Carnival weekend

So it got cold recently, but it’s still nothing like Madison, which got about a foot of snow last week forcing classes to be cancelled one day. The European Champions league, a big soccer tournament, is reaching the final stages so everyone is watching all the games. The Real Madrid game was on pay-per-view Tuesday night so we went to a bar to watch it. On Wednesday night Barcelona beat Chelsea (a team from London) with two late-game goals in a really exciting game that we were able to watch at home. Real Betis is still playing poorly.

Pretty much everyone in the family was sick this week, including me. Everyone had a bad cold. I wasn’t that sick, but it lasted almost a whole week and other than going to class I just slept. Luckily I am back in full health because it’s a five-day weekend and carnival. One of the biggest carnivals in the world is in Cádiz, which is a little more than an hour south of Sevilla. I’m going because everyone is going to be there. Today I went costume shopping with some friends and bought train tickets. I got a really cheap, made-in-China kid’s sized Batman suit to wear and tickets for an 8 pm train to Cádiz Saturday night and a 6 am train back to Sevilla Sunday morning. It’s supposed to rain though; we’ll see how it goes. Next Tuesday is el Día de Andalucía, so there are no classes that day nor on Monday.

My English class was supposed to start this week on Wednesday but the hotel canceled on me so I start next Wednesday instead. Yesterday my art history class went to see a temporary exhibit of 16th Century art, mostly by Diego Velázquez, José de Ribera and Caravaggio. We will visit a few more museums throughout the semester. I got involved with a communications group in my program and two weeks ago we visited the University of Sevilla’s new campus that houses the Communications school. It had a lot of brand new and high tech TV and radio studios and rooms full of PowerMac G5s for editing. Last Thursday we toured a local TV station and saw a radio news program being broadcast live and then stood in the back of a TV studio while the two anchors read the news. We were right behind the cameras and had to be dead silent as they shot the program live. For the last half of the news show we were in the control room. It was interesting to see how they coordinate and time everything and there was a lot of stress and yelling going on among the producers.

I posted an album with pictures from Alicia’s (the daughter) birthday four weeks ago and Alicia’s (the mom) birthday last week. There are also pictures of the Giralda and Cathedral and the two buildings where I go to class. I climbed up the Giralda tower for the first time last weekend and there is a great view at the top. There’s a good amount of Sevilla in the pictures so Martha and everyone who is visiting in April can see a little preview of what they’ll see when they’re here.

So next week I’ll have two days of class and then I’m going to Salamanca on Friday. My program let the yearlong students plan a weekend trip. My top pick was Salamanca.