Link to all Photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/jjotto?authkey=Gv1sRgCJT877-KtKSR0gE

That is the link that will get you to my entire web album and from there you can click on the specific albums.

Crazy Week of Travel/ 9-26-10

Wow another week has flown by maybe even faster than any of the others.  This week our school was super busy.  We had regular class on Monday and Thursday; the other days we were doing stuff outside of the classroom.  On Wednesday we went to the Sevilla Alcazar which is a palace for the king of Spain.  The king and queen still have their own rooms there for when they want to visit Sevilla.  The buildings there are very impressive and have a ton of decorated plaster throughout the whole complex.  Also, many of the ceilings there are made of many many pieces of wood that is cut into shapes that fit together like a puzzle.  The pieces are then steamed so that they expand and hold together.  We have seen this type of ceiling many places in Spain already.  It is a technique that was used heavily by the Muslims when they occupied Spain.  The Sevilla Alcazar is not a Muslim building but, it is decorated in the Muslim style.  Also the Alcazar has a huge garden with paths and fountains all over.  The gardens are kept up very well and are beautiful to walk around. 

The next day we went to another city called Mérida.  Mérida was one of the most important cities of the entire peninsula during the reign of the Romans.  Mérida has some of the best Roman buildings in the world.  We stood in an amphitheater that was used for gladiator fights, scripted naval battles, and other sporting events.  We walked around a Roman theater that was used for plays and is still in pretty good condition.  The world’s best preserved Roman chariot race track, circus, is also in Mérida which we saw.  We saw the longest bridge that the Roman’s ever built to our knowledge and an awesome aqueduct.  We also went to the archeological museum where we saw many relics from the Romans including some mosaics that covered entire walls of the museum.  Also when they were building the museum they found more Roman ruins and a Roman road that connected Mérida to other important cities.  We were able to see these things in a basement section of the Museum.  All in all, Mérida was incredible.  We did all of this in one day so we were very busy.  And I’m sure there was more to see that we just didn’t have time to see.  So as you can tell Mérida has a very impressive Roman past that I thoroughly enjoyed seeing first hand.  I have pictures that will be put up onto the internet soon. 

Then we had regular class on Thursday, and then early Friday morning we left for Granada on our first overnight trip.  Elliott and another girl, Taylor, from his program came along with us.  It was a great trip.  Granada has a ton of impressive things to see.  The most impressive is the Alhambra.  The Alhambra is a royal palace and fortress but really a city in itself that was constructed in the 1300s.  It is a large complex that was in the running of being one of the 7 wonders of the modern world.  Here is a link with more information about it if you care to read it:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra    It is a beautiful place with huge gardens.  The gardens are called the Generalife and are extremely impressive with views over the whole city.  Granada also receives enough snow to be a place to ski in the winter with a 45 minute drive to the Mediterranean Sea.  Also in Granada, we saw the Royal Chapel where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella are actually buried.  These two got married and united Spain, so they are very important in Spanish history.  They also have some relics from their lives along with their own personal art collection.  We were actually able to see the crown, scepter, and sword of the king and queen.  After the Royal Chapel, we headed to the Cathedral of Granada which by the way is still not actually 100% completed.  It will never be finished actually.  It took 180 years to “complete.”  It was amazing just as most of the cathedrals are.  This cathedral had several side chapels that had extremely impressive alters.  There were two alters that were ultra-baroque in style, churrigueresco in Spanish.  They pretty much didn’t have even one inch that wasn’t decorated.  The city was great and is often a favorite place to visit for Spaniards and tourists alike.  I, however, wasn’t able to take pictures in some places so you won’t be able to get the full effect. 

In addition to all these things that went on this week, we are still not done.  Tonight we are going to a bull fight!  Supposedly we are very lucky to be getting to see the bull fighters that are fighting tonight.  Usually, the groups of students can only get tickets to see the younger less known fighters and tonight’s are supposed to be incredible.  I’m pretty excited about the experience, but I hope it isn’t too gruesome. 

That’s all for now, I should be working on homework anyway.  So until next time people.

José

Pictures from Morocco Trip

Morocco Pictures <----- Click there

9-20-10 and Morocco

Blog entry for 9-20-10 and Morocco

Howdy peeps, another week has passed, and I think even faster than the last week.  Time is FLYING here with all the stuff that is going on to keep me busy.  This last week for school we had several small quizzes, had to watch a Spanish movie, had an oral exam where we had to act out scenes from pictures, I started my internship finally, a big presentation that each student has to do once each semester, and then the regular school stuff on top of that.  The movie I watched was called Lope.  It is a movie about Lope de Vega, a famous poet and playwright.  Everyone in our entire class ended up seeing this movie because it was the only movie that wasn’t dubbed over from another language and that was a requirement.  I understood the storyline of the movie but not the details.  Also, I volunteered to do my newspaper presentation first so I could get it over with for the semester.  I gave a presentation over an article that talked about psychology as a treatment for cancer.  It was pretty interesting, and I feel like my presentation went pretty well.  Overall, I think most of the stuff from this past week dealing with school, except one vocabulary quiz that I forgot about and did terribly on. 

I also started my Spanish internship finally.  I am working at a sports complex that has tennis, padel (a game kind of between tennis and racquetball), and a weightlifting gym.  I have just so far been doing stuff with tennis, and I think that is where I’m going to be staying.  Basically, my job is to help the tennis instructors that are there with whatever they want me to do.  I’ve been feeding balls to people that are having lessons.  I hope to maybe meet some people through this internship and obviously learn a lot of Spanish.  I’ll be working Monday – Thursday as it is scheduled now, and I think it will end up working out pretty well.  I have a sore arm already after just two days of working there because it has been so long since I’ve held a racket for that period of time.  I hope I end up getting to play some tennis while I’m working there.  My Achilles seems to be doing pretty good.  I’ve been trying to do some distance running; I still feel like the muscle and Achilles need more time to do full out sprints. 

This past weekend I was in AFRICA.  I went to Morocco with a tour group and 7 other students from my school.  I was a little worried about the trip at first because I didn’t know what to expect or much about the other students from my school, but it all went really great.  We had a great time in Morocco and saw some really awesome things.  It is like a whole different world there than most anything I’ve seen before.  There are similarities but also many differences.  The cities of Morocco, from what I experienced, had some similarities to Mexico City but…. That’s not a good comparison really.

We left on Friday from Sevilla on a bus, went to Cadiz, Spain to pick up some other people.  From there we went directly to the coast so that we could cross between the two continents.  We crossed on a big ferry.  The two continents are actually close enough in place to see from on to another.  You may not be able to see a city or something like that, but we were able to see some mountains in the distance on the African continent.  We were on the ferry for about 45 minutes.  We arrived to the port of the Spanish city Cueta.  I had no idea before this trip that Spain has two cities/regions on the African continent.  It was very cool to be able to say that I was in Spain but also in Africa at the same time.  From there we drove to the border between Morocco and Spain.  We had to sit at the border for over an hour while all the people and buses passed.  Our passports had to be stamped then a Moroccan official had to come aboard the bus and check the passports.  It was a little scary I thought, but we made it through without any problems.  From there we went to our hotel for the night which happened to be directly on the ocean and was very nice.

Ok I can already see that this blog could be a little TOO long so I’m going to cut a lot of detail from this point on. 

We left the next morning to go to the city of Tetuan.  We had a walking tour of Tetuan.  We walked through markets and plazas and many things.  I have pictures of everything so check them out when I get them online.  The center of Tetuan has over 3000 small streets and everything is written in Arabic so we paid close attention to not get lost.  Some of the little paths were small enough that you would have problems getting a bike though them!  The center of the city was a great experience.  We had our tour guide at the front of our group, a native at the end of our group and another guy kind of in the middle keeping people away from us.  He also would sometimes run ahead and check the next street/path we would turn on to and signal to our guide to come or not to come.  I’m not sure if this was for safety or what it was for exactly but….. I could see how it could be a very dangerous place if you were to get separated or not be with locals.  After the tour we ate at a typical Moroccan restaurant that was very good with music and even a belly dancer.  We then boarded the bus again and headed to Tangier (Tanger, I’m not sure I’ve seen it written both ways many times now), one of the larger cities especially in the northern part of Morocco.  We were able to go out and about in Tangier kind of on our own.  Which by this time, it was already approaching night.  All 8 of us from my school went out and saw some local market areas.  Some of us bought some stuff, but mainly we just walked around and tried to experience as much as we could.  It was really really cool, and I took some video and a ton of pictures.  We then had to wake up the next morning at 6 to leave for a mountain city called, ChefChaouen.  It was a very pretty city with most of the buildings and walls painted blue.  We had a very entertaining tour guide in this city.  I have some good pictures from this town also that I think will be interesting to look at.  We left the mountain city and started our decent.  It was a ROUGH ride back down the mountain.  It was hot, the tour guide said because we were close to the sun on the mountain and we were all a little confuse by this statement, but we turned and spiraled down the mountain eventually.  We headed back the boarder and boarded out ferry to head back to Spain.  We then boarded our bus and headed back to Spain. 

A few quick things I didn’t put up there:  I rode a camel right on the coast, you can see the ocean in the back ground.  I bought a handmade small carpet that is very pretty.  And I saw the point where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean and took a picture where you can see both at the same time. 

That pretty much concludes this entry.  I hope it wasn’t TOO long.  I tried to keep it kind readable.  Until next post! 

9-13-10

Hola readers,


I am currently sitting in the kitchen of my house at midnight sweating, not feeling tired, and working on a bunch of homework that I need to have done for tomorrow. Not so glamorous…. But I had a really long siesta and put off my homework till the last minute so that’s what brings me here.

Anyway, this past week flew by very quickly. I stayed busy with school and a professional tennis tournament that was going on here in Seville. School stuff is going pretty well. We get several things to do for homework each day and then projects that are kind of going on all the time in the background which means I have stuff I can do for school all the time. I guess that’s how they want it though. Every Tuesday we have a tutoring session with some other kids around our age which is fun. Last Tuesday my tutor was a very pretty 21 year old girl. Some of her other friends were doing the tutoring so we went with several other people to a plaza downtown. It was a lot of fun, and that group of tutors wants to hang out with some of us some time soon. They were all pretty fun and nice people. One of the guys had just gotten back from Texas where he went to visit one of the friends he had made from a previous semester. I hope I can become friends with them.

I also got my first two tests back that we had taken last Friday. The first exam was an oral job interview which was actually pretty stressful because we didn’t know what questions the teacher was going to ask. I made a 96 on that so I was pleased. The next exam was in the grammar class and was also stressful because we have covered quite a bit of stuff. I made a 96 on that test also so I’m glad to get the first round of tests over with and have done well.

There was a tennis tournament going on here in Sevilla called the “Copa de Sevilla.” I went there pretty much every day for a few hours and watched some really good tennis. The number one seed in the tournament is ranked 76 in the world so he was very good. There were also many other good players there. It was a lot of fun. The tournament happens to be at the same tennis club where I’m trying to get my internship. We didn’t have any luck getting to talk to anyone last week though because of the tournament. I’m pretty sure I’m the only student that is supposed to have an internship that doesn’t have one yet. That is going to be a major project of this upcoming week. Now that the tournament is over, we are going to try to talk to them again this week and see if we can work something out. If not at that club, there is another club that is near the school that is more of a gym but also has tennis courts. The boss of that place is on vacation until the 15th, so that will be our next option. If neither of those work, then I’ll be working somewhere else. I really am holding out hope for a tennis internship to work because if not then I really have no idea where I would work.

This weekend we went to a town called Cordoba. Cordoba has a lot of history. It was one of the cultural centers of the world for many years. It was a place where for a time, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all lived together with relative harmony which was very rare for past times. We saw a massive mosque that around 700 years old. It was beautiful. It was massive, and very famous. The mosque was built to not have many walls so it has many small pillars with a double arch on top. It is an architectural marvel of the time period. The mosque also has a very unique history. At some point the city became a Christian city, and a cathedral was built right in the middle of the mosque. So you can be walking through the mosque and then all of a sudden you are in a beautiful Christian cathedral. And the mosque was originally built on the site of an old Visigoth church and some parts of that are still visible. I took a lot of pictures that I will put up soon, but they won’t do the building justice by any means. It is arguably the most beautiful building in Spain. Also, while in Cordoba we walked across a very large Roman bridge and saw some Roman ruins. In addition to the Muslim, Christian, and Roman culture, we saw one of the only three medieval Jewish synagogues still standing in Spain. It was relatively small but nonetheless very interesting. All of this happened on Friday.

On Saturday, I went to the beach in a city called Matalacañas. The beach was beautiful, and I went with some very fun people from my program, Elliott, some people from his program, and then a few other US friends. We had a great time there it was very relaxing. This weekend, I’m planning on going to Morocco! I haven’t gotten all the details set yet so I’m not 100% sure, but several people from my school are planning on going. It does cost some extra money but when am I going to have the chance to go back to Africa or Morocco. I’m very excited and hope it works out.

Ok well, I’m getting tired finally, and I still have a ton of homework to do so I’ll end this here.

Oh Isa and I have been talking more and I think she likes us better now that she knows us a little better.

Link to Spain Pictures Again

Uploaded some new pictures so here is the link again.

Click Here for Spain 2010

9-4-10 Day After Portugal and La Rabida

Buenos Dias de Sevilla! I wanted to write this one before it got away from my memory. Yesterday we had another excursion, which I did not miss, to a place called “La Rabida.” We went several places yesterday actually. We left Sevilla yesterday morning on a charter bus and went to an old water well. The well was just not a normal water well though because it was the exact well where Christopher Columbus filled his water supplies for the last time before leaving for the Americas. After the well we got back on the bus for about 15 minutes and drove to the monastery where Columbus stayed for a while. Columbus stayed at this monastery after he had asked Spain, Portugal, and France to fun his voyage to the Americas. As Columbus was there he spoke of his ambitions to find another route to India for trade, and the more he talked the more the monks there began to believe that he might actually know what he was talking about. One of the priests at the monastery happened to be the priest who Queen Elizabeth confessed to. Finally that priest decided that he should tell the Queen about this man, Columbus, who wanted to sail. She took the advice and then decided to fund Columbus’s voyage. She provided him with one ship. She then proceeded to buy the entire town of La Rabida and offer the town two options. The town could either provide two additional ships and sailors or pay 25% tax on everything. The town obliged by providing the ships and sailors. The rest from there is history!



While at the monastery, we saw some of the first maps of the New World. It is so interesting because the first maps just had that entire part of the world as a spattering of islands not anything like the large masses of land that are actually there. I’m not sure if it was the original or not, one of our professors said he thought it was the original map, but there was one of the first maps of the Americas on buffalo hide at the monastery. I have a picture of it that I will put up on the internet soon, but I’m not sure how well you will be able to see it. On the map the New World is just a few islands, and they didn’t know about any of the rest of the land at the time. It was just something so cool I thought. There was so much history and world changing events that happened right where we were visiting. If you think about things that have changed the world the most in the last 1000 years the discovery of the Americas has to be in the top 5 without a doubt. I know that it is not universally agreed that Columbus was the first to discovery the Americas, and honestly I’m not so sure he was, but the bottom line is that it is what we are taught in schools today because there are no other definite records of other people discovering the Americas so as for now Columbus gets the credit. Whether he did or didn’t discover the New World, it was still a massive part of history, and I feel very lucky to have been there.


After the monastery, we went to a place where they had replicas of the 3 ships that Columbus was in charge of on his first voyage and discovery. We were able to walk around on the ships, and it was so cool. I have pictures of the ships that will be on the internet soon too.


We left for Portugal after ship replicas! We went to a city called Lagos. Lagos is a city on the ocean that is known for its beaches. The majority of the students in my school are actually staying there until this Sunday. I, however, along with 4 others decided to come back to Sevilla. We were only in Lagos for about 1 hour and 30 minutes, but I had enough time to go put my feet in the water. I also got some pictures that show how pretty it was there. I hope they turned out ok. It was a beautiful place.


Anyway, I just wanted to write about my experiences yesterday. I cannot believe that just yesterday I was at many of the same places as Christopher Columbus and then in Portugal! It still isn’t really registering that I’m in Europe many, many miles away from home, but I’m trying to take it all in as much as I can.

9-1-10

Hola de España, half way through the second week of school and stuff is speeding up. My classes are becoming something that takes up A LOT of time. I’m only taking two classes right now, but we have homework in both of them everyday. We have stuff we are supposed to be doing daily, weekly, and bi-weekly. So as you can image that stuff starts to take up a lot of time. Once my internship starts, I’ll have even more going on with it. I will not only be working, but I will also have reports on current events, reports on the job, formal journals, and informal journals to add to the list. Nonetheless, I’m very excited for the internship stuff to get going. Most people have already started theirs this week. The director of the school and I have been working to find a place where I can get involved into some tennis somehow. Part of the problem has been that a lot of businesses didn’t reopen until today from the Summer vacation period. So tonight at around 5pm, we are going to call a place again about the internship. We are in a rush to get it started because I don’t want to be behind in mine and also the director leaves for Texas for 10 days tomorrow. Tomorrow I have two tests, one of them being strictly oral. It should be “interesting.” Tonight I will be doing some pretty serious studying; I really like to try and do well on the first test to give myself a little room to breathe.



On Friday we will be going to Rabida and Lagos, Portugal. Rabida is the location where Columbus set sail for the Americas. They are going to have replicas of the ships that he sailed on for us to walk on, and I’m very excited about it. Hopefully, I can get up on time for this one; we have to leave early again though…. After Rabida, we are going to be taking the bus to Lagos, Portugal. It is supposed to be a beautiful place known for its beaches. We will only be there for about two hours. Almost everyone in my school will be staying there until Sunday and coming back Sunday evening. I, however, decided against it. I’m hoping to try and meet some Spanish people that I can make friends. I would love to go to the beach, but I can go to the beach with a bunch of people from Texas in Texas….. Just my thoughts, plus I’d rather save my money for a trip to maybe Italy! I do plan to go to the beach sometime this September before it gets cooler; I just have to find a time to go.


If I can get the internship stuff started soon that would be great because I think I’ll be spending a good bit of time there. I would really really like to make some Spanish friends that like tennis. It’s always good to have something that you enjoy in common with friends….. ok well I guess that’s the basis of friendship but anyway you know what I mean.


My friend Elliott, whom I played tennis with at Meridian CC, is back in Spain from his tour of North Spain. He has since rented a city bike like me, and we have been able to get around to almost anywhere we want with pretty much ease. We found a place last night where we can watch the US Open. We will probably be staying at the sports bar quite a bit for the next two weeks 


Last night we went out with our tutors, it is something that we will be doing for the next 6 Tuesdays. My tutor this week was a very friendly girl named Susana. She was talking slower and clearer for me, but I was still happy because I could understand pretty much everything she was saying. She also said that my Spanish was good. I still don’t feel as if my Spanish is back to where it was when I left Mexico two years ago, but it is getting back there for sure. I’m thinking that by the end of this week I’ll be back to that level. I hope then I can start moving forward. I’m very excited that I’m going to be here so long so that I can really, hopefully, get good at Spanish.


Anyway that’s all for now, and it’s about lunch!


I haven’t decided yet, but I think I might start writing some of my blog after the English part in Spanish just for the practice so if you speak Spanish don’t make fun of me too much haha