...whoops

Hi all! I'm sorry it's been about 1283038 years since I last posted. Right when I had some things to write, I came down with an acute case of three ten-page papers, and once those passed, Sevillian Civillian sort of fell off the map. I'm no longer in Seville, but I still have a handful of half-baked posts about my time there that I would like to finish off and will be posting up here in the next couple of days. I will be backdating most of them to November/December, so look for them there. Happy new year to everyone and enjoy the last few posts!

La Universidad de Sevilla

The university experience in Spain is pretty different from that in the United States. The first week of school was a whole new round of culture shock. 

• The Classrooms

In theory, there is a numbering system to the rooms. The campus that I attended all three of my classes in included two different faculties, Philology and Geography & History. The latter has classrooms numbered with roman numerals, and the former with normal numbers. But that’s about where the logic ends. Even with maps (still missing information), it took me half an hour to find each room during the first week. I’d even ask the local students, and nobody would have any idea where my classroom was. Super helpful huh?

• The Professors

The professors are all really nice, although some can be relatively intimidating. The language barrier doesn’t help with that. They all really are accommodating, for the most part. Mumblers can be difficult: my professor for my class Political Ideologies and Social Movements in Contemporary Spain is a mumbler, and I really have to strain to pick up what he’s saying, which, more often than not, turns out to be a wild tangent anyway. More difficult than mumblers, however, are ramblers: I tested out a class called Contemporary Societies, where a professor really stood and professed, einstein tufts of gray hair flying every which way as I stared at his profound gestures and listened to not a word of his long rants about one thing or another. My favorite professor is my History of the “Iberoamerican” Independence, Maria Petit-Breuilh. She has a ridiculously high voice, but she’s super sweet and really wants to help us dumb americans out. Being from Chile, she has a very clear accent, which helps as well. 

• The Students

Generally, the students have pretty thick Sevilla accents. And they talk really quickly. And they are, as a result, virtually impossible to understand. They are embarrassingly good at answering questions. I’m doing all I can to follow what goes on when they get some real good back-and-forth going. 

Being in class with Callie, though, has of course inevitably led to a handful of local friends. In my Languages of the World class, Callie randomly one day asked a girl sitting next to us if she wanted to go get coffee later. A little perturbed but open-minded, she said yes. Her name is Nuria, and she’s turned out to be a great friend and local guide. We’ve hung out on a couple of occasions, eating chestnuts and giggling about boy stupidity (universal, apparently). 

In my class Political Ideologies and Social Movements of Contemporary Spain (where “Contemporary” indicates the years 1800+), we asked a guy sitting next to us one day if he wouldn’t mind sharing with us his notes. He told us he didn’t take any. Luis wrote roughly two lines a day, if he decided he wanted to come to class, while I was typing 3-4 pages of frantic notes each class. Either it’s overkill on my part or a big F is heading in his direction from the exam department, but I suppose only time will tell. Luis, though, is something of an interesting guy. He’s 27, majoring in something politicky, and believes that one day capitalism will fail and that ultimately anarchy will be our governmental style. How he thinks that could ever possibly be stable is beyond me. He kept asking me to hang out with him outside of class, and towards the end of the semester Luis and I grabbed a couple of beers and spent something like four hours chatting about everything under the sun, even dabbling in a little English (his is kind of terrible, but don’t tell him I said that). 

In a lot of classes are other foreign students, but very few are from the US: in Europe, there is a program known as Erasmus, wherein any student in the EU can study in any other university in the EU. Tons of people in my classes were French, German, Italian... It made for some pretty fun diversity. In one class, actually, I met some Japanese girls. It was very cute - and very strange to hear a Japanese accent in Spanish (“sí” was pretty much always “shi”). It led to a lot of inner merriment, and a lot of mental confusion when I would want to reply in Japanese (“Sou ne! Um, I mean, sí, claro.”) instead of Spanish when we talked. 

• The Classes

I’m taking three classes here: Political Ideologies of and Social Movements of Contemporary Spain, History of Latin America’s Independence, and Languages of the World. I’m also taking one class with my program, a writing workshop. Political Ideologies is really all over the place. The professor literally sits at the front and just talks for 2 hours, leading down all kinds of tangents, and I'm just trying to type fast enough to keep up, before I actually realize it's not really relevant. We’ve had two teachers for this class, actually, and the first was unfortunately a mumbler. The second guy liked to stand and pace while he talked. I liked him better as a teacher, although tangents were more common with this guy. He was nice in office hours though, excited we were taking his class and keen to help us out. As for the rest of the classes, I think I’ve talked about them all in my Day in the Life post.

The class quality in Spain varied, depending on the class, but while I would say the content is probably up to par with anything I might take in the US, the way it was taught is very different. Work, and evaluation criteria, tends to be one big enormous scary exam at the end of the semester, 100% of the grade, as opposed to the US, where at least a couple essays if not additional homework assignments come into play. 

Classes themselves tended to be relatively disorganized, actually, and not very well laid out at the beginning, an especially complicating factor for rookies in the system like me. Teachers sort of just jumped up front and started talking, with few class plans and even fewer out-of-class resources available. So we bewildered foreigners go to office hours, much to our professors’ delight, to try and get a handle on what is actually expected of us. It doesn’t help that we technically are leaving early, in December as opposed to February when the actual academic semester finishes, and as such we get some exceptions thrown into the mix. A bit confusing, really. All in all, I would say, although the classes are interesting and at of course a collegiate level, they really don’t, in the end, compare to classes I take at home, with a ton of support, much more performance expected from our end, and generally speaking a more streamlined and interactive manner of learning. 

When it comes to class, I discovered in the very beginning that I should also probably stick to material I know. The very first class I sat in on was an economics class, which I thought could be fun; I’ve always wanted to take an econ course, and hey, International Economics? What could be more appropriate? I was thrown in however amongst a whole bunch of econ-savvy Spanish kids whipping out terms I probably didn’t even know in English. Fascinating, but I knew after the first class that there was just no way I’d be able to keep up. Scrap that idea! 

I did have trouble one day keeping a grin hidden when I glanced into a class in progress once and saw the following on the board:

“ 1    2      3     4     5    6      7       8      9

One two three four five six seven eight nine

My name’s James Bond...double oh seven (007)”

I felt pretty smart after that. 

A Day in the Life

Here's the lineup for your average Monday. 

• 2:00 am garbage truck stops below my window

This is really the first wake up call of the day. Gotta look out the window, give a bleary wave to the guys in neon orange, and roll over with the pillow over the head. It’s a daily ritual. 

• 8:45 wake up

...always a struggle, no matter what country I live in. 

• 9:00 breakfast

Breakfast is actually quite good, especially since Carmen made an effort to go buy some peanut butter (all but nonexistent in Spain). There’s usually lots of cereal, yoghurt, fruit, and toast. Lots and lots of toast. Too much toast. I started politely refusing toast on occasion, but Carmen was shocked. “No toast? Are you sure? Are you feeling okay?” “No thanks, Carmen, I’m still full from dinner last night really...” “No toast? No toast??”  

Carmen likes to make our toast for us, which means she comes in to the kitchen, puts toast in the toaster, and leaves again. Five minutes later, she returns, finds the toast burned, throws it out and starts again. Usually the second time around she is more timely, putting the toast on a plate and handing it to us. Why she finds us incapable of doing this job ourselves and saving her the trouble, I will never know. 

• 9:30 walk to the university 

From Carmen’s house to the university campus, there is a nice walk. It takes half an hour, roughly 20 minutes or so if you book it. At the beginning of the school year, I got a trial membership for a city-wide bike share system known as Sevici, but after getting frustrated with broken bikes, broken machines, a lack of open spaces, a lack of bicycles, and an unfair overuse charge, I gave up and resigned myself to hustling back and forth four times a day. It’s a pretty walk though in some parts, and I took to listening to a bunch of spanish music during the trip, so it turned into something of a joy. And it’s sure made me appreciate living a maximum of 2 seconds from anywhere on campus at home in New York. 

• 10:00 class: languages of the world

This class is rather interesting, especially considering my current position, but it seems to me at the end of it that philology is a relatively useless field. The professor for this class as a guy named Yanguas, a stout little Spaniard with glasses and going bald. He is multilingual, being a linguist, and is fluent in English; lucky for us Americans, a lot of the examples of linguistic phenomena that he uses are from the English language, leaving the Spanish kids confused and us Americans enthused. Yanguas tends to jump around a fair amount in his material, but by the end I sure knew a whole lot about languages. Did you know that Japanese and Korean are mysteriously completely unlinked to any language family? Or that next to no languages have grammatically arranged their sentences so that the object is said before the subject? I’m an encyclopedia for useless language details.  

• 11:00 visit the gym

In order to stay somewhat close to in shape for crew back home, I took it upon myself to find a gym somewhere with a rowing machine. This turned out to be Nadia's All-Women Gym, a little hole in the wall down by the city center. It's rather inconveniently located, being a half hour walk from my house and twenty minutes from the university, but it's an excuse to go wandering the very cute streets of Seville, and to get to know the downtown labyrinth a little. The gym is run by a spindly old guy, whose name I never did catch, but he absolutely loves that I row, and is regularly very excited to have someone under 40 pushing their heart rate over 130 in his gym. He talks quickly though, and there are a lot of "what?"s and "I'm sorry?"s from my end whenever he comes over and tried to make conversation while I sweat through a 10k row. The rowing machine itself is shoehorned into a corner next to a massage type machine, which is very, very loud right next to your ear, but the little space became my home more or less in the place. I could tell from the machine's memory that no one but me used the erg. 

• 1:00 return home

• 2:00 eat lunch

Lunch and dinner are usually at Carmen’s (on occasion, I would eat lunch at school, depending on the business of the day; this consisted of a bocadillo - a big baguette with Spanish ham or chorizo on it by itself - and lots of fruit). These two meals are basically interchangeable in terms of food served: cuts of pork, or spinach and garbanzo beans, or gazpacho, or Spanish tortilla, or a bean stew, or fried rice... Usually we will have two of these dishes, and not necessarily in any kind of balance-coordinated way. Often a salad will be tacked on as well - lettuce, tomato, olive oil, rock salt, and tuna. And always bread. Lots and lots of bread. I have to say though, one of my favorite things is dipping the bread in one of the various sauces from the other dishes. 

• 2:30 walk back to the university

• 3:00 class: history of the “iberoamerican” independence

This class is taught by a Chilean woman with one of the highest voices I have ever heard.  A little hefty but with a big smile and clear spanish, Maria Petit-Breuilh was very nice to us Americans, confused as heck about what was going on for the first few weeks. We learn a whole lot here about everything under the sun between the years 1750 and 1820 in Latin America and Spain’s foreign (empiric) policy. I also learned a lot about Napoleon and the Battle of Trafalgar from my 10-page paper for this class. 

• 4:00 homework time...

• 5:00 class: writing workshop

This is the class that I take with my program, taught by a great guy called Juan Muñoz. Juan was fluent, more than fluent, in English, and worked as a translator for several companies in Britain and America in the past I think. He’s really friendly, rather fun, and a very good source of information about cross-cultural blunders and translation struggles (“Juan, is there a word for ‘awkward’?”) The class is structured more like a US one would be, with lots of small assignments and an exam going into the final grade as opposed to just one big test at the end deciding everything. We do a fair amount of reading for this class too, which is good practice and, hey, even might be culturally enlightening. 

• 6:30 hang out in the program center

The Michigan-Cornell-Penn in Seville program has a cute little space in an office building a five minute walk from the main part of the university. On the third floor, it overlooks the river. It serves its purpose well, providing computers and printers, a small library, and study space, as well as housing the offices of the staff. The program students come and go through here, attempting to work but usually ending up doing more important things, like playing cards. 

• 7:00 dance class

At the beginning of the semester, our program took us out to go see a Flamenco show. From that day forward I was determined to stick myself in a Flamenco class and see if I could teach myself to be a little more graceful by the end of the semester (no). There is a specific kind of Flamenco that is unique to Seville, a set of four short dances that a pair dance together in succession at a very famous fair held every spring. The four dances are known as the Sevillanas, and Rebecca and I set out to learn them with another girl from our program, Sonali. As it turns out, our dance class is one of the things I love most. Sandra, our teacher, is a very sweet, very talented, and very pregnant lady who was more than welcoming to us clumsy Americans. We come three times a week to stumble around in the complicated Flamenco fashion, along with three Spanish girls between the ages of 7 and 12 and two other old Spanish ladies somewhere north of 50. The class is great fun. The three girls love talking with us, although most of our communication consists of gestures and giggles (kids’ spanish is surprisingly difficult to understand). We’ve pretty much managed to master the Sevillanas, and Rebecca and I have turned out to be a pretty decent pair when we dance with each other. It’s on my bucket list to come back to Seville for the spring fair.

• 8:30 Pasapalabra

After our dance class, we usually return to the apartment in time to catch Pasapalabra, one of the few TV shows that Carmen consistently watches. The title literally translates to “password”, and consists of two contestants who, after spending most of the show in teams earning points, hurry to complete a rosco (round) of the alphabet: for every letter, a clue is read, and they have to provide the answer to the description - a word beginning with that letter. If they don’t know, they get to say “pasapalabra”, which pauses their clock and puts their opponent in the hot seat. If they manage to get every letter correct before the time runs out, they win a big jackpot, but if they get one wrong, the chance for that is lost. As long as the contestant has more letters right than their opponent by the end, though, they get to come back to the show and try again tomorrow. For most of the semester, this guy named Carlos was on the show every day. He just kept getting so close, but never quite completing the rosco, and you know, we all got very attached. Carmen would call us out of our bedrooms if he had a few to go so we would all stand in the living room, watching with bated breath. Rebecca and I also would get very, very excited when we knew an answer (maybe happened twice a week). 

• 9:30 eat dinner

Dinner is pretty much exactly like lunch. However, every now and then (more then than now), Carmen will sit with Rebecca and I. It's a rare event, but it's fun when it happens. Carmen is not a conversationalist, and it requires a large amount of effort on our part to keep things moving, but we love it when she joins us. 

• 10:00 procrastinate
• 12:00 bedtime 

Rinse and repeat!

San Francisco, Portugal (2)

Our whirlwind trip to Lisbon: Part Two 

Lucky for us, Portugal and Spain had a daylight savings event that weekend, and we scored an extra hour. Rebecca and I devoured more fantastic hostel breakfast, checked out, and headed out again fairly early, to pack in as much Lisbon time as we could before our bus ride home that evening. 

Our first stop was the now-infamous tram. Since we never got to catch it the day before from the basilica, we decided to go the other way: catch the tram from the hostel to the basilica. It was as crazy as it looked. These trolleys are little wooden things, painted a bright canary yellow, and boy, do they rocket around. The ride is a thrilling one: particularly jerky, usually jam-packed, and doing a lot of rattling, the trolley is already an adrenaline rush before you look out the window and see how fast you’re going. I’d estimate these rickety things get up to a good 25 or 30 miles per hour, flying up and down the narrow cobblestone streets, cresting hills and thundering around corners like there’s no tomorrow. 

We managed to arrive in one piece however at the basilica, where all was high and dry once more. From here, we had hoped to jump back on our tour bus, but the first one to arrive was so full the driver didn’t let us board. That worked well. So we took a local bus instead. We were heading for Belem, a section to the east in Lisbon that was dedicated to the ocean and old-time maritime Lisbon. Along the way though is Lisbon’s enormous, famous red bridge, called the 25th of April or something but more commonly known as the Golden Gate. We jumped off the bus underneath to check it out. 

The streets out here were quieter, definitely residential. Strolling along the road, looking for a smaller road to take us to the water’s edge, we came across a little old man in a beige fedora walking a fluffy white dog. Clearly, we were walking around with neon signs that blared “TOURISTS”, because the guy took one look at us and started pointing around and talking in what we think was Portuguese (at any rate, something unintelligible to us). It took us a moment to decipher the signals: he pointed towards the bridge, pointed up some stairs off to the right, and then made a very italian kissing-the-fingers gesture to indicate “lovely!”. 

We took the hint and climbed the stairs. Everything was very quiet; Sunday morning I suppose. We hiked up the stairs and found a deserted church at the top, padlocked shut; but even cooler was the view of the bridge from its terrace. The old man wasn’t kidding. We took a bunch of pictures there and marveled, as well as laughed at the uncanny resemblance between this and San Francisco’s golden gate. 

When we had had our fill, we headed back down the stairs and started walking on the main street again. Two blocks later, just when we are about to turn left to go towards the water, the old man with his fedora and dog turns a corner and spots us. “No, no!” he called, pointing straight ahead and making the “lovely!” gesture again. We nodded and laughed. Well, he’d been right once. 

After going straight for a few more blocks, we see another opening towards the water’s edge, and turn left there. The old man knew his stuff: as it turned out, there were railway tracks between the houses and the bay, and this street led us straight to a pedestrian overpass - from the top of which was another fantastic view of the bridge. Several more pictures later, we made our way down to the water and hang a right, walking through the broad park along the shore towards Belem. We watched, admittedly wistfully on my part, a whole bunch of small sailboats crisscross across the bay beneath the bridge as we walked. 

Belem itself was pretty cool too. We passed bunches of sailboats packed together in a couple marinas, the names of which amused us for a while (my favorite was "Speedy Nice"). Belem's biggest monument is an homage to the oceanic discovery ages and Portugal’s legacy on the high seas. The Tower of Belem was also neat; it was apparently strategically matched by a twin across the bay, between which any enemy ship would get destroyed in a crossfire before it could pillage and plunder Ye Olde Lisbon. Rebecca and I had some fun exploring the two structures, dutifully taking reels and reels of pictures. 

We hopped on the tour bus from Belem and hitched a ride back into Lisbon proper for some lunch. What should have been a quick look around for a restaurant turned into a bit of an adventurous wander as we got thoroughly lost in the labyrinth of Lisbon’s real residential neighborhoods. Laundry dangled from balconies over narrow cobblestone alleyways, casting light shadows on the pastel-colored buildings walling us in. Once we came across a group of kids kicking a soccer ball around in a slightly more open space. As this was hilly Lisbon, we were up and down stairs a lot, and occasionally we’d catch a glimpse of the bay or some big church tower and try to orient ourselves. Some of the windows and balconies had bird cages in or on them, where a rainbow assortment of songbirds trilled non-stop. For the most part the streets were devoid of people, but we came across one guy smoking a cigarette outside his back door once. He smiled when he saw us. “Hello!” He proceeded to teach us “good morning,” “good afternoon,” and “good night” in Portuguese, completely without prompting. We got a laugh out of his eagerness, but were too hungry to stay long. 

Eventually we resurfaced nearby Lisbon’s Pantheon. The name confuses me; it’s an enormous building, beautifully constructed, but devoted to the Christian faith. We stopped by for a quick second before abandoning our explorative search for a restaurant and heading home. Lunch, we decided, would be homemade again. The Pantheon was right by a tram stop for our trolley line, so we went for a second ludicrous ride in a hurtling yellow tram. We were squashed in right behind the driver this time, which was a pretty fun experience. He’s got this swiveling lever that he wrenches around periodically, which to me seemed to have no other effect than to send us all lurching to one side or the other.  

Our little supermarket served us well: baguettes, a different kind of cheese, ham, tomato, and mango on the side pretty much sums up lunch. Several sticky fingers later, Rebecca and I decided some ice cream was in order for our final afternoon ramble through the local downtown Lisbon area. We were really impressed by the general variety and skill of the local street performers, actually. One guy, who we’d seen in all parts of downtown Lisbon at various moments, would make enormous bubbles from a loop of string drooping from two sticks. We also saw one guy really going at it on a cello. We really enjoyed that, but then realized that it was more the instrument we thought was awesome than the performer. A woman dressed in a victorian white dress, with a white painted face and a sun umbrella, became a living statue, but turned the process of setting up into its own kind of performance, deliberately pulling on her elbow gloves, arranging her skirt, and delicately opening her umbrella, before freezing in place. Two other guys we saw were apparently floating in midair, although both were holding some kind of cane or walking stick that did touch the ground. Rebecca and I stopped for a while in front of them, trying to figure out the ruse. I’m going with metal stand hidden down the clothes. 

Unfortunately, the hour approached for our return bus trip home. After fighting several evil portuguese machines that ate various coins of mine, we managed to make it to the bus terminal with ten minutes to spare. As we climbed onto our bus, one girl tapped us on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” she said in accented English, “but did you take the bus from Seville on Friday?” She was on that same bus with us, and recognized us on this one we were about to take together again. We briefly compared our experiences and laughed about the coincidence. 

All in all, our trip to Lisbon was absolutely fantastic. We ate lots of cheese, kept having to stop ourselves from automatically speaking Spanish with the locals, and really enjoyed the surprisingly clean public bathrooms (ironic, considering they all smoke a ton). Although we may not have been so keen when our bus pulled into a sleepy Seville at 5am the following morning, Rebecca and I loved every second and would do it again in a heartbeat.


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Check out my MobileMe Gallery to see more of my photos from Lisbon!

San Francisco, Portugal (1)

Our whirlwind trip to Lisbon: Part One

Two weekends ago Rebecca and I, pretty much on a whim, bought a couple of bus tickets, reserved a hostel room, and shipped ourselves off to Lisbon, just for fun. We had a long weekend due to All Saint’s Day being a national holiday in Spain. The holiday was on a Tuesday, but Monday was all but free of class too (as one professor put it: “There is class on Monday.  But, if no one comes, then there isn’t class.”). We did have to be back for classes that evening with our study abroad program, which is little less lax about days off than the university, but it meant that we could thoroughly use Saturday and Sunday without worrying about concentrating much on Monday. 

The saga started with the bus ride. Rebecca and I were sufficiently excited for the seven hours to pass relatively quickly. “We’re such elementary kids with our pack lunches,” Rebecca remarked, “but such college kids with our cheap bus tickets!” Across the aisle from us, a woman picked up on our exchanges in English and leaned over to say hi. Another American, she was teaching English in Spain for the year and was doing the same thing as us - getting away for the long weekend to Portugal. After a midway stop in the middle of nowhere, our “vehiculo longo” pulled in to Lisbon at around 8 in the evening without mishap and we set about finding our hostel. 

The Smile Hostel is a charming little place, hidden away in the great old downtown of Lisbon; the key words there, however, are “little” and “hidden.” We figured out the metro, deciphered the map, and arrived at the hostel’s building, but there was nary a Smile sign in sight. The door was ajar though, so we decided to go in. Three flights of shadowy tile stairs later, we are standing on the third floor, where our fistful of reservation papers have told us the hostel is, but all we have are four unmarked gray doors. 

Since we were both too chicken to start knocking, we decide to go back outside and make sure that this really was number twelve, on the right street. It was. As we stood around wondering what to do next, we noticed a buzzer panel on the wall: next to #3A was written, in tiny little yellow letters, “smile!”. We poked the button. No response, of course. Several more pokes proved unhelpful, so we trudged back up the stairs again to get a good look one more time. Surprise! There are still four completely unmarked gray doors, just like last time. 

I suppose we were talking relatively loudly in English, though, because one of them opened and a little old lady popped her head out. “Looking for the Smile hostel?” she asked cheerfully in accented English. “We are over here! The buzzer downstairs is broken, sorry.” After our initial mishap, we discovered that the Smile hostel was actually a great place. Colorful, clean, cozy, and blanketed in plush carpeting, the Smile was a friendly little hostel, with a fantastic included breakfast. 

After getting checked in, meeting our current roommate (another American girl teaching English in Spain), and dropping off our stuff, Rebecca and I decided to go for a walk and find some dinner. A handful of blocks away, a jovial waiter flagged us down and enthusiastically began talking to us in various languages to figure out which one we used. Once our English/Spanish preference had been established, we figured he was too much fun to leave, and so we sat and had the first of what was to be several delicious meals in Lisbon. Interesting note about restaurant culture in Portugal: you have to pay for the bread. And the butter. And the Lisbon-specialty sardine and tuna pâté spreads. We didn’t discover that until we got the bill, but we were too happy and excited to be preoccupied with the extra pair of euros. 

Following dinner we explored a little. We didn’t have to venture very far before stumbling upon the epicenter of Lisbon’s night scene, the Bairro Alto. It’s essentially a patchwork of narrow streets lined with bars and clubs, and on a Friday night it was absolutely teeming with people. Japanese trains at rush hour approximate how crowded it was, but don’t do justice to the amount of trash in the streets as well (mostly discarded bottles). During our wander, a cheerfully rotund guy stops us and asks where we’re from. He was delighted to hear that we were both Americans and both “new,” as in, from New Jersey and New York. As it turns out, he was Spanish, and his tall, sticklike friend was Portuguese. Both spoke broken English and loved talking with us. Without much ado, our curly-haired Spanish friend informed us that they were gay, and that they wanted our help warding off any suitors by pretending we were their girlfriends. We decided to play along for a short while, and ended up shooting the breeze with the pair of them for a good half an hour. Spanish Guy was certainly chatty, and lit up like a christmas tree when we told him we were studying in Seville. He insisted on teaching us the basic hand motions of Flamenco dance, relating them to the motions of picking apples and everything. I had to stop and appreciate the event.

When a wave of tiredness finally sloshed over the pair of us “new” Americans, we bid adieu to our newfound friends, much to their disappointment, and headed back to the Smile for some R&R before our first full day in Portugal.  

Day two started really well: with a great breakfast. We were delighted to discover that the Smile provided several kinds of cereal, hard boiled eggs, several kinds of bread, butter, jams, cheese, ham, pears, grapes, apples, pineapple, various juices, tea and coffee, chocolate cake... What made breakfast even better though was the company. At the table, and in and out of the common/dining area, were the other hostel guests, including assorted Spanish folk, an American or two, and a British-Portuguese couple. Everybody was speaking a thorough mix of Spanish, English and scattered Portuguese. The Portuguese London resident with his british girlfriend took us for Spanish girls at first glance, which was definitely exciting for us. 

When we stepped outside that morning, Rebecca and I had no real idea where on earth to go. As mentioned, this trip was pretty spur-of-the-moment, so our research on things to see essentially consisted of googling “Things to do in Lisbon” and glancing down the list of results. Fortunately, the hostel had provided us with a tourist map listing all kinds of cool things in Lisbon, which proved to be very helpful. However, our first stop was easy enough to find; standing on the Smile’s street corner, we could see down the road an enormous, important-looking gothic style building. “Let’s go there!” 

Dodging a wild yellow tram (to be discussed at length later), we hopped, skipped and jumped over to the building. It was a famous cathedral, and rather stunning inside I might add. I took roughly a gazillion photos of the place as we wandered about in hushed reverence admiring the soaring architecture and solemn artwork. I particularly liked the organ, a fancy affair with tubes and trumpeting pipes stretching elegantly every which way.  

Our handy map told us that a big square castle was just around the corner, so we thought we’d stop by. A cursory climb to the top of the entrance gate convinced us we needed to buy entrance tickets and check it out. Not only did the castle end up offering great views of Lisbon in all its red roofed glory, but it was very fun to explore. Very Game-of-Thrones-like, with curtain walls and keeps and towers and cannons... I kept thinking about how ridiculous it must have been to dash up the various flights of steep stairs in full suits of armor. The yellowing stones were ornamented with well-kept gardens and greenery, particularly the bottom floors. Street performers had taken up posts around the place, so we passed a grass weaver here, a stone carver there, and the sound of a recorder playing something Celtic followed us through the ruins. Rebecca and I easily whiled away a couple of hours there, talking at length about school, our future plans, and how awesome the view was. 

When we decided it was time for lunch, we ventured out of the castle. We noted, however, several tourists stepping through an inviting red door into some kind of courtyard, so we decided to follow suit. We hadn’t really been expecting to find this: 

Modern art, to be sure. We were musing between us about what exactly it was made of when a passing guy overheard our English conversation and said, “Looks like a giant Brill-O pad to me.” I’d say he was spot on. 

Lunch turned out to be a simple homemade affair. Rather than buy bread in a restaurant, we decided to buy it on the street: Rebecca and I stopped by a local supermarket and bought a couple baguettes, some cheese, salami, pears, and a packet of plastic knives, and made our way to a wide plaza down by the water. Sitting in the shadow of a massive bronze horseman smack dab in the center of the plaza, we went to work creating some of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had (Mom’s ham-cheese-tomato is excluded). Unfortunately, a bold flock of pigeons seemed to realize this, and had a lot of fun nosing about nearby, hoping for crumbs. The bird situation wasn’t helped by the old man who sat down a few feet away from us and tossed them chunks of bread. Even seagulls joined in then.

To top off our lunch, we stopped by one of the numerous famous bakeries in the area for some custard tarts, a treat apparently native to Portugal. It’s essentially crème brûlée, with a thinner top sugar layer, cupped in a pie crust the size of a muffin. Dangerously delicious, those things are. 

Rebecca and I walked off our lunch exploring the immediate area. Checking out shops and  plazas in the Portuguese sun was really great, taking in all the people, the numerous street performers, and the smell of roasting chestnuts and bakeries. During our little meander we stumbled upon one of Lisbon’s bigger tourist attractions, the Santa Justa elevator. 

Lisbon is made up of several ridiculously steep, although not necessarily that tall, hills. I have in mind something resembling an egg crate mattress pad. The result includes various iron funiculars, elevators, and trams that sprung up around the year 1900 all over the city. The Santa Justa elevator was constructed in 1903, and has been a random wrought iron tower serving, what I think is, no real discernible purpose ever since. It works essentially to  take people straight up to the top of this one hill, but because the line to take a ride was way too long, Rebecca and I walked around and up to the top of the hill by stairs. It didn’t seem that bad to me, but apparently the walk merited an elevator. In any case, it was fun to check out, and standing on the gangplank from its upper deck gave us some great views of the city. 

Once we’d had our fill of the elevator, Rebecca and I decided to go buy a tour bus ticket. We had debated the idea for a while (“But it’s just so...touristy.”), and finally decided that the 24-hour ticket, the hop-on-hop-off tour, plus accompanying free access to the city’s buses, trams, funiculars, and elevators, was too useful to pass up. We threw together a rough plan for the rest of the day and jumped on the first big yellow double-decker bus that pulled up to the stop. The choice to sit in the uncovered top floor turned out to be a poor one, because the wind quickly got us very chilly. Nevertheless, we were whisked through some of the more modern areas of Lisbon, where we were amused by the Corte Inglés department store with snowflakes decoration like Saks Fifth Avenue, ducked under an absolutely enormous Portuguese flag, and hummed to the repeating music on the tour recording. 

We jumped out of our touristy bus at Lisbon’s famous basilica as the sun was heading home. The facade of this place is pretty impressive in itself, white marble shaped by various carvings and statues gazing calmly off into space. Ducking inside quietly, we pulled up short when we heard some kind of congregation going on. We were a little confused, this being roughly 7:00pm, but ventured silently down the aisle between empty rows of pews up towards the front to get a better look. A couple other folks, whom we assumed were also tourists (false!) edged around a small barrier and disappeared down another hallway. That looks like a good idea! Let’s do that too! When we tried a minute later, awkwardly skirting the barrier and trying not to interrupt what Rebecca told me was a rosary prayer, a man exited the door we were heading for and made several disapproving gestures when he caught sight of us. Big whoops. A couple people attending the service shot us dirty looks. Thoroughly chastised, we clumsily hurried back outside before we could disturb anything else. 

The sun was setting now, turning everything a nice shade of peach pink, and notably dropping the temperature. We tourists hadn’t brought coats with us, so we planned to swing by the Smile and grab ours before heading back out for dinner. The tram that goes right by our hostel also stopped in front of the basilica, conveniently, so we trudged over to the trolley stop to wait. 

Several trolleys, different lines from ours, came and went. We watched studiously the little sign that says when each tram is coming next. Ours had been stuck on six minutes for quite a while now. Trolley times went from 20 to 0, trams rolled by, and it steadily got darker. As we started getting particularly cold, we began to think this was a pretty long six minutes. Eventually we abandoned the trolley idea. Rebecca and I, being the cheap college kids that we are, didn’t want to take a taxi, but we didn’t exactly trust ourselves to cut across Lisbon on foot with a map the size of a postage stamp and that was missing half the street names, so we resigned ourselves to taking a slightly longer route and follow the tracks home. 

A couple blocks later, we discovered a veritable flood. We stopped and gaped for a minute. Water was absolutely gushing down to our intersection, turning to the right and surging down one of Lisbon’s ridiculously steep hills. This hill, though, just happened to be the street that the trolley tracks were on. The four trolleys, empty and dark, lined up and stationary, didn’t escape us either. This little deluge was the source of the tram interruption. Some kind of water main must have broken and it was taking some effort to fix. 

Bemused, we continued on our way, following the river and the tracks together down the hill. This caused us to be exactly within range of spray from passing cars. Why someone would drive on underwater cobblestones up or down a hill is way beyond me, but there were plenty of cars passing by, sending up sheets of water over the sidewalk. Rebecca and I started to feel like we were in some kind of cop movie, flattening ourselves against shop windows every couple of seconds to dodge incoming fire. 

When we reached the bottom of the hill, the water finally managed to disperse into various street drains. We continued on our walk along the tracks, if a little wetter than we had hoped. Along the way we came across clusters of people waiting at the tram stops, frustratedly glancing at their watches and peering down the street looking for the trolley. Rebecca and I took it upon ourselves to spread the word about the halted service (“’Scuze me, does anybody speak English? Or Spanish?”).

We eventually completed our mission and made it back to the hostel. With a quick hello to the others and after warming up briefly, we set out with a new purpose: dinner. Both of us half-ashamedly admitted that what we wanted to eat wasn’t portuguese food exactly, but pasta. We’d been craving pasta. Carmen’s food is great, but it is definitely all Spanish cuisine, all the time. Pasta was something that sounded way too good to pass up. So, in Lisbon, we two Americans studying in Spain found a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant, and ate some of the best pasta I’ve ever had. I feel like the quality (combined with the low price) justifies our culinary choice. Well, that, and the fact that there was a purely Portuguese birthday party in full swing two tables over. 

We were so comfortable there, in fact, Rebecca and I lost track of time just talking, and got up to leave when the restaurant looked like it was beginning to close around midnight (still pretty early for us seasoned Spaniards). Not exactly sure what to do next, we started out just by walking, and found ourselves standing in front of the metro station pondering our next move when a guy came up to us. 

He was about my height, with dark brown hair shoulder-length held back by a headband. With a heavy accent, he asked, “We hear you speaking English. Where from?” We’re a little surprised, but we tell him we’re Americans, and get caught up in a conversation with the guy. His name was Mart, and he was from Turkey. He and his friends were all studying in Spain too, doing the same thing as us, taking advantage of the long weekend in Lisbon. He beckoned over the people he was with after a couple seconds: a tall blond guy with a hook nose - Hugo, from France - and a round-faced guy with light brown hair and a slight case of buck teeth - Simon, from Britain. They were all really nice and friendly. Simon of course had perfect English and turned out to be rather charming (although, Rebecca and I have both agreed on this, british accents by themselves are fantastic). He also spoke perfect French, with which he would converse with Hugo on occasion, although Hugo spoke medium English as well. Rebecca tried her hand at French too with the two of them, although it was reportedly a bit difficult; for both of us, when it comes to foreign languages at this point, it’s Spanish or bust. 

Mart invited us to join them for the evening, where their plans so far consisted of meeting up with the rest of their group. Feeling adventurous, Rebecca and I agreed. We tagged along with Hugo, Simon and Mart, heading back towards the nightlife neighborhood. The five of us stopped in a plaza familiar to us, but not to them; it was full of young people standing around drinking, chatting, petting their dogs they had brought with them to the party, and two guys playing didgeridoos. Rather eclectic. While Simon coaxed his go-phone (exactly the same as mine, but of course purchased for less than what I paid at The Phone House) into texting the missing friends, Hugo, Rebecca and I had a laugh watching outgoing Mart walk up to the didgeridoo players and ask them about their trade. He even had a go playing one, but no sound came out despite his best efforts. 

To try to meet up with the others, we moved into the maze of narrow streets of the Bairro Alto, and promptly got ourselves lost. We peered at crumpled maps and squinted up at street signs in the middle of Portuguese nighttime revelries in full swing. Eventually we picked a direction and ended up at another plaza. This one was a little calmer and overlooked the bay. 

It was also lined with roughly twelve parked police vans. One of the cramped streets leading on to the plaza from the bar neighborhood was choked with people and police. We looked on, with mild consternation and much curiosity, as policemen let people out one by one, holding back the rest. We pitched ideas back and forth about what could possibly be going on before Mart decided to walk up to a policeman and ask him. Simon read a new text with a rueful smile and told us their friends were, of course, stuck in the mess. Apparently, the police were letting any women out, but all men had to present ID to the police before they were let out of the street. We were thinking drug raid, male suspect. Rebecca and I felt like we’d put back on our Mission Impossible caps. Mart, however, returned and told us the police had simply called it “routine.” 

Eventually, a pack of people squeezed out of the mess and made its way over to us. Our group immediately doubled in size. Handshakes were passed around, introductions were made, but it was harder for Rebecca and I to remember names and talk to everyone now that there were so many of us and we were on the move. Two new additions that we did get to know pretty well by the end of the night though were Spencer, from Alaska - a stocky, dark-haired guy with narrow brown eyes and a friendly face - and Natalie, a French American - pointy nose, big smile, and masses of blond ringlets. 

We shifted the party to one bar of many and sat down to talk and exchange stories. Natalie  is American born and bred, but her father is French, and she is a full-time student at a French university. Very chatty and open, she was the life of the party for sure, talking to everybody seemingly at once. Spencer, on the other hand, is pure Alaskan. He grew up on some island up there, learning to gut a fish before handling long division, and in the summers he now works on a fishing boat while the season lasts. When the last boat comes in and the work for the year is done, he takes his pay and travels the world, until the season begins again or he runs out of money, at which point he returns to Alaska and starts again. He’d met the others, all a group of students from Spain, at the hostel. One other girl was from Wales, and I was very excited to discover she knew Crickhowell, the tiny town outside Cardiff where I’d visited a friend before coming to Spain. Mart, our original Turkish friend, was actually the oldest of the group - 28 I think it was. He’s a small-time journalist aspiring to take on an international post with his paper; he and I somehow ended up in a deep conversation about hopes and dreams, one of which for him is to visit the US. While all this was going on, one table over, three boisterous german guys in impeccable suits were having quite a good time. Beers in hand, smiles on their faces, the three were singing and dancing in their chairs. One of them grinned boozily around a pipe towards our table. We watched, amused, as his equally indisposed friends eventually hoisted him up and left, waving to us and walking out with an air of much practice. 

Eventually, everyone called an end to the evening and dispersed towards their respective hostels. Our group dwindled down to the original five, and Hugo, Mart, Simon, Rebecca and I moseyed back down to the spot where we’d met. Several goodbyes, handshakes, and European kisses later, we parted ways so that we could all get some sleep. 

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See Part Two for the next half of our Lisbon adventure!