Yesterday was an entire day of orientation. I met up with my friend Erin, who is also from Purdue, and headed down to breakfast early in the day. Breakfast was buffet, but it included plenty of meats (something similar to prosciutto was involved, so what's not to like) as well as cereal, cheese, and bread. We met again in our groups afterwards and took a walk to FCEYE (Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales), which is the business school for the University of Sevilla, where we had a few meetings. These meeting were academic based, and at the end we got to draw out our schedules. These schedules won't be finalized until next week, but we could at least get an idea of what they would be like.
Something that will be difficult to adjust to is eating lunch around 2pm, and not snacking in between breakfast and lunch. I'm learning fast that Spaniards love their coffee, so in between meetings we headed down to the cafetería to have a café con leche. This at least helped most everyone stay awake through the meetings!
After another academic meeting, our guides took us around on a tour of the business school, showing us where in general our classes would be. An interesting fact about the business school building (one of the them), it used to be a women's prison. So it's not the most beautiful building on the outside, but it has an interesting background!
After our tour, Marta took us to have tapas for lunch, to show us "how it's done in Spain." We went to La plaza Nervión for lunch and had tinto de verano (a drink similar to sangría), and little sandwiches which were delicious.
The afternoon consisted of Spanish interviews, done by professors, to gauge our level of Spanish speaking. The interviews lasted over four hours (although each student only went for 10 minutes), and they asked us questions that ranged from "Where are you from," "what are you studying," "why did you choose this program," etc. I heard that other people got harder questions like, "what should we do about the economy?" I'm glad my questions weren't like that!
Once we were finished with our interview we could do whatever we wanted until 8:30pm, at which point we met with our groups yet again and headed for more tapas for dinner. The entire program walked into the historic part of the city, and then split up to different restaurants. Sevilla at night is beautiful! Seeing the lighting on the cathedral, and other old buildings was amazing! At 10:30 we went to see Flamenco, which was unbelievable! The skill that these dancers (and guitarist and singer) had were truly remarkable. I was thoroughly impressed!
The group split up again afterwards into the group that wanted to go back to the hotel, and the group that wanted to go out. I was in the latter. :-) Antonio (one of the guides) took us to this really cool bar (that I'm positive I stepped into with my family 6 years ago) where we got some sangría and got to watch some more Flamenco. It was a fun experience to be out drinking delicious drinks, with fun people, in a really cool place.
I headed home around 12:15 with a friend because I knew I still had to do things the next day and didn't want to be hungover and exhausted when meeting my familia!
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