Caminando

This first week of classes has been the most relaxed first week of classes I've had since...the fourth grade? Classes starting after 1pm every day, and no class on Fridays definitely helps.  I usually sleep in, then wake up and have breakfast (toast with olive oil and sugar is my new favorite breakfast)/lunch then walk to the University.  Walking to school doesn't take long, and is always beautiful since you walk through a park and past the Plaza de España to get there.  The school itself is beautiful, built and used in the 18th century as a tobacco factory.  It has a moat, drawbridges, and a most confusing floor-plan I've ever had the pleasure of being lost in.

After school I usually head into the Santa Cruz neighborhood, to the river, or into Plaza Nueva rather than go straight home.  I like to sit in Plaza Nueva, one of the bigger plazas in El Centro, to watch little kids play soccer and watch the protesters outside of the city hall that appear every afternoon.  I've still got a lot of exploring of Sevilla to do.  Friends and I were walking through the city a few nights ago and came across the giant waffle/mushroom!  It was dark and cold so we didn't spend much time there, but it's called the Metropol Parasol, and I really want to go back soon during the day.  

Today, we went to Ronda, a sleepy little medieval town in the middle of the Málaga mountains.  Maybe not sleepy, but I felt like I was in some type of fairytale picture book.  We went to the Plaza de Torros first, the largest bull fighting arena in Spain (the building isn't that big but it's famous for the large diameter of the actual fighting circle).  We then went to the Puente Nueva, Ronda's famous bridge that connects the town across the Tajo gorge.  The bridge was built in 1741, took 42 years to build (the bridge they built in the same place before this was completed in only 8 months and collapsed).  It served as a prison for a while and then during the Spanish Civil War, prisoners were thrown off of the bridge into the gorge (they say).  We took a little hike down around the town into the gorge, and found and explored some remains of old stone structures built into the side of the cliff.  We went as far as we could toward the bottom of the bridge and walked along some cool trails built into the side of the cliff.  We found one side of a little cliff-house that we saw from the top of the bridge, but to make it through to the rest you had to squeeze through a dark and damp stone tunnel filled with spider-webs.  Our journey stopped there, but we decided that as soon as we got home we would look up more places to go hiking and explore during the weekends, even if it was just a short day trip away from Sevilla.  It was a beautiful afternoon and so nice to be out in some fresh air with the open skies.  The sky definitely seems a lot bluer here.  

Plaza de España

Walkin' home!

Afternoon beside the Guadalquivir River

Puente Nueva in Ronda

It was a pretty hike