¡Encantada! Cerrad la puerta con llave.

Before arriving in Sevilla, I'd assumed I would have a couple days to recover from jet lag, walk around the city, and get more accustomed to speaking and listening to Spanish before meeting my host family. I'd forgotten to bring a gift for my señora from the EE.UU, so I planned to pick up a small somethin'-somethin' for her when I was getting to know my new hometown. I envisioned myself strolling down a sunny avenida, snapping fotos with my gargantuan camera (without looking touristy) and expertly haggling with street vendors for the best deal. It was going to be a smooth, painless, graceful transition into life in southern Spain, and I, of course, was ready.

In my twenty-one years of lived experience, I've had plenty of time to watch my card-castle plans collapse at the gentlest whisper of changed circumstances. I really should not have expected my first homestay to be an exception to the rule. But, I did. So I was characteristically unprepared when reality breezed on in.

At the welcome meeting on the first night, one of the program leaders, Cheryl, informed us that we'd be moving in with our señoras the next day. Not in a couple days; not in twenty-four hours, even. The next morning. Qué sorpresa bonita, ¿eh? That only gave my brain a couple hours to recover from imploding before I'd need it to do some Spanish for me. As for the gift, I could only hope my sharp wit and undying charm would be gifts enough.

Nuestra calle, Ximénez de Enciso,
en el Barrio Santa Cruz

Nuestra casa--the first door

My roommate, Callan, and I were the last ones in the program to move into our new home and meet our señora, Ana. Our house is right in the middle of the historic district of the city, en el Barrio Santa Cruz, and since the hotel is only a couple blocks from the hotel we went on foot, dragging our bags through puddles and knocking into irritable peatones and their dogs. Side note: There are many dogs in this city. There is also  very little grass--everything is cobblestone, brick, tile or concrete--so people just let their animals do their thing wherever they darn well please. It's kind of a problem if you aren't paying attention to where you're going (or, you know, if you're dragging three airline-size bags behind you). I've learned the hard way to be careful where I step.

The second (and third) door(s)

Ana was a gracious host from the beginning, welcoming the sweaty, flustered americanas into her home with a firm but understanding kiss-kiss. Ana wasted no time in explaining the rules: Nice to meet you. (1) Lock the door. Theft is supposed to be a big thing here, as in any city, so our front door lock is pretty heavy duty. Whenever we leave the house, we have to swing the wrought-iron bar door shut until it clicks, then wedge the heavy wooden door so it doesn't give when we throw ourselves against it. This sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I'm going to put pictures of the door on here as soon as I figure out how to upload them--y'all really need to see it to understand what I mean. Kidzu's doors have nothing on these ones.

(2) Unplug the table. This house, like most houses in the area, is not heated. The walls and floor are ceramic tile. It is cold--on the coldest days, you can see the steam rise from your breath. The Sevillians, always thinking ahead, build their houses to retain coolness when it becomes desperately hot in the summer. During the winter, they sit at electric tables with heaters underneath, tucking their legs under the blanket-tablecloth so they can defrost while they watch TV (or write composiciones, in my case). The only thing is, these things are highly flammable. If you forget to unplug them, you could wake up to an inferno in the middle of the night. Rule 2.

Room and roomie :)

We learned some other basic household rules, but those were the most important ones. We smiled and mumbled a quick gracias before going downstairs to unpack our bags. (Callan and I have a nice-sized bedroom, a bathroom and a small reading room with a plug-in table on the ground floor; everyone else is upstairs.) Ana called us up for comida at around 2, and it was pretty awkward. Ana, her husband, Pepe, and either his mom or his sister (I don't know?) ate with us, and we were all having trouble understanding each other. Comida is the big meal of the day, so we had lots of food: espagueti and salad, fried fish, bread, and fresh fruit for desert. It was all delicious, but I was relieved when it was time to escape to my bed for a post-lunch nap. I passed out for a good hour or two until Callan and I had to meet our program-mates at EUSA, our school building, for the first orientation meeting.

It feels like it's been a lot longer than two weeks since I moved in; I already feel pretty comfortable here. Ana and Pepe still have trouble understanding me sometimes, and vice versa, but it's definitely gotten easier to communicate. The streets that used to confuse me are becoming familiar shortcuts, and the baristas in Santa Cruz know I'm going to want café con leche, pa' llevar, before I walk in. And the front door? I can open and shut it left-handed. Now I just have to work on my Spanish....

Staircase leading to the 1a y 2a plantas

Looking up toward the 2a planta from my room

¡Bienvenidos a España! Gracias por su paciencia...

I never thought I'd hate the sight of an advertisement so much. It wasn't sexist; it didn't exoticize people of color; it was, admittedly, a touch paternalistic toward people who can't afford health care, but eh? The dentistry ad in the Madrid airport, featuring a little boy's painfully white smile, was not itself the problem. The issue was that I'd been staring at it for about seven hours on end.

A word of advice: If you're ever flying out of the Madrid airport in January, expect massive delays and flight cancellations. My program-mates and I arrived in Spain on January 13 at about 7:30 in the morning, but a blanket of dense fog hovering over la Meseta (the central plateau in Spain) kept Iberia from boarding flights, including my 3:50 to Sevilla, until hours later. Half of us were able to squeeze onto the first flight; the other half were stuck in the airport until 7:50pm. ¡Qué lio! The important thing, though, is that we all made it to Seville on the first night of the program.

Culture shock? Maybe. But I'm pretty sure I was in medical shock by the time we arrived in Sevilla. Even before I stepped off the plane, I felt como pez fuera del agua, like my American-English gills were choking on the Spanish-heavy air. I confused at least a handful of Spaniards with my garbled questions before I shuffled my bags out the airport doors and into the trunk of a waiting taxi. Thank goodness I shared a cab with my friend Kat--she just spent fall semester in Madrid, so she was able to make conversation with the driver while I quietly suffocated in the next seat.

After we taxi'd ourselves to the Hotel Alcanzar, the UNC in Sevilla SAS people had a quick meeting with the program directors, almost exclusively in Spanish. (After over 24 hours of plane travel and 2 sleepless nights, I was definitely struggling to keep up!) We finally got some food at a nearby restaurant after that, returned to the hotel and promptly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Y'all, please understand: I love my fellow program participants already, but the hours we spent in the airport, our first dinner together, the first couple of days were hard. Nothing could make me long for a return flight to the States like small talk among strangers who know they're gonna spend the next five months together in another country. I think it helped that we were forced to break the ice as we waited for the fog to lift in Madrid, but, of course, it takes time for people to get to know each other, and the interim can be painful. Until I got settled in here, I couldn't help but feel like my international flight was just an irrational flight from the faces and places I love. I didn't realize how close I was to falling in love with a new place, to finding community in a group of new faces.

(To be continued...)