Tuesday, February 19, 2019

February 19 - Lively Intercambio

This morning, I made Chicken Tortilla Soup - we stopped at the Triana Market on our way home from the airport yesterday to get fresh jalepenos and then I stopped at the regular grocery store after school last to get everything else.  While Albert was doing laundry, I was chopping, sauteing, carving, pureeing, and all the other things to make the soup for lunch.

After that, I spent some time working on my homework and doing some review.  I stopped with about half an hour to go before school since I knew it would be a long afternoon and evening of Spanish.

I originally planned to walk during the break and between class and intercambio, but I ended up working through the break with another student on an exercise and then one of the other professors asked me to walk a new group of students across town to the intercambio.  We arrived early since we went straight from class, but we ended up chatting for the 15 minutes until other students started to arrive.

The teacher in charge of intercambio invited a couple of her local friends to participate.  It meant we had lots of local Spanish speakers to keep the conversations going.  In addition to the new students and the visiting locals - lots of the regulars were there.  I ended up staying until close to 10:15 - lots of Spanish practice tonight!

Of course, with no walking during the break or right after class, I still had some walking to do after intercambio  - so I mostly stayed on the bigger streets and got in a couple of miles.  The large street that runs parallel to the river on the Sevilla side has had construction fencing up along different parts on the side of the street near the river pretty much since we got here.  As of today, it has all been taken down... of course now there is new fencing up across the street.  The city seems to be in a neverending state of infrastructure upkeep.
Tomorrow should be a pretty normal day.  It is supposed to be in the low 70's and then up into the high seventies for days and days.  Everyone here seems to think the "hard winter" is over.