site Seeing and Being American

So Sunday I woke up and met Delaine, who lives in the same building complex as I do. We walked to the university to meet with our group to go to Italica. Italica is a place of ancient roman ruins, and it was amazing! I took so many pictures, and I will try to get them up soon, but it is hard enough trying to keep up with these day-to-day blogs! Anyways, there was an old amphitheater there that is thousands of years old and we got to go in and walk around. It was so weird to think that we were standing where people were mauled and killed by lions for the entertainment of others! We got to walk around inside the amphitheater where they kept the lions and prisoners as well, and it was after a day of rain, which just added to the effect. We continued walking around, because it used to be a small city, so there was a lot to see. We looked where some houses used to stand, and they were HUGE lots of land! It is unreal. The floors were all mosaic tiles laid by hand, and many of them were still in tact! (again I have to get those pictures up!!!) It is unbelievable that they still have these mosaic tile floors from centuries earlier, and let me tell you they are beautiful! What a tedious job to design and cut out pieces of stone and then put them down as a floor!

After our mini field trip I headed home for lunch; delicious soup with sausage, garbanzo beans, and veggies and of course a hunk of bread to go with it. They eat bread with almost every meal it seems. That night I went out with a couple of girls to a tex mex bar, the most American place ever to watch some playoff football games. Talk about being your typical Americano haha. On the way we ran into Tia and one of her friends and they were headed to the same place so we all walked together. The tex mex bar was too crowded so we went to an Irish pub right by there instead, I know, quite the improvement in experiencing the culture here haha. We enjoyed a delicious glass of sangria, watched some futbol Americano and met some other American students in a different CIEE program. After that, it was home for some rest for the start of my intensive language course!