Sorry, it's narrated in Spanish. ;-)
Anywho, I was in Sevilla for the weekend with 5 other girls to get away and to celebrate my birthday. I'm 23, btw, eek. My mom got married at 23 years old and my grandma had already had 2 kids and number 3 was a bun in the oven by the time she was my age. Dang. I don't see marriage in next few years, though, so I'm going to assume that with each generation that age will get older and older.Sorry, tangent...Sevilla was great. The morning of my birthday it was pretty miserable, weather-wise, but it cleared up and was gorgeous by the end of the day. We had a lot of fun seeing more of the stuff that we had missed during orientation.
We had a 2-day celebration, basically, since we went out the first night for when I turned 23 at midnight and then the next day when it was more-officially my birthday. It was fun. We hit up the swankier bars, since I enjoy that atmosphere more than a bar filled with ridiculously drunk 19 and 20 year-old Americans here to study abroad.
The Plaza de España was probably my favorite part, as far as sight-seeing goes -- it is the most ostentatious display of architecture that I have ever seen in my LIFE. Walking around the plaza is serious sensory overload, and it makes sense why Seville went into serious debt when it was constructed in 1929. I took approximately 9 billion pictures while in the Plaza because of the amount of stuff, there. It's a huge semicircle loaded with fountains, tall buildings, bridges, a moat, towers, painted tiles and spotted with greenery and horse-drawn carriages.
For birthday dinner, we went to an Italian restaurant near the center -- it was pretty swanky.
They heard us speaking English or just could see that we were American by looking at us, so they mainly spoke English to us, which was fine. I appreciate having menus in English because I don't know all the food vocabulary yet, especially if it's something weird like braised duck with whatever kind of sauce. Jessica, a girl in our group, told the waiter that it was my birthday, so he brought out helado (the ice cream they have here) with "23" candles in it. It was cute. He also sang the Spanish version of happy birthday, which was really funny. He looked like Derek Jeter, it was really weird. We invited him to hang out with us after he was done at work and he 
actually did ca
ll us, but I had no idea how to tell him where to meet us -- I have enough problems with directions in English, let alone my 2nd language. I gave the phone to another Spanish guy who was with us (a friend of Michelle's), and I guess the fact that more guys in the group scared him away because he never showed up, haha. Oh well!
After dinner, we all went back to our hostel to change into our party attire and go back out on the town. We ended up going back out at 12:30 a.m. Yes, people go out here that late in Spain, that's why the entire country takes a siesta for 2-3 hours, daily. We hit up center Sevilla again and got 2 pitchers of sangría and just chatted. The girls asked me what I wanted to do, specifically, and my stipulations for a fun birthday were 1) I didn't want a ridiculous amount of smoke surrounding me, I already got a damn eye infection from that, 2) no dancing, because going to the dancing spots here generally consists of ugly guys coming up and grinding on you without any sort of invitation, 3) not so loud I couldn't talk to anybody. That makes me sound like a grandma, doesn't it? Whatever. I enjoy all those things besides the smoke, sometimes, I just don't want some ugly guy in a loud dance bar grinding on me on my birthday, sorry. So I thought sangría outdoors would be fun, and I think it was. Michelle invited a group of her guy friends, so they showed up, too. It was pretty fun.
Sunday was just more sight-seeing and relaxing by the big bridge where there's a lot of grass and ducks swimming, and the like. I asked several random Spaniards on the street if they would take pictures of me with the girls.
To be honest, in the past 5-ish years, my birthday was completely unmemorable and blah, usually (with the exception of my 21st, probably...). My birthday ALWAYS fell during finals week, so hardly anybody was up for a big party of anything along those lines. But birthday time in Sevilla definitely made up for that, I'd say. :-D
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1 comment:
no wonder you were exhausted yesterday when we skyped . . .
For your 22nd birthday we went to see Cirque de Soleil. I know that being your mother is not the best thing maybe for a birthday, but I will always remember that . . .
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