weekends in sevilla

The past two weekends (sorry it’s been that long since I’ve posted anything!) I have been in Sevilla. Although I haven’t been traveling the world, I have still been doing and experiencing new things right here in my “home town!" It would take forever to try to tell ALL of the fun things I did, but here are a few.

Last weekend, the big event was the Sevilla marathon. There were 4000 people running in it! There is a girl, Julie Ann, who works for Trinity (my school) and ran the whole thing. Me and Kayla and another friend of ours named Bethany thought it would be cool to run part of it with her. We calculated about what time she would be at the 32 kilometer point so then we could run the last 10 kilometers with her. As we were waiting at our meeting point, we cheered on lots of other runners. It was fun to make them smile in the midst of such a grueling race. Lots of them beckoned us to “vamos! venga!” and join them in running. It was such a cool atmosphere! When Julie Ann came by, we just jumped right in with her. It was a gorgeous day, and it was fun to see parts of Sevilla I’ve never seen before. When we reached the finish line (we didn’t cross – we let the real marathoners do that) we realized that we had forgotten the fact that we needed to get home somehow… None of us had money for a bus since we were in running clothes, so we only had one choice: run! We accidentally ended up running about 11 miles that day. It was good practice for the half marathon we are running in a couple weeks.

Another highlight from last weekend were the chocolate chip cookie sundaes me and Kayla created. We had lots of cookie crumbles that were delicious, but just hard to eat… We came up with the lovely idea of putting them on McDonald’s soft serve ice cream and having a nice treat by the river. J

This past weekend, one exciting thing we did was book plane tickets for some trips later in April. We are now for sure going to Switzerland and Ireland!

This Saturday, we did another long run by the river. The weather has been great for running, and it has been a perfect way to see a lot of the city! We ran to a park and were surprised to see that there was some sort of festival going on. It was a celebration for Andalusia, the province that Sevilla is a part of. There was a band, and tons of people singing a song about a “cucaracha” (cockroach) and then people painting the streets green and white striped like the Andalusian flag. It was a great thing to stumble upon and gave us a nice break in our run.

Speaking of cockroaches, we (Kayla, actually) found our first cockroach in the house! AH! As Kayla was walking into the bathroom, I heard an urgent “Kristin! Kristin! Come here!” When I walked in, she was just looking and pointing at the wall. Sure enough, sitting on top of the towel rack was a big, nasty cockroach. We both kinda freaked out a little bit, so our senora came to see what the trouble was. After she found out, she swiftly went to the kitchen, got a broom and a bag, and took care of the nasty thing.