Plaza de España

These past few days have been consumed with orientation activities: getting to know the Center and how things work there, the other students, my family, and the city. And today we started classes, so I don´t anticipate things slowing down. On Saturday our group, which is actually quite large, split into smaller groups and went with different professors from the Center on a tour of some of the major neighborhoods and points of interest the city. We ended in El Centro (downtown) near the Plaza de España which was built for the Iberian-American Exhibition of 1929 and some friends and I decided to wander around and take pictures. I have been trying to blend in and avoid looking like a tourist, which I have been very successful at so far, like getting in to the museum for free and being told that I have "una cara bien española" (a very Spanish face/look). But today, since we had already blown our cover with the tour, we decided it was a good day to be tourists and we took many photos. The Exhibition was meant to increase the bonds of friendship between the countries of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and the Countries of Latin America, so throughout the Plaza are beautiful tile pictures (which seems like such an inadequate word, but I have no other) representing the different regions of Spain and Latin America. Artistic tile work (azulejos) is a specialty of Andalusia; I wish the photos did it justice. The architecture of Sevilla and the art of the buildings here has been one of my favorite things about the city so far. So here are some photos (finally).