Thursday, October 14, 2010

My Brain Hurts

With everything now in a different language I have to always be on, which leads to my brain being totally fried my the end of the day, if not sooner. School is especially tooling on my ever expanding cranium. So far at least once each day I have wanted to just curl up in a ball and cry. I'm overwhelmed and tired of having to concentrate every single moment. However on a good note, my Spanish comprehension is expanding quite terrifically.

I experienced my first fiesta on Monday night, for the birthday party of a girl on the swim team. It was an all girl party, :(, but was still fun. There was a lot of dancing and I learned La Sevilliana, which is a traditional dance here in Seville and is a must know for the Feria, which is a week long festival in the spring. I'm not very good at the dance...yet, I just need more practice. I was a bit shy when it came to the dancing, because we hardly ever dance in the US, so I'm not completely sure with what I'm suppose to do. I just need more practice and opportunities to dance. I realized that it is a bit more challenging to dance to songs that you don't know, especially those in a different language.
A girl at the party told me that I look Spanish, with my oval face and dark hair. I wasn't really sure how to take that, but I took it as a compliment.

Swimming is going well, I'm working on adjusting myself to all of the different ways of training. Lifting here is a regular, and I've never really lifted before so I'm having to get use to that. I'm not really a fan of lifting, I have to say I'm more of a sucker for the body weight stuff.
Practice is interesting.
Yesterday was a 1500 for time, although not fast, a pulse rate (PR) of about 23. Mine was about 27 and I was the last one to finish. If that doesn't scream "I'm not a distance swimmer" I don't know what does. Well maybe also that fact that I died after about a 300. After that we did 15x100's and then another 1500. I was beat and on the verge of sinking by the time practice finally ended.
Today was a "test." It was 3x100's race from the blocks, best stroke. I did breaststroke (1:25.1 1:27.9 1:26.4) not too shabby and the coach was quite pleased.
This weekend I found out that in December we have a meet in Portugal!! And then in January or February seven of the fastest boys and girls are going to Italy to train for a chunk of time. How cool would that be?!?!?
I'm not really sure yet where I stand on the team, speed wise, but we have a meet next weekend, so I will be finding out. I have no idea if there is even a chance of going to Italy, but one can dream right?

Tomorrow is the one month mark since I left home on the 15th of September. I'm not really sure how I feel about it. When I think about it I wonder where the time has gone, because I can tell you how I felt the day I said goodbye. The though makes me want to cry. I still can't believe that I said goodbye to my family, that I had the strength to say goodbye to my family. Everything still seems like a dream, yet it all seems so real at the same time.


                                                            El Campo

On Monday I went into Seville with my host father Juan to get my student residence card. We when to La Plaza de EspaƱa.


The building was a half circle and around the perimeter was a map and the name of each of Spain's Providence's.


Until next time...