Monday 10 November 2014

Week three in Seville

Hello dear readers,

I have now spent three weeks in Seville and after bragging and lolling about how sunny it was here the temperatures have PLUMMETED and no clothes that I've brought here are warm enough!!

I didn't write a blog post last week. The truth is, I was suffering terribly and I didn't want to worry you. I wanted to be brave, and pretend that I was okay and write a happy blog post, but I wasn't strong enough. At times we didn't know if I'd be able to last until the end of the work programme, and there were at least three days when I woke up in  the morning and I thought to myself, "Oh dear I do NOT feel well!". It begun with a sore throat and rumbled along into a runny nose and some real GROGGINESS, you know what I mean? But you'll be relieved to hear that somehow I have managed to struggle through. I still have a lot of phlegm in my nostrils though, and so I've spent the last few days really surprising people at how loudly I blow my nose. Nobody in the office has mentioned it which is very awkward as sometimes I blow my nose so loudly that the pen pot rattles, so I'm sure they've noticed it.

This weekend I went on an exciting adventure to Madrid to visit a Dear Friend. Madrid is in Spain, and so is Seville, but let me tell you Spain is much bigger than you think it is! I've just looked it up and as a point of comparison Edinburgh is closer to Birmingham than Madrid is to Seville - its over 500km. They have one of those super fast space age trains that only takes 2.5 hours but it costs more than I could sell my kidney for. The next quickest option is car! So I decided to take a Blablacar, which in the words of my Oldest Sister is "like hitch hiking, but worse." Its a website where people who are driving places offer up any spare seats in their car for a fee - you pay them to get in their car. Its sounds super creepy to me because I'm English and I'm scared of strangers, confined spaces with strangers and strangers on the internet. But in Spain its really normal. They seem to really like confined spaces with strangers. In the tiny lift in my office building, for example, everybody says hello when they get in AND "see you later" when they get out. Which is surprising when you think the normal thing to do in a lift is stare at the ground so you avoid eye contact and really sneakily check yourself out in the mirror. (BTW Spain is arguably less weird than Austria where in train cabins they used to say "greetings to God!" and "you're welcome").

So anyway Blablacar is normal here and it was also really fun. It was also great to practice Spanish and it was fun to meet some, like, real life Spanish people who are just going about their business and are surprised to see a little English girl waddling along being all confused and cute (that's me btw. Nobody's described me as cute yet but its how I'm trying to project myself).

Last time I went to Madrid with another Dear Friend we were basically hijaked by the Dear Pope who had decided to pop over from the Vatican along with millions of Young Catholics. (I really do mean millions). We both agreed that it was literally the worst thing ever. But this time it was so fun, and Madrid was very pretty and fancy.

There are so many other things I can write about!! But we're all getting tired so I will leave you with an interesting question. 'Blah blah' in English obviously refers to chatting, which is where I assumed the name BlaBlaCar came from. But in Spanish, to talk is 'hablar', and 'he talks' is 'habla', which sounds a bit like 'bla bla' and looks a bit like 'blah', and I'm like, is that related? Is that why we say Blah Blah? Please send your answers on a blank postcard with a self addressed envelope to PO Box CUTE.GIRL.IN.SEVILLE., best answer wins a Kinder Egg and a gold Blue Peter Badge.

xxxxxxxxxx

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