Hola!

This will be another fairly short entry because I only have 20 minutes. We'll see how much I can get written. There's always so much! Basic things, it's only been a day so things haven't changed much in Salamanca. I'm still happy with my host mom and roommate, classes were a little better today. Also, our host mom hosts french highschool boys, too. New ones come every tuesday and leave on saturday so we met this week's pair at lunch. They were pretty quiet, but I guess we were too since Spanish is not native to any of us.

Conversation class was very exciting today. When I was introducing myself to the teacher and class yesterday, I mention my love of the Catholic church and studying philosophy/theology(really, apologetics) and the teacher asked me to give a presentation on the church for the class. Her thinking was that we have a few chinese students in the class who would be totally unfamiliar with christianity and I could introduce it because it's so huge in Spain(94% Catholic). So, when we walked in today she asked me to take her teachers chair and I ended up spending the whole hour and a half giving an introductory survey of the christian and more specifically Catholic faith. The first 45 minutes was more or less lecturing and the last 45 minutes was feilding questions ranging from what catholics really believe about the Eucharist to why priests can't get married. I had lot of help from the teacher and MANY corrections on my grammar, but I spoke entirely in spanish to my German/Estonian/German classmates and even my catholic teacher learned a few things. It was so much fun, I didn't even realize how much practice I was getting with my spanish!

Ok, so that was my excitement for today(that, and Salsa dance lessons tonight!), but I need to get back to telling of my travels. After Granada we went to Córdoba to see their mezquita(mosque) turned cathedral, and then took the bus to Sevilla to check into our hotel for the night. The Cathedral was really incredible. They maintained almost all of the original structure of the mosque(some hundreds out of the more hundreds it had before) and put a huge altar and choir in the center. As long as you were between the choir and the altar, it seemed like any other cathedral, but as soon as you stepped out it turned into a muslim world. The columns reminded me of the Mines of Moria from the Lord of the Rings movie. Something else that fascinated me was the number of private side chapels along the outer walls. There were probably more than 30 different chapels lining three of the four walls of the mosque. As you wandered through the columns away from the central altar, you would eventually come back to a very christian outer wall. I didn't take many pictures because I was burned out from the Alhambra, but I did grab a brochure with some good shots. I'm sure images.google.com can help you out too. It was really amazing.

I also want to mention the monstrance they had there for the feast of Corpus Christi. They said the one in sevilla was bigger, but even this one was as tall as me. It was incredible. So much gold and intricate design. I can't wait for the feast to see the procession here in Salamanca. It won't be Santa Semana, but it'll be pretty cool. It's coming up in just a few weeks!

Before leaving Córdoba, we took a little time to wander through the town and jewish quarter. We were shown a pretty street of flowers with a famous view of the bell tower, but I didn't think it was a very big deal. Pretty, but not too special. We also saw a small, long-unused Jewish temple. It was built by jews and decorated by a muslim under christian rule. The big deal was the mix of culture that is present throughout all of southern spain. It was pretty cool, I guess. I really loved Andalusia as a whole.

We finished the day in Seville, all trying to recover from the long day. My favorite memory was walking down to the Guadalquivir river a few blocks from our hotel and just looking out from the bridge. It was very peaceful and made me realize how much I love rivers in general. We took a little walk along its edge and then headed home for bed.

Now I have to go to a history lecture(we have a presentation on either history or art every night). Last night we learned about the early civilizations, particularly Romans, in Spain and about the art of El Greco. Very interesting stuff.

Hasta luego!