la vida es sueño.

I absolutely love Sevilla. I honestly think I could live there and love it forever. The Guadalquivir? Beautiful river. The Alcázar? Beautiful palace. The bull ring? Too expensive for two college students. Luckily, our tickets for Alcázar were only 2€ with our student ID's.

El Real Alcázar de Sevilla was breathtaking. It's obviously a mixture of Arabic architecture and Catholic influence, but the detail on the building is incredible. Using colored tile on the walls, ceilings, and floors is really popular in the south of Spain because the Arabs occupied Spain from 711-1492 (history class, what up?!). I can't describe how beautiful it is and I'm terrified my pictures won't do it justice. I'm kicking myself for not being able to post pictures on the blog!

After the Alcázar, we walked around for a while in search of various plazas and bread to eat with our monstrous jar of Nutella. Side note: we bought Nutella and apples and bananas and granola bars in hopes of saving money eating out. #collegekids

Continuing the adventure: my favorite part of the day was finding the Plaza de España. I literally stopped dead in my tracks. First, part of one of the newer Star Wars films was filmed there. Two, part of the new Sasha Baron Cohen movie The Dictator was filmed there. It's beautiful in the movie too, don't worry. There's a huge fountain in the Plaza, so we definitely say and put our feet in the water for about twenty minutes. The building in the Plaza is one of the largest buildings I've ever seen in my life. It arcs around the plaza and has a MOAT. A moat! How awesome! You can rent boats for the moat. Spaniards love to rent boats, I guess. The building is brick, I think, but it's speckled with that beautiful colored tile so I wouldn't mind if it was made of dookie. Obviously, I would mind that and I would be disgusted, but you know what I mean.

We walked all over Sevilla today and sweated worse than pigs. My Chaco's rubbed two blisters on each of my feet that have now become open wounds. Did I mention it's almost 100 degrees in Sevilla, but 80 in Madrid? Sevilla, you're beautiful. But you are HOT.

Somehow, our bus situation in always an adventure. After saying goodbye to Tarsi and watching The Dictator trailer about seven times, we went to a bus station. Wrong. This particular bus station stops sending buses to Granada at 2:30. It was 4. Across the city we went using the public transit, wishing we were on Madrid's Metro. We got on our non-air conditioned bus to Granada with five minutes to spare. Everyone was in a tizzy because we were all going to Granada, but the bus had a different destination taped to the window. Too tired to worry about that, Sara and I got settled. The girls in front of us go to Ole Miss, so that was nice.

Three hours later, we got lost trying to find our new family. We should have been prepared for getting lost, but we weren't. We finally made it to Stephanie and her precious dog Misou, who made me miss Piper so badly my heart aches we haven't met Marco, Stephanie's boyfriend, but maybe we will tomorrow. He works at a tapas bar. She speaks over five languages. And she's from Belgium. Legit.

We have made so many international friends this weekend. First, the boy from Ireland. Then a couple from Arizona stood in line behind us (they're son works for the FBI. Should have gotten his email!), then a couple from Sydney, Australia took our picture in the Plaza de España. A man from Switzerland also took our picture and told us about a wedding he went to yester night. Now, Stephanie is from Belgium and has lived in Spain for five years, perfectly picking up the language from hearing it. I can't wait to see who we'll meet tomorrow!

A lot of people got married in Sevilla today. A LOT. At all times too. Even the people who were wed in the middle of the day had guests in black tie attire and all the ladies wore hats like the British. Gosh, I live Spain.

Stephanie, Marco, and Misou live on a hill. Seriously, we climbed like 50 stairs to get up here. But, the view is breathtaking. The apartments here are so much prettier than anywhere else I've seen so far. We went to dinner about a fifteen minute walk from here and had Italian- it so hit the spot. I'm thinking I want BBQ and Krispy Kreme when I get home...then I'll go right back to wishing Paloma was there and that the fruit in the US was as fresh as the fruit here.