"Yo soy una ciudad de lucha"

For those of you who don't habla español, the title of this post basically means "I'm a struggle city," which has kind of been the theme of the past 2 days. Don't get me wrong, I am LOVING the experience so far, but there have definitely been a couple moments that have merited "struggle city." For instance, just trying to speak spanish ALL THE TIME is really HARD! There's always a word that escapes you, or you conjugate the word incorrectly, or you start a sentence that you have no idea how to finish... it all adds up to get a tad frustrating once in a while. Nevertheless, I already feel like I'm learning. The accent is the hardest, though. The average Sevillano basically speaks Spanish in the way French is spoken: only using half the letters, and to add on top of that, they speak with a strong lisp, too. I know I'll probably end up coming back and speaking Spanish like a Sevillana, but right now it really is a struggle city for me, as far as trying to determine what the hell the natives are trying to say.

Another struggle city moment for me was when Natalie and I were almost pick-pocketed/robbed! We were being all studious and reading for our culture/history of Spain class while sitting outside at a cafe, and all of a sudden two middle-aged women came up to us, upon which they immediately began insisting we sign the petition they were holding. Natalie and I refused (in Spanish, of course), and they persisted, we refused some more, told them we were not citizens of Spain, and they told us it didn't matter and kept insisting we sign the petition. After a few minutes of this struggle, a waitress who worked at the cafe came out and immediately the two women walked away. The waitress asked us if we signed the petition and we said no, she replied with something along the lines of, "good... well you should check your pockets." Luckily, Natalie had her purse on her lap and they didn't have access to it, while mine was on the seat next to me, so close I had a hand on it. But thank goodness we were smart and didn't sign the paper because I know that as soon as we had our hands occupied our stuff would've been GONE with those women. Well, I guess this is what they call COMPLETE IMMERSION (that was for you, Miguel :) ...

Well, it's about time to get some reading done... ciao!