Winter weather

It finally started feeling kind of like winter this week to me! I finally got out my wool coat and my gloves, and had to wear something more than shorts and a t-shirt for running outside. Monday night, José (my roommate's boyfriend, who's lived in Sevilla all his life and has never seen snow) announced it was going to start being cold the next day: high of 14. Of course I had to convert that to Fahrenheit since I'm still not good with Celsius - that's a high of 57˚ F. I know, life is tough here. :)  Lows are into the 40s (F) now though, plus it's pretty humid here, which makes it feel colder…humidity in the winter is definitely a strange sensation for me. The lab has heating thankfully, but our apartment doesn't (like most apartments here), so it gets pretty chilly. The way we deal with this is slippers, space heaters, and an awesome table that has a space heater under it and a blanket that goes over the table and your legs. :)

Thanksgiving + new favorite food

New favorite food: roasted chestnuts! I had never had roasted chestnuts before I came to Sevilla. Once the weather started getting cooler this fall, vendors appeared on the streets, with their chestnut roasting carts. I first tried them on All Saints' Day (Nov 1), since roasted chestnuts are a traditional food for that holiday. If you haven't had them...you peel off the shell and they're soft in the middle, slightly crunchy on the outside, nutty and slightly sweet.

 

roasted chestnuts, sitting on the steps of the cathedral of Sevilla :)

Thanksgiving Day itself was exceedingly uneventful for me - no mention of Thanksgiving at all throughout the day. On Saturday, though, one of the other Fulbright girls in Sevilla hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at her apartment with me, a third Fulbright girl in Sevilla, a few other American friends, and one Spanish friend. We each brought some dishes and we had all the typical food: turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie... It was great company and I really enjoyed some home-cooked American food! I also had fun explaining pilgrims and Indians and the origins of Thanksgiving to the Spaniard...I have yet to meet anyone here who knows how Thanksgiving started. :)

Thanksgiving dinner with friends!

Granada

I went to Granada with my lab group this weekend! Granada is another one of the major cities in Andalucía, 2-3 hours from Sevilla by car or train. Saturday was the birthday of one of the girls in the lab, and she wanted to go Granada, so a group of us drove over for the weekend.

Four of the masters students in the group (in Spain - in general - you have to do a masters before a PhD, and at least in the sciences most people do their masters in the same group as for their PhD) are doing an intensive 3-week course for their masters at the University of Granada, and they're renting an apartment during that time. We all stayed with them in their apartment - 10 of us! One bathroom, and I slept with four other people in the bedroom, so nice and cozy!

Some of the group :)

It was a really fun weekend - basically we just spent a lot of time together. We went out both nights - there are plenty of bars and discotecas in Granada since it's definitely a university town, and there are people standing on every corner giving coupons and deals to groups of young people walking around. The night before the girl's birthday we followed one of these people to a salsa/Latin bar/discoteca, and since we were there early (around 11pm) it was basically empty. At midnight the really nice bartender let her go behind the counter and choose whatever bottles she wanted from the shelves and mix her own drink, so that was a round of chupitos (shots)! Some of us went back to the apartment early (like around 3) and played a card game until like 5 when the rest of the group came back. :)

The next day we basically didn't leave the apartment until night since it was raining all day - we ordered in Chinese and played the werewolves version of Mafia, and it was a very loud and involved few rounds! We went out that night and were going to come back early so we could madrugar (wake up early) the next morning and go to the Alhambra (huge 10th-century Arabic palace, and Spain's most visited attraction), but we ended up staying out until a normal hour (5am) so the Alhambra didn't really happen the next day - although we did go to a lookout point that had a great view of the Alhambra, and went up close and got to see a few of the buildings.

The 19th-century author Washington Irving spent time in Spain and Granada and wrote in his journal of the Alhambra: "How unworthy is my scribbling of the place" - I'll just display the pretty photo below and let it suffice to say that I want to go back and see it!

La Alhambra, seen from a lookout point

Jamón

Jamón ibérico is a type of cured ham produced mostly in Spain. The best jamón comes from pigs fed only acorns, and the ham is cured for a year or two, and served in very thin small strips (see picture below). Jamón can be eaten alone as a tapa, on toast with olive oil for any meal, on top of revueltos (scrambled eggs with potatoes and vegetables or really anything)… I didn't really like it at first since really salty and fatty meat isn't usually my favorite, but it is really tasty and is growing on me!

Jamón ibérico

The parents of my roommates (who are brother and sister) visited and stayed with us this weekend, and they brought with them a paletilla: a cured jamón leg! I've seen them in restaurants and in stores (expensive!) but never up close, so this was an experience. The parents brought their special tabla (wooden thing that holds the leg in place), and started cutting it up on the kitchen counter:

Una paletilla: cured front pig leg, on our kitchen counter. Check out the hoof.

I was talking to the dad as he was cutting up - he's taken a course on cutting jamón, so I learned ALL the fascinating details: where to hold the leg while you cut, the proper shape and size of the jamón strips (square, three fingers), the knives you use to cut different parts of the leg, the different types of tocino (fat) throughout the leg, where the best jamón comes from (of course in southern Spain), the ideal climate for the pigs, the difference between black-foot and white-foot jamón, the difference between the front and the back legs, and why you want the strips as thin as possible: so that you can get more plates of jamón out of a leg, and also because jamón is super chewy.

As you can see in the picture there's still a ton of the leg left…so I have a feeling it will be sitting on our kitchen counter for a while!

This week: flamenco, orchestra…

For lack of a better post topic, here are some fun things from my week…

On Tuesday, one of the other Fulbrighters in Sevilla performed flamenco at a bar in the city! She's danced flamenco for years in the US and for her Fulbright she's studying flamenco and taking classes here in Sevilla. In case you're not familiar with flamenco, flamenco is a style of both music and dance that originated in Andalucía (southern Spain), that involves dancers, a singer, and a guitarist, and clapping. Anyway that's my short explanation. :)  It was fun to see her perform! Afterwards I learned that nearly all of the performance was improvised, and was very impressed!

Flamenco! fyi the singer is next to the guitarist.

Thursday I went to a concert by the orchestra in Sevilla - the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla. They have their concerts at a nice concert hall right on the river, on my way back from the lab and only 20 minutes walking from my apartment, so I've enjoyed going to a few of their concerts. On Thursday they performed Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony (one of my favorite symphonies ever), Poulenc's piano concerto with a 19-year-old soloist from Sevilla, and a short contemporary piece by a Spanish composer. It was so nice being at an orchestra concert!

I also started a new research topic this week! So far I've been investigating hydrogen adsorption in zeolites - with the overall goal of using zeolites as materials for storing hydrogen to use as a fuel. This has involved looking in the literature for computational models to simulate hydrogen adsorption in zeolites; testing these models to see how well they give results that match experimental data just obtained by some of my PI's collaborators; and adjusting the parameters of these models so that they match the experimental data better. And then I plan to use the adjusted parameters to investigate hydrogen adsorption in zeolites with different structures and compositions.

Anyway, adjusting the parameters is a kind of long process that involves a lot of downtime, so in the meantime I'm expanding into deuterium! Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen, with one more neutron. At low temperatures and in confined spaces such as inside the pores of zeolites, the quantum behavior of H2 and D2 becomes important, and this behavior can be exploited for such useful things as isotope separation. So to start out I've been doing a lot of searching in the literature to see what's been done, and to look for data that I can reproduce to validate models. En fin. (useful Spanish phrase you can say at the end of a story/anecdote/explanation. :) )

Keity

The first time I went to 100 Montaditos (a chain restaurant that features 100 kinds of montaditos - little sandwiches on toasted baguettes), that's how the person taking my order spelled my name, and I thought that was interesting. :)  At 100 Montaditos you order at the counter and tell them your name, and they call your name when your order is ready.

My name pronounced in the normal American way sounds pretty weird to Spanish-speakers, which I've learned after spending time in Mexico and Spain. My first time in Spain, when I spent a summer in Oviedo with the IU Honors program, I didn't really think about it and just pronounced my name in the regular way, and it turned out that most people thought I was saying something more like "Kiri".

When I studied abroad in Mexico for a semester, I (along with the two other Katies in my program) introduced myself as Katie pronounced like Cati, which is indeed a Spanish name. Mexicans definitely understood that and it didn't sound weird to them…but it's not really my name.

So these couple of months when I've introduced myself to a Spaniard, I pronounce my name pretty much in the regular way, but in a more Spanish-friendly way…which means pronouncing the "t" like a "t" in Spanish (and not like a "d" as in the regular American pronunciation), pronouncing the long "a" more like a Spanish "e" followed by "i", and saying my name slowly. So people understand me better when I say my name, so when Spaniards say my name it sounds more or less normal. :)

In any case I've started using the name "Ana" when I go to 100 Montaditos…much less hassle, haha.

Barcelona

I had a super fun time on my trip to Barcelona this weekend! I had Thursday off for All Saints' Day, and I've wanted to visit Barcelona for the longest time, so I took off for the weekend. I got Ryanair tickets, booked a hostel online, and asked basically everyone I know who has been to Barcelona for suggestions on what to see.

I did a ton of sightseeing/wandering by myself and with another girl who's a Fulbright researcher in Barcelona. I loved the city, and also had gorgeous weather - lucky, since my roommates tell me it rained here in Sevilla and basically all of Spain this weekend.

I got to see a ton, but a few highlights - walking around Parc Güell, a park designed by the Catalán architect Antoni Gaudí, with awesome mosaics and views of the city:

Finally seeing the famous mosaic benches at Parc Güell!

Seeing the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's really weird, huge, and beautiful cathedral, that is still under construction, following Gaudí's original plans from the 1920s. Going up to Tibidabo, a mountain overlooking Barcelona, with an impressive cathedral, an old amusement park, and great views of the city and the Mediterranean from the top of the mountain. Walking through La Boquería, an indoor market with stands for fruit, vegetables, fish, candy, meat… my favorite part was the fresh fruit juices for 1 euro. :)

Inside La Boquería

Also the Picasso museum, which has one of the largest collections of Picasso's work. I enjoyed seeing the progression of his works from his early realistic works to the blue period to cubism. Finally one of my favorite spots was the audio-guided tour through Casa Batlló, a building restored by Gaudí, and located right on a major street sandwiched between other normal buildings. The house is so pretty and weird, and also ingeniously designed. The inside looks like water - there are almost no straight lines; the color palate is a gradient from light to deep blue; the light covers look like turtle shells; the designs on the walls look like fish scales; some of the glass windows are warped to make it look like you're underwater. I could have spent forever in there!

Main room in Casa Batlló

One night I also got to see another five or so of the Fulbrighters in Barcelona, which was great. Such a fun trip!

Oh and THE BEACH. Lunch one day...simple pleasures. :)  (that's goat cheese)