Wednesday. A good day.

So the last couple of days have been really great! For a variety of reasons. I'll start from the beginning.
Wednesday I went over to Andy's place for lunch with him and his roommates. His roommate makes this famous bolognese sauce so I came over to try it. It was as good as advertised. Andy lives in Triana, which is on the other side of the river from where I live, so while I was on that side of town I decided to wander around. Specifically, I was on a quest to find a costume store that Alfredo had told me about. After a brief pit stop for café at a delicious bakery, I found the store. And it was also as good as advertised. They had a ton of costumes for cheap and I had a blast looking at all of them. Now I didn't have any desire to buy a big elaborate costume, I just wanted something small (black cat ears and a tail), but it was interesting to see how this American custom translated to Spain. Apparently Halloween has gotten more and more popular over the years here.

After spending some time in the Halloween store, I decided to walk farther south toward Los Remedios. Los Remedios is the neighborhood where Ignacio lives so it is where I had to go to set up my bank account. It is a really cool area with a really nice pedestrian street called Calle Asunción. Now over the past few weeks I've been hunting for a dress for the benefit dinner, Sevillano del Año (Warning: Shopping discussion to follow). I didn't have any luck on the main drag in the center of the city, so I thought Los Remedios might have some different stores. I was right. The first store I went into had a ton of beautiful cocktail dresses, all of which would have worked for the gala. I found a purple one that I loved, but when it comes to me and shopping, I can get a little trigger shy. In the U.S., I would call my mom or a friend for a second opinion, but I didn't have that option here. I stood in the dressing room debating what to do for about 10 minutes, when finally Isabel (Ignacio's wife) came to the rescue! I called her and she agreed to come down and have a look. Yes, I actually called her, and she left work to walk down the street and help me decide about a dress. That is how nice she is. It made me feel really welcome and I really felt like, Wow, these people really care about me. To wrap up this story, she agreed the dress was great and now I have a dress for Sevillano del Año!

You are probably thinking, wow, what a great day! She ate delicious Italian food, bought a dress, and a Halloween costume! But it gets better. I came home to discover that we finally have a functioning TV in our apartment! What this means, is that now we can actually start using the common space and bonding a little bit more as roommates, which is exactly what we did. The previous night a Spanish miniseries debuted and the whole country was going crazy about it. It is called Felipe y Letizia, and it is the story of how Prince Felipe of Asturias (the heir to the Spanish throne) got together with his wife Letizia, who was a journalist when they met. Very romantic and all of that, but also interesting insight into Spanish royalty. As an American, I know next to nothing about how royalty works in other countries so it was interesting to hear the historical background from Marta. Anyway, we stayed up and watched it together (even Iván, who was supposedly reading for class at the same time, but I know he was into it). It was a lot of fun to just hang and watch TV. I never thought that would be something I would miss, but alas.

I have more to tell about Thursday, but this post is getting a little long and I have to go to meeting, so I will post about what happened yesterday and its implications later! Have a good day!