Where I've been for the last three weeks

...basically, just hanging out in Sevilla.

Four days after the end of the semester, my mother finally arrived. (We're talking late May here...I have a lot to catch up on.) She had some flight issues and so I stayed at a friend of mine's house until she got here. My brother flew in a couple days later and I enjoyed showing them around my dear Sevilla.

The good: They enjoyed tapas, a carriage ride, the Cathedral, Itálica and more. I took them to my favorite café multiple times, allowed them the American experience of Starbucks in Spain, and Peter and I biked on Sevici bikes a bit.
The bad: I lost my Canon camera in a taxi our last day in Sevilla. We were hurrying off to Santa Justa to catch the AVE from Sevilla to Madrid and in the midst of bustling luggage in and out, I left my camera on the floor of the taxi. I wonder where it is now.

Madrid was groovy. We went to the Prado, ate good food, stayed in an apartment I hunted down on airbnb.com and went to Toledo for half a day to stroll around. They left, I went back to Sevilla for a work meeting, gathering information about a possible job.

The ugly: That job that I thought I had, I no longer do. Yesterday I went to the Plaza de España at 8:30 AM to try and get a paper necessary to work here. To make a long story short, my student visa isn't the right kind so I can't work the allotted 20 hours per week generally allowed. That leaves me with about five weeks unaccounted for at the end of June and all of July, but at last in the first two, I will be tutoring the same two children as during the semester so it's not a total loss, financially.

Since the beginning of June, when I returned for that meeting, I have been staying at my friend's house, paying my way by working with her to fix up another apartment she plans to rent out. We laugh at the disparity of our ages--she could be my mother, but that doesn't stop us from having fun biking around Sevilla, attempting to make gazpacho, scheming up big plans for the rest of my summer and more. Actually, all of my friends here are older than me: I do not understand how I'm not actually twenty-eight years old, sometimes thirty, instead of a measly twenty-one. I literally cannot believe how old I truly am. Such is life. The struggle against time only shows us we don't belong in it. We're fish out of water.

So, this fish out of water is eager to see what the Lord has planned for July, since I just lost any plan I once had. Vamos a ver.