My Travels in Spain: Orientation and Seville Cathedral

Hola todos!

I hope everyone enjoyed their day off from work today :) Labor Day, unfortunately, is not celebrated in Spain, so this morning I found myself waking up at 8AM and heading to school for orientation.

Day one of orientation went well. All of the incoming students from the U.S. had to take a placement exam, which I think I did pretty well on--I will found out the results tomorrow. Then we were given a tour of campus. Unlike Bryant University, Pablo de Olavide University is huge and very spread out. Going from class to class or from class to the library will call for a lot of walking, but I'm sure I can handle it especially if the weather is going to stay this warm until December! Tomorrow I will go back for the second day of orientation and we will receive our class schedules and I will be able to sign up for what is called an "intercambio." Basically, you are paired up with a spanish-speaking student and they teach you spanish and you teach them english--it's a pretty good concept!

After orientation we went to the Seville Cathedral. As I believe I mentioned before, the Seville Cathedral is the 3rd largest in the whole WORLD. Construction began for the Gothic Cathedral in 1401 and was completed in 1506. An interesting fact about this Cathedral is that Christopher Columbus's tomb is found here. Three other churches have claimed that his remains are in their churches, but it was recently confirmed after opening the tomb, under the permission of a descendant of Columbus, that his remains are, in fact, in the Seville Cathedral. The bell tower of the Seville Cathedral (The Giralda bell tower) has a height from the pavement to the weather vane of 98 m or about 321 feet! We were able to climb to the top of the bell tower and it has a magnificent view over all of Seville (pictures below).