After roughly an hour of waiting at the Seville Airport and a 15 minute bus ride to Seville I have arrived at my homestay. Here are a few pictures of where I will be staying.
These past couple of days have been a mix of emotions to say the least. On one hand, I am excited to be able to immerse myself in the Spanish culture and be able to complete an internship in my desired field.
However, at the same time I am feeling overwhelmed with the internship process as a whole. In addition to general anxiety of living in a foreign country relatively on my own, their has been a considerable level of anxiety that has resulted due to the uncertainty of the internship organization process. In this context, one of the main concerns has involved the uncertainty of the internship search process as a whole. Although where I am working has been confirmed, the exact work schedule has not been determined and I will not be able to meet up with my employer until Tuesday. Due to the fact that I have an excursion this Friday and will thereby have only 2 full days of work this week, this is not exactly comforting ( primarily due to the fact that I will barely be able to fit in the required work hours in a 5 day workweek, thereby making it very difficult for me to complete any excursions in the future).
Nevertheless, there have been some plea sent surprises that come with living in Seville. One of these surprises has been my Spanish language skills. Despite my initial uncertainty with using the language in simple conversation during my preliminary time in Spain, I have been able to (mostly) communicate with my host family in fluent Spanish. This has made it considerably easier to find comfort during everyday activities when done with orientation activities. In addition to this point, the city of Seville and, more specifically, the are directly around my host family’s household has been a pleasant environment which has allowed me to preliminarily clear my head during anxious situations.
In this addition to this point, the orientation activities have been helpful in that they have been helpful in introducing me to some good places to spend my free time. By visiting these spots, I feel/hope that I will be able to get a better feel for the environment here as well as get to know some of my fellow interns/ study abroad students better.
From these initial couple days, I would say that my current feelings towards Seville are mixed. On one hand, I think that that Seville is an amazing city that can provide great opportunities if I can take advantage of them. However, from this initial experience it seems that it will be difficult to fully experience what Seville has to offer unless I get to know my fellow CEA students and local Sevillians. I may be getting too anxious at this early point, but I am beginning to feel that this experience could either be much better or much worse than I expected before beginning.