Places to go and people to meet

Before leaving for South Africa, I was gung-ho about coming back and then going to Ecuador or another developing country to learn Spanish. But after Africa, I wasn't so eager. It wasn't that Africa was a bad experience or even particularly hard, considering that I was on an organized tour for much of the trip. It was mostly lonely (in spite of being on an overland truck with 26 other people) and all of a sudden, moving to a very different place with a no language skills didn't sound as appealing. It sounded quite overwhelming. So after hemming and hawing about where to go, and thinking a few times about giving up the whole idea and finding an internship (even though I've determined that internships are never very good, and I have two more summers of them coming up), and cycling between going to Ecuador or Spain or Bolivia or Guatemala or Ecuador or Spain or Middlebury (for the most comfort-zone providing language learning experience possible) and even Monteray, California...I've settled on...Spain. For now. With every intention of going to Bolivia right afterwards, because I'm still interested in an experience of a very different sort. Hopefully I'll learn enough in Spain to feel comfortable going to a small city in Bolivia and going for that whole immersion thing.

So after being almost ready to book tickets to Guatemala City, keeping my fingers crossed that no major problem would break out before I was scheduled to leave (so my parents wouldn't physically prevent me from boarding the plane), I spoke to someone about Seville, and finally got excited about that idea. Really excited. I couldn't fall asleep at 2 am and had to go back to the computer to figure out how my brilliant new plan would work (N.B. - it involved flying from Madrid to La Paz, and basically it wouldn't). But I also managed to talk to someone at the school in Seville - or Sevilla as I should get used to saying - about the possibility of there being space in two weeks. And then I had to see what cities are nearby to Sevilla, because even as I said that the trip was about learning Spanish, not traveling...all these great places are so close, and the trains in Spain are a welcome relief from incredibly expensive last minute train fares in England, or having to book flights way ahead of time. It sounds like there's many places for weekend visits (unlike Guatemala, which would be more of a laid-back cultural experience I'm not sure I'm ready for). So I tried to go to sleep around 6 am and didn't fall asleep until after 7, and work up at 12:30. Fortunately, still excited.

Many, many thanks to Edin, Eric, Megan, and friends of friends who talked to me about where to go. In the end I'm just going to do exactly what Edin did and hopefully will have half as good an experience as she did, but I needed to find out as much as possible before I made a decision. Like how I visited about 50 apartments in London before choosing one.