Club Fun

            I will go right ahead and say that this journal tells the story of perhaps my best night here in Spain. It happened while we were on the CEA provided trip to Sevilla. It was our second day in the city. We had spent the day on a walking tour with the group, we got lunch at a sidewalk café, then dinner at another sidewalk café. My roommate Alex and I decided that we didn’t want to stay out too late. We had kind of a late night the previous evening, and we didn’t want to be really tired on our last day.

            After getting lost for only a little bit, we made our way to Plaza Alfalfa. We had heard good things about this place. It was supposed to be a street lined with bars that a lot of students went to on the weekend. When we finally got there we found it was a little bit more than what we expected. The street was lined with bars, but to our surprise there were hundreds of students and young adults pouring out of every bar and into the street. I had heard a rumor that one of the bars on the street served giant mojitos for only 5 euro, so we looked up and down the street for people holding giant mojitos, and went into the closest bar. I found a guy that seemed close in age to myself and asked him where he got his mojito, and he directed me which bar to go to.

            As my roommate made his way through the crowd to go in and get a drink, I stayed out in the street to wait for him. As I was waiting (as the only American in sight), the guy that I asked about the mojito began talking to me. I need to say before we go any further, that my Spanish is no where near what I wanted it to be by this point in the trip. My two main goals before the program started were to befriend locals and speak Spanish with ease. But I learned when I got here that achieving my goals would not be easy. It is hard to meet locals when you do not speak their language fluently, and to this point I did not have much luck. But anyway, back to the story.

            So the guy that was talking to me had 3 other friends with him. One of them spoke pretty good English, but the other two only knew a very little bit. They all seemed cool, so I wanted to keep the conversation going to pass the time while I was waiting for my drink. I was speaking broken-Spanish and they were speaking broken-English, but we were communicating. I told them at the beginning of the conversation that I did not know Spanish very well. So whenever I would get stuck on a word, I would kind of shrug my shoulders and say the word in English, then we would all laugh at my failed attempt. We found out that we all like the same American and British rock bands, and we got into a good discussion about Radiohead and Wilco. As the conversation went on, I became more and more confident with my Spanish, and it felt like I was almost fluent. We talked for a while, and eventually they told us that we had to come to a club with them.

            We passed a sign that said ‘6 shots for the price of 4’. So we went in, touched glasses with an ‘Oley’ cheers, and carried on. We finally got to a part of town that was nothing touristy at all. The club was called ‘Club Fun’. When we got in it was clear that we were the only Americans inside. But our new friends introduced us to the DJ and we got another drink. The rest of the night consisted of talks about sports, politics, and differences in American and Spanish culture. It was nice to learn the viewpoints of someone my same age, but from a completely different part of the world. To someone who wasn’t there, this may seem like a rather normal night. But for me, getting to meet locals a nice as these guys, and see how much we had in common, was definitely a highlight of my trip.