Tuesday, April 14

We arrived early at school so that Rosa could be on time for the 1st grade and 2nd grad mini olympics.  While she's in 1st grade back home, she's in 2nd grade here.  It turns out, with her December birthday, that she just makes the cut-off and that she's one of the youngest students in her grade.

It appears that her English teacher spends half the day teaching 1st grade Engish and the other half teaching 2nd grade English.  And the same with the Spanish teachers.

It's a school tradition to have the mini olympics.

Here are the students from Rosa's class parading from the front of the school to the bus that will take them to the stadium.  Rosa's class wore red t-shirts.  Students in other classes wore white, blue, or yellow t-shirts.  Rosa made a bright yellow sign which you can see in the distance in this parade.

Here's a close up of one side.  

And the other side.  Her classmates helped with this sign and with others.

Across the street the students walked to the bus.

I dropped the boys off at school, grabbed a coffee, and then decide to walk to the stadium.  Supposedly it was only 20 or so minutes away.  First I walked to the train station at which point there's a giant traffic circle and I needed to follow it around to Kansas City street.  I saw the street sign and started walking along the boulevard.  It was a really pretty street.  And I walked and walked and walked and walked and realized eventually that I must be lost.  With all of my phone troubles, I didn't have a map on it, and my Seville city map didn't go out this far.  While I'd seen loads of taxis earlier, at this point I didn't see any.  So I just turned around and started walking back the way I came and finally found a taxi.  It turns out that I'd taken a wrong turn at the train station traffic circle.  I finally arrived at the sports stadium almost an hour later than I'd hoped to arrive.  And once there, I still needed to figure out where Rosa was.  Needless to say, I was frazzled by the time I saw her.

And here she is.  She chose basketball for her morning team sport for the two days.  Her other options had been hockey, handball, and soccer.  I think she'd chosen basketball because she'd seen my infatuation with the sport during this year's college basketball season while most of UVA's men's games were on tv.

Here they are in action on the court.

The kids would play a game, and then teams would rotate and the kids had long breaks.   During the breaks they did a lot of running around in the inner grassy field.  At one point I tried to teach them how to play red rover.  They thought it was hilarious.

After the morning team sports, the kids went to sit on the bleachers and eat sandwiches.  Many of them brought stuffed animals that they'd dressed up for the games.

Then some of the individual activities started taking place.  The students were called by name, led through warmups from the coaches, and then did the activities.  At this point it was mostly sprinting races.

I left by noon to make it back to the school to meet the boys for lunch at 1pm.  Earlier and multiple times I'd tried to convince them to stay at school for lunch and eat with their many classmates who stay during lunchtime.  I didn't have any luck convincing them to do this.  I thought about taking a taxi back to the school, but instead braved walking.  I found my way back without a problem.

Along the way I saw this festive sign that captures some of the highlights of Sevilla in the spring.

After lunch, the boys and I went to the playground across the street from their school.  I think they look so cute riding this bouncy toy together.

Across the street is a fruit and vegetable store.  The kids love going there and picking out fruit.  This day they each picked out apples to munch on for their post-lunch snack.

That night we tried doing take-out for the first time since we've been here.  Scott offered to walk down to Domino's and Devon chose to go with him.  He's a smart boy trying to get as much time alone with a parent as possible.  He does a ton of errands just for this.  Anyway, Devon loved this date and waiting for the pizza.