Picking up from where I left off the last time ... My girlfriend, Kim, came to visit me in Spain on the 15th, and on Friday and Saturday we were in Sevilla and on Sunday we went with a trip sponsored by the university to Ronda. Sevilla is the capital of Andalucia, which is the province of Spain in which I am living. evilla was the largest city I have been in so far in Spain and it is too big to take in everything in 24 hours. But we certainly tried.

It has been awhile since I wrote on the blog last, mainly because I haven't been able to log in to the website for the last two weeks ... AAnyway, two weekends ago I went to Cordoba with Randy, Ashley and Rachel. We got to see La Mezquita, which today is a huge beautiful cathedral built inside a huge mosque. Quick history: at first it was a small cathedral, and then the Moors conquered Spain and in the spirit of tolerance, tore down the cathedral and built a huge mosque in its place. And then when Spain retook the country, continuing in the spirit of tolerance, they tore down part of the mosque to build a huge cathedral in the middle of the mosque. It is very beautiful and its huge pillar fields make it unique.

This past Sunday, the University of Cadiz organized a trip to go to Bolonia for the day and to get a semi-behind-the-scenes tour of the old Roman city of Baelo Claudia. In the morning, the archaeologist who was directing the current excavation going on at Baelo Claudia gave us a tour of the ruins, but also showed us the excavation he was overseeing. This tour was all in Spanish like the bodega tour, but this time the only group getting the tour was our small group and, thankfully, Juan Carlos translated what the archaeologist said.

This past Friday after Spanish class in the morning we hopped on a train to El Puerto Santa Maria to take a tour of the Osborne sherry winery. It was cool to walk around and see all the old-fashioned equipment that they used to use to make the wine and also to walk through the winery gardens, which were impressive considering the bland exterior of the building that you see from the street. The tour was in Spanish (clearly) though and the tour guide talked way too fast, so I actually didn't catch 95 percent of what he said. But it was still fun and, of course, they let us try some of the sherries they produce at the end of the tour.

Seven of us went to Gilbraltar this weekend, which was 99th on my list of 100 things I want to do while I'm in Spain. 98th is to riot after a soccer game and 100th is to be thrown into a Spanish prison. I'm just kidding, though.

On Wednesday night, at around 9 p.m. (the sun is up until like 10:10) I went to play a pickup game of soccer (futbol) with the two guys who live in my apartment with me, two guys I know from working in the allelopathy lab, and three other guys (I was the only American). So it was pickup soccer, and I played soccer all through high school, so I thought I would do fine, as the guys are older than me (like 24-27) and they said they weren't very good at soccer and were out of shape. So anyway, the point of this long introduction is to set the stage for the butt kicking given to me by these guys. Not all of them were good players (two were only OK), but there were three guys who were very good, and hit give-and-gos like they had been playing together for years. I also was the first person to leave, at 10:10 when it got dark, because I was dead tired and had been standing in a fixed position for the final 15 minutes like I was rooted in the cement we were playing on. They kept playing until 10:30. Yeah.

Friday night we experienced our first Spanish "discoteca." I don't know the name of it, as all clubs have strange names, and so seeing strange names in Spanish makes it even harder to remember. I think one place was called Mu Cho Teatro and another one was called Juegue Conmigo. Or something like that. We took a train into El Puerto Santa Maria and went to a club that had a concert that night, with a band that was fronted by a singer who was an old guy from America, but had been in Spain with the army, had married a Spanish girl and had settled in Spain. After hearing this, I wasn't surprised when he started to belt out a lot of old Motown songs from the 1970s. We ended up seeing an administrator from the University of Cadiz there with his wife, and he knew the singer and tried to introduce us to him after the show, but the singer was swept up by someone else as soon as he had said hello.

On Sunday, we caught a train in the late morning into the new part of Cadiz. Cadiz is divided into the old city and the new city somewhat by an old wall that kept out invaders around the Napoleonic times. Cadiz is a peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean and on the train ride to the beach the peninsula gets so narrow that there is only room for one road and one set of train tracks and on one side is a small beach and the ocean and on the other side is a small beach and the bay. The train let us off in the new city about two blocks from the beach and from there we went down to the beach and set up shop under our solitary umbrella, our lone respite from the hot, strong Cadiz sun. The beach, as foretold, was beautiful, but I did not think it was much better, if at all, than nice beaches on the Atlantic coast of the U,S. Anyway, it was nice and I would spend all summer on the beach if allowed.

Rachel, Randy and I are going to be working for the next two months on extracting and analyzing three different species of Antarctic lichens. We are trying to identify secondary metabolites in the lichens. Secondary metabolites are chemical compounds that may benefit the lichen but not be necessary for survival, in the strict sense. An example of a secondary metabolite would be an anti-herbivory toxin produced by a plant so insects would not eat the plant. Plant specific secondary toxins (PSST) are also responsible for the bright colors of some insects and frogs because the insects and frogs eat the colored toxic compounds of the plants. But instead of digesting them and getting sick, they store them for their own protection. Antarctic lichens live in very rough conditions and so have a large amount of secondary metabolites, which we are trying to identify so to then determine their function.

So this morning we got to go into Cadiz for the first time, which is a small city that is very beautiful and has good restaurants and nightlife. (Sorry Puerto Real.) Next month, all of us Americans on the trip are pushing to be moved to the University housing in Cadiz.

Getting ready to go to Spain isn't as much getting ready as it is getting bombarded with information, dos and don'ts (mainly dos), and trying to take everything (something?) in without feeling overwhelmed and without nodding off during phytochemistry lectures. (It's warm and dark in the room. It's after lunch. Don't judge me). Everything has been great so far. It's still very hard to know what to expect. Kind of like when Brad Lidge comes in to pitch for the Phillies, except that with Spain, you know it's going to end well.