La lotería

On Sunday, Lucia and I woke up at around 9:30 and got ready to leave the house. We had churros con chocolate for breakfast and we had all intentions of leaving at 11 a.m., but we left later because we were watching the lottery on television. I know that sounds a little ridiculous, but the Christmas lottery is a HUGE deal here. Everybody and their dog buys a ticket or two or three for the Christmas lottery. Actually usually people split the cost of tickets with other people. For example, Lucia's mom invested her money into ten different tickets and I could have put money into one with the faculty and staff at my school, but I didn't. Anyway, you get the point. It's a big deal. There are commercials on T.V. about it and long lines at the lottery stands for it and the drawing was yesterday.

Here is the commercial for the lottery

It was really interesting to watch the drawings. Number after number and prize after prize was drawn. They have children from Madrid sing the numbers and the amount of the prize for each number. Lucia told me that the students come from the same school in Madrid, El Colegio de San Ildefonso. The students from this school have sung the numbers for the lottery for three centuries.Crazy! So pretty much, they raise these students to sing at the lottery. It really was interesting. And yesterday, the lottery handed out 2,240 million euros in prizes! That's over 3 billion U.S. dollars! The largest prize that was handed out for one number was 4 million euros ($5,476,000). That lucky number was 62246 and 13 tickets had that number. Most likely more than 13 people won that money because like I said, people split the cost of the tickets, but still--4 million euros! Also, by chance, out of the half hour that Lucia and I watched the lottery, we got to see 62246 get picked! :D Here is what that was like...

I have been trying to look for how many numbers were drawn in total, but I can't seem to find it. All I know is that each board had about 100 numbers and prizes and there were quite a few boards. Plus it went on all morning and part of the afternoon. Anyway, enough about the lottery, but there is an interesting cultural thing that you now know about Spain.

We left to got towards the center of Sevilla. We walked a little bit through Triana, which is a neighborhood of Sevilla. I'm not exactly sure why it is special or important, but it was nice to walk through and it is connected to the center by the Puente de Triana, which crosses the Guadalquivir river and is apparently iconic for Triana.

El puente de Triana

El Torre del Oro

Andalucian, Spanish, and European Union flags

After walking through Triana, we crossed over the river and saw El Torre del Oro, which was a military watchtower and controlled all of the boats coming into the city. We then took a stop at the Alcázar, which was a Moorish fort, turned palace and it is one of those World Heritage Sites that I always talk about. The architecture is mostly Arabic and there are a lot of pretty tiles throughout as well. Also, the gardens are beautiful and we feed the peacocks that were in the garden cookies. :)

After we left the Alcázar, we ate a small lunch and then we walked along the river to get to the bus station. Once home, we did absolutely nothing for quite awhile and it was great. We just sat and chatted and then we finally stopped being lazy and played Xbox Kinect. Lucia kicked my butt, but it was fun! After awhile, Lucia's dad came and picked us up and we ordered Chinese and ate it at his house. I know that I should probably be trying Spanish food, but the Chinese was SO good! I am so happy that is what we had for dinner. Yum. After dinner, we watched The Vow or, in Spanish, Todos los días de mi vida, which I haven't seen since it came out it theaters and I forgot how good/sad it was, but I was really happy to watch it and it was great to see the setting of Chicago. Everytime they should the skyline or something I went "Aww, Chicago." I'm sure it got annoying for Lucia and her sister, but I couldn't help myself. Anyway, then I went back to Lucia's mom's house with her and her sister and we went to bed. Day two was good and I still can't believe it's Christmastime. It doesn't feel like it is and I don't know if it will, but we'll see.