Adiós, Barca

This will be brief because I'm leaving for the airport in just over a half hour and I still have to throw the last-minute things (including my computer, which, did you know it's called an ordenador instead of a computadora? I've always heard computadora and the only reason I initially understood what an ordenador was was learning French last summer) into my suitcase.


Things I have learned to do in Spain:

1. Live in a city.  The longest I'd ever spent in a city before was nine days in New York visiting Morgan and Nicole for fall break.
2. Appreciate red wine.  I have probably told you about this.
3. Appreciate visual art.  I have definitely told you about this.
4. Deal with scented laundry detergent for an extended period of time.  No, really, it was a big deal for me!
5. Not get pickpocketed.  It's an industry in Barcelona and I've avoided it entirely.
6. Understand people when they ramble at me in Spanish!  Most of it, anyway.  Of course, now I'm going to have a conversation with someone who isn't from Northern Spain and I'm not going to have any idea what's going on, but baby steps.
7. Speak like a Spaniard.  Pronouncing gracias as grathias feels a million times more natural to me than grasias, and having something approaching a regional accent makes me feel more legit about learning Spanish in the first place.

I'm having a hard time ending this entry in a way that's appropriately not ridiculous so I'm going to give up and go now.  Spain, I love you a lot and you've been great.  Here's to airports.

Manzana de la Discordia

First of all, dear readers, I cannot believe that I'm in the middle of packing right now. I've known all along that this is a really short program and five weeks isn't a lot of time and I don't want to leave Oberlin for a whole semester and that's why I'm doing this for a month instead of four, but I'm not ready to leave. I haven't explored as much of Barcelona as I wanted to and I haven't been to the rest of Spain and I can feel my Spanish getting better by the hour (and my ceceo is getting more pronounced, my eighth grade Spanish teacher Sra. González would be proud) and I do not want to leave.  But fencing awaits me at home, so away I must.

Spain won the semifinal game last night and I'm going to have to watch the final alone in my basement screaming at the TV in Spanish.

Have I told you all lately exactly how much I am in love with my art history class? And my professor? And Catalan art? No?  Okay let me explain.  I have never been an art person.  I've always been bad at museums and I've never understood art and I like it fine when it comes from art rental or from a poster sale, but music and literature have just always been more of my thing.  At least once a day for the first week and a half or so my brain would wonder who on earth let it into an art history class.  I wrote my final paper on La Celestina instead of visual art because I was pretty sure that in four weeks I wasn't going to suddenly be able to write two thousand words about art.  Then I realized that a) I know more than I think I do and b) modernism is the coolest ever.

There were three main modernist architects in Catalunya: Domenech i Montaner, Antoni Gaudí, and Puig i Cadafalch (pronounced poochy cadafall, by far my favorite name in this class).  They all lived in different parts of the city, but there's one block on Passeig de Gracia, which is the expensive street with all the designer clothes and most of the cool architecture, where all three of them designed a house.  It's called the Manzana de la Discordia.

This one time Eris rolled a golden apple labeled "to the fairest" into this party that the gods were having and Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite got into a fairly significant argument about which one of them was the prettiest.  Manzana is Spanish for both apple and city block (fun fact, that's why New York City is called the Big Apple!), so the Manzana de la Discordia is an absurdly clever mythological reference to the fact that the tree main modernist architects are all competing for attention on the same city block.  I can't get over how cool that is.

On the far left is Puig i Cadafalch's contribution, with the Arab and northern European influence, and in the middle is Gaudí's, which is called Casa Batlló.  The Battló family lives there, and I know you are all astounded by the creativity involved in that name.  (Domenech i Montaner's house is at the far end of the block and it's the least interesting of the three.)  There are two possible interpretations of Casa Battló: one is that it was inspired by St. George and his dragon killing, and that the balconies are the skulls of the girls that the dragon ate and the roof is the dragon's back, and the other is that it represents the carnival.  It's hard to see in this picture, but the facade is covered in small dots of color that look like confetti, and the balconies look like masks.

The Battló family had these friends and they were like, oh cool, that house is awesome, Gaudí should build our house so we can have one that is also colorful and fun! So they contracted him and left him to his own devices and he built them this:

They were not pleased, and Gaudí actually got fined for making a house that was too big.  It's so big that it's hard to get a picture of how cool it really is in person - from the ground it looks like a lot of stone and some iron.  Considering what they wanted - basically, a replica of Casa Batlló - it's not surprising at all that they were upset, but this is one of the few buildings in Barcelona that are more interesting on the inside than the outside.  It's basically a mini city, and it's colorful and gorgeous.  They charge absurd amounts of money to get in, so Alicia took us all and made CIEE pay for it.

My favorite part of the entire thing was the roof.

When we were still inside the building Alicia made some reference to "and the kids would play on the roof" and then we got up and we saw this and I had such extreme childhood envy.  Can you imagine growing up with this roof to play on?

Also, fun fact, George Lucas saw the statues of the soldiers and modeled the storm troopers from Star Wars off of them!

The architects who took over the construction of the Sagrada Familia for Gaudí when he died incorporated similar statues into the facades and I could keep talking to you about how cool Catalan architecture is and I haven't even mentioned Park Güell but I think you're probably done listening to me.  I could go on forever about Miró and how I almost died of awesome in the museum the other day, but we both have better things to do with our time.

Tonight: studying, packing, night in with Angela. Tomorrow: art history final, farewell party. Saturday: home... on Air Canada flight 815. hah. I am more excited than I should be by this prospect, and I have been for nearly two months.

Rebaixe rebaixe rebaixe!

Rebaixe is Catalan for rebajo which is Spanish for sale, and we're talking here about the kind of sale that even puts Black Friday to shame. In July the whole country (continent, really) costs half of what it did in June and it's impossible to walk down the street, let alone try to get into the changing room of a store. It's wonderful. This summer started out cooler than it has in years past - yeah, that changed, and also who knew that the Mediterranean is known for being humid? I definitely didn't - and combined with the crisis económica, they're doing rebaixe different this year.  They usually start with 30-50% discounts and work their way up, but most stores are taking the plunge and marking every single item in the store 50-70% off.

Yesterday I went shopping with Angela, and it was more or less hilarious.  She told me that when her daughter goes shopping without her, she never wears anything that she buys, but when she goes with her mother, she wears everything all the time because Angela is very práctica.  She looked so proud of herself every time she showed me something and I liked it.  We bought the same sweater at Mango, so now I have matching sweaters with Anne and Angela. Everyone else, start working on finding something awesome, because I need to match sweaters with you, too.

One store, Blanco, had signs saying that everything in the store was 50% off except for the new collection, and at one point Angela was looking at the new collection without realizing it.  Then she saw the sign, recoiled, and said, "Ay, ¿por qué miramos esto? ¡Estamos rebajando!" I love that there's a verb. Rebajar, to sale-shop.

We went to a sports store and she was so. excited. about showing me everything, because she thought that tents and sleeping bags were exciting and novel.  She kept telling me that we would find the fencing section, and I kept telling her that there was probably not going to be a fencing section, and then she kept telling me that no, in this store there would be! and then she asked the people who worked there and they stared at her and said no, there was no fencing section. Or skiing section, because it's July.

I'm starting to get worried about the size of my suitcase, which is a new experience for me because it's enormous. I just don't know if it's enormous enough for all of the sweaters I bought for eight euros each.  And the blue suede booties.  And the dresses.

My favorite ridiculous purchase: something called jeggings.  They are jeans that are tight enough to count as leggings.  They're actually comfy and they don't look as absurd as one would imagine and the button in front is really flat so it doesn't show through a shirt and they were ten euros and I'm going to wear them all the time when I am no longer drowning in humidity, but I still hate myself a little bit.  It's just... they're jeggings.  And in case you were wondering the ones I bought are absolutely nowhere near as horrible as the ones you find in a google image search.

This weekend: finish research paper! It's due Thursday but I want to get it out of the way. I'm writing about magic in La Celestina.  Types, consequences, and historical context.  Thank goodness for the Oberlin VPN, because I can access JSTOR!  I also have to write 500 or so words on medias de comunicación and I have to analyze and present an advertisement and I am not at all a fan of the direction that my Spanish class is going in because I do not care about advertising or any other communication media.

On the 4th of July (tomorrow!) we're going to Montjuïc - literally, Jew Mountain, which sounds like a really exciting amusement park - to watch colorful water dance to pretty music.  We are encouraged to bring cold beverages and American spirit.  We'll see how that goes.

Meta #1: Comer todo.

Dutiful readers (ha), if you recall from my first entry, my first goal in coming to Spain was to eat everything. The only thing I knew about Spanish food coming here was that tapas are considered standard Spanish fare, but I didn't know what to expect in a tapa. Sr. Abadía told us in ninth grade that the small plates were designed to put on top of a wine glass in the middle ages so that flies didn't get in, and that's as much as I knew. I had no idea what to expect from Catalan food.

In the past couple weeks I've more or less fallen in love, so I'm compiling a List Of Awesome Barcelona Culinary Deliciousness.

Pan con Tomate

During the Spanish Civil War, people only had access to bread that was gross and hard, so they decided to be geniuses and rub tomatoes on it to make it softer and easier to eat.  Now pan con tomate is also rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with olive oil and a little bit of salt, and it's a staple at my señora's dinner table.  Pan con tomate is also used as sandwich bread and you can order it at a tapas bar.  It's simple, but no one on CIEE can stop eating it.

Tortilla de Patatas

On my first night in my homestay, my señora made me tortilla con patatas.  It's basically an omelet with onion and potato, and it's another one of those simple things that I can't get enough of.  Angela has made it for dinner three times and it's always a little different - she claims it's because she uses different kinds of onions - and it's always amazing.

Paella

It's more or less impossible to talk about Spanish food without mentioning paella, a rice dish that comes originally from Valencia.  I've somehow only had it once here, but it was such an experience that I'm okay with that.  Paella is a rice dish served with seafood and veggies and sometimes meat, and you can get a paella negra, which gets its color from squid ink.  When I got it in Sitges, it came out to the table in the huge black pan pictured above.  It's the kind of food that's super filling but impossible to stop eating.  Delightful with sangría.

Patatas Bravas

Patatas bravas are fried potatoes with a spicy, creamy tomato sauce and they are invariably delicious. Whenever we go out to get tapas, or even just a couple of beers, someone orders these and then everyone else gets the same idea and soon enough, everyone has a million of them. Different places have different sauces and some of them are a lot spicier than others, and I have yet to try one I don't love.

Bizcocho

My señora is obsessed with bizcocho, which can mean many things but in this case it's a cake.  Seriously, obsessed.  She has a standard recipe that she uses and then she sometimes adds things like chocolate or lemon zest or flavored yogurt.  She never adds sugar, which I think is crazy, but it works (although I thought the chocolate one could have used a little).  It's pretty amazing breakfast food, and she leaves it in the same bowl she bakes it in so it stays moist.  She gave me the recipe (except it'll need some deciphering, what does 200 grams of flour mean?) so I'm going to make it all the time at home.  There's one in the kitchen and it's taking basically all of my willpower to not eat it all right now.

Jamón con... pues, con todo 

This picture perfectly expresses how the Catalan people feel about ham.  All the time and with everything, please.

Clara y Tinto de Verano

Clara is half beer and half Fanta limón.  Tinto de verano is half red wine, half Fanta limón.  Prior to tasting both of these things I was convinced that they would be the weirdest things in the world, but they're surprisingly delicious.  Clara is one of the more refreshing things I've ever had in my life, and tinto de verano comes in a close second.  It actually tastes a lot like sangría, but it's not as sweet.

Things to not eat in Spain: hamburgers.  They usually serve them without a bun, and if you get homesick and order one at an American bar, it'll be well seasoned and delicious but the bun will be sloppy and confused.  Butter: they don't use it here, it's always olive oil. The giant heart-shaped cookies at the bakery by your school: because you'll develop an addiction, which is dangerous because those things are cheap and absolutely incredible.

The phrase I plan to stop using with such alarming frequency: "una bola de [insert gelato flavor here] en cono, por favor."  I have no regrets about the apple gelato, though. That was incredible.

I'm still alive.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0625/1224273270363.html

In case you saw that story, which has been mysteriously absent from all US news media I could find, I'm okay.  Somehow almost 30 people decided it was a really good idea to run across some train tracks in front of a speeding train, 13 people died, and they actually had to use forensic evidence to find the remains of one of the bodies.  Everyone here is pretty shaken up about it and CIEE called all of us to make sure that we were still alive and now everyone is obsessed with train safety, which is probably a good thing.

I didn't get run over by a train, so my San Juan was really great! We hung out and drank wine on the beach and watched fireworks. It was insane how many little kids were around in the wee hours of the morning, setting off firecrackers and sparklers and just running around. We all ended up leaving before everyone ran into the ocean, but I'm okay with that. I think 4:30 was a respectable time to get home.

 This is why we decided to go home. We were all a little sleepy. Incidentally the girl who's sitting up isn't on our program, she's a random Spanish girl who told us in confused English that she wanted to go to America and "fix the cows, I'm studying to be vet, vet to be vet, for animals."

A lot of people took advantage of the long weekend to travel so classes on Friday were pretty empty. My Spanish class combined with the intermediate class because there were only four of us total, and we watched Volver, which I loved. I was the only person in art history, so my professor told me a little bit about Modernisme and then we walked around the Parc de la Ciutadella and she told me about buildings and statues. It was amazing.

One of the first works Gaudí ever did!

 This is Alicia, my art history professor. She's Andorran and adorable and she knows everything.

Spain won against Chile in the world cup game! But there wasn't as much celebration here as you would think. This is why:

Graffiti on the wall by the Dalí museum.  The Catalan flag with the Cuban blue triangle and star is an extremist symbol. I'm not really clear on why this sentiment is expressed in English, but it sums up the argument nicely.

To do this weekend: short essay on Spanglish, 500 words of a research paper (ie figure out what to write about for a research paper!), some grammar exercises, watch the USA game in a stereotypically American bar, and shopping shopping shopping. For one thing, Matt and Miriam have birthdays! And I really want a cookbook.

On Sunday: bullfighting? I'm super torn but it's a typically Spanish experience that I feel like I should have. I'm still on the fence.

Fiesta de San Juan!

La Fiesta de San Juan is one of the biggest parties of the year in Barcelona.  It marks the shortest night of the year, the summer solstice, and they have special cakes for the occasion.  I am all for any celebration that gets its own cakes.  Everyone gets a long weekend (except CIEE, we have class on Friday) and on Wednesday night people go crazy.  Angela has basically told me that she will be incredible disappointed with me if I'm back at any point before 6 AM.

Everyone goes to the beach and parties and then at some point everyone runs (naked) into the ocean and the metro runs all night which is a big deal because it usually closes at midnight on weeknights and then - this is what I'm looking forward to the most - everyone eats churros dipped in chocolate.

I'm a little bit in love with the idea of taking a big long stick of fried stuff and dipping it in chocolate.

CIEErs are meeting on the beach at around 10:30 and our plan is to basically do what the locals do (although most of us are bringing bathing suits.)  Angela looked in horror at my skirt and tank top, which I wore to class today, and told me that I needed to wear jeans and socks!  Because it's cold, and there are drogas.  She was trying to tell me that I might step on a needle because apparently people shoot up on the beach (she's a little paranoid) but for some reason she started miming drug use so I thought she was saying that people would try to inject me with heroin.  Which, on top of being freaky, would not be at all affected by my decision to wear socks.

So, dear readers, expect an update about what will surely be one of the more interesting nights of my life!  And rest assured that I will (probably) not be ninja-drugged on the beach.

The one thing you can say about Barcelona is that it never fails to be interesting.

Excursión is Spanish for field trip.

CIEE Barcelona is obsessed with excursiones.  We go on them all the time in class and wander around the city and listen to our professors talk about how awesome Barcelona is, and we have two planned for the whole group.  Our first was the Cava/Sitges trip, and we just got back from our second, which was advertised as French Catalonia and the Costa Brava.

Naturally everyone on the trip was convinced that we were going to be in France for the weekend. We dug out our passports, busted out the French phrase books, and tried to remember how to ask for the bathroom (ou se trouve les (las? I never know) toilettes, is how Rosetta Stone taught me) to prepare for what we thought was to be our epic French adventure.

Then we got our itineraries and realized that the we were going to spend a grand total of three hours in Colliure, a town in French Catalonia that a kid in the group described as "six inches wide."  So, if I promised you stories of my epic French adventure, here they are: we walked around and saw the beach (so pretty!) and then we got crepes and then I bought earrings.  One kid spent a full hour looking for a soap store he saw earlier and refused to listen when we told him that ALL of the stores in that town sold soap.  It was gorgeous and I loved it but it was kind of a relief when we got back to Spain and we all knew how to speak the language again.  (Apparently that was the point of the excursión. CIEE employs crafty geniuses.)

France is beautiful! Even if I can't communicate with anyone there.

After that we left France and made our way to a town called Palamós on the Costa Brava, which is adorable and tiny even if it does have some questionable architecture.  We stayed at a hotel that normally doesn't allow groups so Lizzie, our "mama duck," told us that we all had to be ninja mice and not make any noise on our way in and out of the hotel.  Needless to say that didn't happen at all, but I appreciated the metaphor.

To get to know Palamós we did a bike tour! And then it started pouring and then we jumped fully clothed in the Mediterranean Sea and it was the best thing I've ever done in my entire life.

Right before the bike tour I walked into a plant and then I bled profusely.  I have lots of painful scratches on my arm because I was mauled by a plant. I'm clearly all kinds of coordinated.

We went to see some Greek and Roman ruins and I had a hard time accepting anything the tour guide said as fact without a clear presentation of the archaeological evidence used to arrive at her conclusions. It was a problem but also kind of wonderful. I got a sunburn.

I wish we'd spent less time at the ruins because we didn't have as much time for the Dalí museum! It was incredible. He spent the last 15 years of his life planning it and it's not chronological at all and he just decided to put things where he thought they were cool. He apparently made a comparison between himself and Don Quixote, but he said that unlike Don Quixote he was capable of coming back from insanity and returning to a sane place.

That being said he used to put honey on his mustache and speak to the flies that landed there.

 Salvador Dalí was very proud of his bigote.

Today we did a pottery workshop in Bisbal d'Epordà, which is the ceramics capital of Catalonia.  We painted pots.  They are clearly extremely beautiful.  They have a really neat crackle thing going on and I really like the one I did, actually.  We also got a bigger pot that we didn't have time to paint but they all have unique crackle patterns and I love the one I picked out. And then I somehow accumulated three other little pots that other people didn't want so now I have four little pots and they're amazing.  I'm going to use them as beverage receptacles!  I'm probably going to give the bigger one to my señora as a thank you for housing me present because I have no idea how to transport it home and it seems like the kind of thing she'd really like.

Not this kind of Bisbal.

After the pottery workshop (at which I augmented my sunburn to a pretty extreme degree) we went to a little town called Pals.  The idea of a bus dropping a bunch of students off in a small town (this one was also about six inches wide) for a couple hours while we explored and got lunch reminded me a lot of American Music Abroad!  And then I got a little homesick.

I got an Agatha Christie book - Asesinato en Mesopotamia - at a store called Happy Books (I'm saving that bag forever) and I'm super excited to read it, but we have midterms next week and they effectively scheduled our weekend so that we would have no time at all to do any homework, so I'm going to be busy in the next couple days.  Still, it's always nice to have a book to read on the metro.

Also, leave me comments and let me know how much you looooove me.

De cuerdo y loco, todos tenemos un poco

For my Spanish class we had to write a page based on the tema Barcelona.  We had to come up with our own problema (thesis, basically) and then desarrollar.  I wrote about my crazy host mom.  I haven't edited it but it's not due until Thursday.  Basically I wanted to brag about having finished an assignment 49 hours and fourteen minutes before it's due.  I can't remember the last time that happened.

Anyway, aquí hay:

Vivir con una familia en un país extranjero es una experiencia bien rara.  El estudiante elige hacerlo para conocer mejor la cultura y practicar más el idioma, y sí logra estas cosas, pero ha estado puesto en la situación extraña de buscar su papel en la casa.  No es una parte verdadera de la familia pero no es independiente tampoco.  Tiene su habitación cerca del resto de la familia y tiene que estar en casa para cenar y llamar a la señora de la casa si haya un cambio de planes, pero la verdad es que la señora no sea su madre.

Conocí a mi señora, Angela, al vestíbulo del hotel dos días después de llegar en España.  Antes de este conocimiento nunca había oído nada sobre ella sino algo que me ha dicho Marco, un estudiante español, treinta segundos antes de conocerla por la primera vez - «tu señora es loca, diviértete.»

Esto me puso un poco nerviosa.

Nos conocimos y hicimos la cosa con los besos que nunca había hecho antes – ahora soy experta – y empezamos a hablar.  A pesar del cansancio acuciante que venía del desfase horario me daba cuenta lentamente de que sí, Angela era loca.  Después de los saludos iniciales la primera cosa que me dijo fue que el Catalán sea un idioma muy feo y la idea de una Cataluña separada de España sea «una locura.»  Se mudó de Madrid a Barcelona cuando tuvo seis años y todavía quiere tener nada que ver con la cultura catalana.  Me sorprendí oír esto porque en Estados Unidos normalmente no hablamos de la política antes de conocer a una persona por el miedo de ofenderla.  La primera cosa que he aprendido sobre Angela es que no le importe si sus ideas le ofenda a alguien, y que tenga creencias bien definidas.

Condujo por todas partes de Barcelona y me dijo que había unos barrios para evitar por la noche a causa de «los árabes y malos negros, y no hablo de los negros de la Universidad.  Estos negros son malos. Tienen drogas.»  Me interesó que solamente explicó la diferencia entre buenos negros y malos negros, y implicó que todos los árabes fueron malos.  Siguiendo con este tema me preguntó si fuera musulmana, porque no había querido una estudiante musulmana, y me invitó a venir a visitarle en el invierno antes de que yo pudiera decir diez palabras.  Cuando llegamos a su casa me mostró su casa, incluyendo mi baño, mi habitación, y su cuarto de la ropa.  Es tan grande como su habitación y conté por lo menos quince pares de zapatos.  No he pretendido contar las bolsas.

Hablar con Angela es recibir un flujo constante de la información, y requiere la habilidad de ignorar un poco de lo que dice.  Me ha dicho que nunca cocina con la sal porque es muy malo para la salud, es mejor no poner el filtro solar porque tomar el sol asiste en la absorción de algunas vitaminas, vivir con el estrés causa el cáncer, y vivir sin chocolate no vale la pena.  Estoy de acuerdo con ella solamente con este último consejo, pero he aprendido sonreír y asentir un poco con la cabeza y decir que sí, el estrés causa el cáncer y intentaré trabajar menos.

He vivido en Barcelona con Angela por una semana y no cambiara mi situación si podría.  Para siempre hay una conversación nueva llena de consejos y locura.

Tú vs. Ud.

I've always learned in my Spanish classes in school that you use tú for people your own age and Usted for older people - basically, it's a formal mark of respect. Our guidebook for CIEE told us that we should refer to our host mothers as Usted unless instructed to do otherwise. So, I've been calling Angela Usted and yesterday I left her a note with my cell phone number when I went out for the day saying "para que tenga Ud. mi información."

Her response when I got home was, "no me llamas Usted! Usted es para una persona mayor que no conoces bien!"

Interesantemente he estado usando Ud. porque ella es una persona mayor que no conozco bien.

We did a reading in my Spanish class today about the differences between the two words, and it basically boils down to calling someone ma'am (at least, when you're not in the South). Forty-somethings wearing a little bit too much makeup can get really self-conscious about it.

In other news I made friends with a whole group of kids on the metro today. I think they were around seven and I was eating an ice cream cone and I made faces at them through the window and they thought I was the coolest.

Paella, Playa, y Sangría

First off, last night: tapas were delicious and flamenco was incredible. Flamenco isn't a Catalonian thing - it's from Andalucía, which is all the way across the country - but there's still a little bit here, mostly for tourists I think. At least, the place where we went had drunk British guys and lots of flash photography. It was still absolutely incredible and it was really interesting to see first hand the Muslim influence on Spanish culture. The flamenco singing is an obvious reference to Islam. The whole thing is really beautiful and there's a lot of clapping and whirling and hip moving and feet tapping and it's easy to get caught up in it. After the flamenco show we all went out to a bar and I ordered drinks legally for the first time in my life (yay?) and we all had fun and I ended up getting the very last train back to my homestay. The metro closes at 2 on Fridays. I realized that all of my clothes reeked of cigarettes, but Angela washed them and they now smell like scented laundry detergent, which I usually hate but greatly prefer to cigarettes.

Then after a whopping five hours of sleep, I woke up and we went on a Cava tour and tasting! Cava is Spanish champagne that they're not allowed to call champagne because champagne is French. We toured the storage caves and our guide told us that the wooden barrels down there were purely for decoration because people like to get married there and even though the process has been modernized for 30 years they still like to keep the relics around for fun. Then we got on a train to explore the biggest wine cellar in the world and it was kind of like a roller coaster in that we almost died multiple times and it was great fun! The tasting was amazing - we had two, a pinot noir and a dry one whose name I can't remember that is apparently one of their best. I liked the dry one the best. I do think it was silly to give a bunch of hungover college students two full glasses of cava (I know of at least two people who were still drunk from the night before) but I enjoyed it.

The world's biggest wine cellar! It can hold 100 million bottles, which as it turns out is a lot.

After the tour we went to a little town called Sitges, which is around an hour outside of Barcelona. Sitges is the kind of town that you imagine when you hear the word Mediterranean. It's on the sea like Barcelona is, but it's a lot more quaint and the beaches are cleaner. City beaches are never really the best, I've learned. There's a huge church overlooking the town and it's incredibly picturesque. A friend and I wandered around for a bit and explored and then we hung out with some people on the beach and then we ate paella and had sangría and it was absolutely ideal. The weather was perfect and the food was delicious and it was a little expensive, but worth it for the experience of eating right on the beach.




Sitges might actually be the most beautiful place I've ever been.

And then we tried to find the train station and we finally did (after first finding the train, which was not as helpful as we had hoped) and then our train stopped and we all had to get off because something terrible happened (I have no idea what) so then we got on a new train but it was really crowded and we weren't really sure where it was going so we got off and then got on another train and that ended up going where we wanted to go but we got off at a weird place so we wandered around until we found the Passeig de Gracia and then I realized that I know the metro better than I think I do.

Anyway, getting lost with someone is much better than getting lost by yourself. Samantha and I are nomads now.

Angela's daughter loves Bon Jovi and we listened to all the random slow dance 80's songs we could find at dinner today and I listened to Angela tell me all about how tomando el sol is good for your health because you absorb vitamins that way (which is true) and how you can't avoid cancer anyway so you might as well not wear sunscreen (which is not true). Now she is trying to further my cultural education by making me watch Robert Redford and Meryl Streep movies dubbed in Spanish.

As of yet, any efforts to find Firefly in Spanish have been unsuccessful.

It's midnight on a Saturday and I think everyone I know is drunk and watching the World Cup (or celebrating, or bemoaning) but my bed is very comfortable and I walked around a lot today and I can't seem to bring myself to get up to go out. I'm lame but I think I like it that way.

Oh, and the biggest mistake of my life was leaving my camera at home. It's sitting on my bookshelf right now. I couldn't find my USB cord so I forgot entirely about the camera and now I'm kicking myself. Everyone else is taking pictures and a million are going to end up on Facebook and I'm going to steal them for my own, but in the mean time I'm posting pictures here from Google Imágenes España.

I didn't get lost today!

Not getting lost is perhaps the most exciting thing that has ever happened in my life, especially after yesterday. I told a bunch of you about this, but here's what happened: I left my house at 11:30 for my noon class and I got on the FGC (which is a metro line but not actually the metro). I got off at the stop called Gracia because I assumed it was the same stop as the metro stop at the Passeig de Gracia. As it turns out, Gracia is a neighborhood and not just a street so I wandered around with my map for a while and tried to figure out where the hell I was. Two nice men tried to convince me I was in Albania instead of Spain and eventually I called CIEE to inform them that I was confused about everything. (Thank God I decided to get a cell phone.) They told me to get back on the metro and walk to La Casa - that's what they call the CIEE Study Center - from the Placa Catalunya stop.

Meanwhile bells tolled and informed me that it was 12 and I was already late for my class.

So, I got back on the metro and I got off at the Placa Catalunya and then I realized I didn't actually know where the Passeig de Gracia was so I started walking uphill because I knew I had to go in that general direction. By some miracle I found the Passeig de Gracia by wandering around and then I realized I didn't know which street I wanted to turn on to. I tried one that looked promising and failed. After even MORE wandering I got a call from someone in the class that I was missing - he said that there were six people in our class and he wanted to make sure I was okay and by some miracle I was right next to the street I had to turn onto so I eventually found him and I made it to the second half of class. At 1:20. It was horrific and I had several mini-breakdowns, including one before dinner. During our 45 minute break between classes I didn't want to risk getting lost so I hung out at La Casa and I hadn't eaten anything all day and it was awful.

Now I know my way around, though! At least, I know my way around the Passeig de Gracia and the Placa Catalunya, and that's the important part. I can also get from the Muntaner FGC stop to where I live, and I found a farmacia and today I bought sun glasses for 5 euros and life is going spectacularly well.

I just noticed three pairs of gafas de sol on my escritorio. I told Angela that I had left mine at home (they're in my car which is having major surgery somewhere in Framingham) and she apparently is intent on giving me some of her daughter's. She is insane and wonderful. At dinner last night, when I finally got to meet her daughter, she told me that I talk like una carta (a letter - so, excessively formally) and that I should use the word cojones more often. And joder.

Ahora un repaso de mis clases! I'm taking two, Advanced Spanish and Catalunya a través de las artes (Catalonia through the arts). They're 3 credits each and we have 45 hours of class in 4 and a half weeks. I'm the only one I've talked to who's actually planning on putting in any effort, but I want to do well. I'm pretty sure they're going to count towards my GPA.

Advanced Spanish looks like it's going to be absolutely wonderful. I placed into the highest level here and I'm the best at speaking out of everyone in the class, but I think we're all on pretty even ground when it comes to grammatical mastery. We're going to do grammatical exercises which I haven't done in a year and a half, and everything is geared towards using Spanish in the real world and not writing essays, which is exactly what I need because if you recall, hablo como una carta. We're going to be listening to the news and answering comprehension questions and listening to songs and filling in the blanks and - the part that I'm most excited for - reading stories and answering questions. Everyone has to do a presentation on one of the authors. This week is Cortázar! And we're reading Continuidad en los parques, which I read for Fernando last semester and wrote about in my trabajo final. I'm assigned to do the presentation and I'm absurdly excited and no one else understands why. We have a good thing going, CIEE and I - everyone thinks I'm a geek, which is true so I'm willing to go with it.

Catalunya a través de las artes is going to be a fair amount of work. I've never taken art history before and it looks like it's going to be great and exactly what I want, in terms of being able to culture myself, but I need to acquaint myself with an entirely different branch of academia. Tomorrow we're taking a field trip walking around the city and identifying things as Románico o Gótico. I've been taking a lot of notes but the professor speaks really quickly and I'm not sure I've been getting it all down. We have a midterm and a final exam, and we have to write a 9 page research paper about something related to Spanish art. It can be about any kind of art so I'm thinking of writing about Spanish literature during the Siglo de Oro en el Renacimiento because I took that class last fall. There are so many things I want to research - la poesía de Quevedo, el rol de entremeses en el teatro, el desarrollo de la novela picaresca, la idea de la mágica en La Celestina. I'm also looking forward to doing research in a Spanish biblioteca. I like the idea of learning about art history but I don't think a month is enough for me to be entirely comfortable with writing a 9 page paper about art.

Esta noche - tapas y flamenco! Y después mi primer bar español. Veremos lo que sucede.

Crash course in culture shock

The biggest culture shock I've experienced so far probably has more to do with the fact that I'm in a city than anything else. The most exciting thing about my day was that I managed to find my way all the way from the Placa Catalunya to my señora's apartment that's so far north it's not on the map thing my dad gave me. I've actually been able to orient myself alarmingly well, in spite of a few minor panic attacks.

Streets in Barcelona generally run in blocks (except the Avenguda Diagonal) and instead of north-south and east-west they're arriba-abajo and Besos-some other river I can't remember the name of right now. Arriba-abajo comes from the fact that the Mediterranean Sea is abajo and the mountains are arriba, so the streets have a pretty pronounced gradient to them. All of the blocks have diagonal sides instead of corners and they have benches and things, and a lot of people meet there but instead of just saying the corner ('cause there are four, you see) you'd say Passeig de Gracia-Aragó-abajo-Besos.

Even though it's comparably easy to navigate here, I'm not used to cities at all and Barcelona is famous for pickpockets so I'm being super careful/paranoid (the same thing, right?) and my señora walks to work in the morning so I went with her and I had no idea where the metro was when I was coming back home and the map I have is apparently mierda.

A note on my señora, Angela - she's crazy. She drove me all around Barcelona after she picked me up (when I was falling asleep) to show me all the neighborhoods that I shouldn't go to because there are "árabes y negros, y no son los negros buenos de la universidad. Son negros malos." She also wasted no time in telling me that Catalonians are crazy and the idea of Catalunya as an autonomous nation is "locura" and Spain should be unified. She lives with her dog Maxi - short for Máxima, because she's approximately eight inches long - and an entire room for her clothes. She also has some of her daughter's clothes because her daughter lives in a small apartment without a lot of closet space. Her entire apartment is filled with pictures of her daughter, Melisa, and she talks about her all the time. It's really cute. She's going to teach me how to cook Spanish food and she goes to the cine every week. She's taking me tonight! She's also addicted to chocolate and wants me to ask her questions about everything even though I end up staring at her and being confused most of the time. She walks to work every morning to keep up her figure and she told that did I know that salt is really bad for you? And she has four or five huge bottles of water in her fridge at all time.

The Oberlin in me is going crazy with all this bottled water. I have no idea why it's such a thing here, but they don't do tap water at all. Angela has a Brita filter but she doesn't use it and she just keeps lots of bottled water around. It's killing me a little bit. Also I had a placement test today for my language class and it was proctored and it felt so oppressive.

The other noticeable cultural difference I've found so far is this whole siesta thing. My ever-present desire to take a mid-afternoon nap is culturally embraced. I love it. So, siesta time.

Besitos! and I'm sure I'll stop updating so much when classes start and I know the city better.

I'm moved into my homestay! I have one drawer, which is interesting, so all of my clothes are either hanging from hooks on my door or folded on a little sofa bed thing. My host family is a señora named Angela and her tiny dog. She has an entire room dedicated to her clothing and she wasted absolutely no time in telling me that learning Catalan is a waste of time and it's an ugly language. She's really funny and nice and she made a tortilla tonight with tomatoes and potatoes and onions and it was absolutely delicious and I feel bad about the fact that I've been staring at her when she tries to engage me in conversation. She's pretty cool and I'm sure we'll get along well when I can figure out how to speak Spanish again.

I've always thought that I've had a decent accent but comparing myself to native speakers all the time is making me feel like such a foreigner. Which, you know, I am. I just want to make it so that the little bits of American accent don't creep up into my Spanish. I also feel like I'm trying to be cool or something (phony a la Caulfield, I guess) when I say grathias instead of gracias - the Spanish lisp.

I mostly just can't wait for classes to start and to go to sleep, which is going to happen pretty soon after I post this. It's only 8 here but I'm SO TIRED. Everything is going to seem so much better when I'm not tired anymore.

I can't remember how to speak Spanish right now.

Oh and I have a phone! It was cheap and you can call me! You probably won't but that's okay. The number is 605614583.

HOLA DE BARCELONA

It's 10 PM and I am more tired than I perhaps have ever been. I woke up yesterday a little before 10 AM to finish packing and I haven't slept for what I guess is 32 hours. I'm a zombie, I think, but so is everyone else and we keep apologizing for being boring and falling asleep.

I survived my million hours of hanging out in airports! I did a lot of reading and a LOT of Firefly and a significant amount of trying to get to sleep. Airports are odd creatures.

Barcelona es bello y España es fantástica y caminamos demasiado hoy pero valió la pena porque todo es increíble. Ya sé que me voy a enamorar con esta ciudad. La combinación de idiomas por las calles y los edificios y el tiempo y las playas son perfectos. La navigación será simple muy pronto aunque ahora es un poco complicada, pero todo es complicado a causa de mi cerebro y su funciona actual. Mañana conoceré mi host family.

The only thing is, I didn't really do my research with the program. I definitely didn't expect this much English to be spoken, and I definitely didn't expect people who had never spoken Spanish before to be here. I'm doing a lot of translating for other people and I guess the group dynamic that we have is going to be entirely in English, at least outside of class. I'm okay with that, though. It's not ideal at the moment but once classes start up and I'm speaking more I think I'll be happier.

I somehow ended up here with the wrong kind of electrical adapter, so my computer plug doesn't actually plug into the wall. I need to remedy this. We're in a hotel tonight and I have a temporary roommate so I stole hers, but that's not going to fly in my homestay when I can't steal from anyone. Also my debit card didn't work today at the metro station and I really hope it works at the ATMs here or else crisis. But I'm sure it's going to be fine. Delightful, even.

Also facebook is trying to text a validation code to my cell phone but my cell phone clearly doesn't get texts here and I have no idea what's going on with the internet.

Up tomorrow: bus tour! academic orientation! moving into the homestay! write letters! send letters!

Cute thing of the day: seven (?) year old British kid at the airport said, "I'm just really well acquainted with the swine flu. It's a weird thing about me." :D

And now I will sleep (!!!!) because we're getting a wake up call tomorrow at 8:45. For a meeting that starts at 10:30. I am going to ignore the hell out of that wake up call.

It's not like anyone could read the Spanish, anyway.

I guess I made this blog for myself without realizing that people would actually want to read it, so from here on out it's going to be in some delightful mezcla of languages. I've always loved the word mezcla. Anyway fear not, dear reader, if you speak not a word of Spanish. I cannot guarantee that this will be a great blog because I have no idea what I'm doing, but I can guarantee that you will be able to read it.

In an hour I leave for the airport to embark on my epic journey from GMT -5:00 to GMT +1:00. Peace out, Eastern Standard Time. But not until my layover in Montreal is over.

El día antes del viaje...

Mañana voy a Barcelona. Voy a tomar dos clases por un mes con CIEE. Sé que este programa no dura mucho tiempo, pero no quiero pasar un semestre completo fuera de Oberlin a causa de las matemáticas (y SITES y la esgrima y muchas otras cosas). Además, no tengo nada más para hacer con mi verano. Entiendo que mi tiempo en Barcelona será limitado así que intentaré hacer lo más posible en pocos días.

He decidido hacer un blog para mi viaje de Barcelona. No sé exactamente por qué estoy escribiendo esto - puede ser que simplemente no quiero hacer las maletas - pero tengo esta idea que cuando regreso, estará bien tener un resumen de toda la experiencia. No quiero olvidar nada.

Además, quiero ver el desarrollo de mi español escrito. Este blog podría ser algo como el diario que escriben los estudiantes del Español 101 o el diario que hicimos en Exploración Cultural.

Unas metas para mi mes en España:

1. Comer todo
2. Aprender cocinar la comida española y hacerla en los EEUU
3. Aprender un poco de Catalá
4. Entender todo al fin del mes
5. Ir al Museo de Chocolate (!!!)

El número cuatro probablemente no pasará pero quiero intentar. Vamos a ver.

Y ahora tengo que terminar decidiendo lo que voy a poner en mis maletas; he procrastinado bastante. Mi maleta es enorme pero no está llena - he aceptado que compraré demasiado en Barcelona y quiero tener espacio para traer todas las compras a los EEUU en julio.

Besos!