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.