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.

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