First week in Barcelona!

Clearly, I haven't been updating this as often as I would have liked. I had big plans to catch up on the last week in Jordan and my week in Greece, but real life has started and I'm going to have to rely on pictures to remember the amazing times I had. At a time when I'm going to need it the most, my self-discipline is dwindling.

This week has been a busy one, and I haven't taken a single picture of note, so nothing to post in that regard.

It has been eventful though.

Alexa arrived on Tuesday and that afternoon we went to Carrefour and bought appliances, followed by a KFC Dinner! You gotta have the American favorites when overseas just to maintain your sanity and for a little taste of home. Having a microwave, toaster, and a hot water boiler in the apartment now makes all the difference!

Although I joined a gym last Friday, my first attempt to actually go there wasn't until Tuesday. I looked up the schedule, got dressed, packed my stuff, and went downstairs, all excited to ride my bike to the gym. I walk to the bike parking area and discover this:

If you can't quite tell what's wrong with this picture, I remind you that one usually sits on a bike, and the bike, in the state that I found it that afternoon, was missing the seat...I went home and pouted and did NOT go to the gym.

Wednesday was the first day of school, although we were really only there to take the Spanish test. Alexa and I took the bus together, recording a 45 minute door to door round trip. Its not so bad, and as we are the first stop on the line, we do get seats so, in theory, we can be productive on the bus in the mornings. Since then, though, Alexa tested out of Spanish and I've been riding to and from school on the back of Andri's moto. It is about 20 minutes faster, so its worth the ride, but not worth me getting my own.

I finally did go to the gym after the Spanish test, and the experience will take getting used to. Following an aerobics/dance class in Spanish is hard - in theory, you just follow the instructor. But this flamboyantly gay man was so all over the place, keeping up with him was virtually impossible. Everyone speaks only Spanish, and everything in the gym is written in Catalan. I haven't gone again yet, but intend to try the yoga class tomorrow.  On the way back I discovered what are called "chinos", stores owned by Asians, for the most part, that have all kinds of random stuff. In a way its a mini-Target - you have appliances, school supplies, beauty products, some clothing, housewares - but everything is fairly cheap and in a limited selection. This is where I am taking my mom when she gets here next week to buy much needed storage items for my room.

As for the Spanish classes that started on Thursday, I initially placed into Spanish Level 6 (out of 10 possible placement levels). The class was pretty good and with the exception of 1 or 2 people, everyone was on the same level. The teacher, however, was another story. How you can be a teacher of Spanish as a foreign language and fail to explain to a class of intermediate students the difference between the use of "le" and "lo" for direct object pronouns and the difference between "ser" and "estar" is beyond me. We're not the first ones to ask this question - it confuses all students. What kind of teacher are you? She then decided to "change things up" in the afternoon and thought it would be a good idea to split us into two groups and have us discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Spanish. You don't do that on the first day of class with a group of students that can barely construct temporally complex sentences. The next day of class was even worse, as she decided to teach us "emociones", somehow supposing that, at level 6, we didn't know what "estoy triste" meant.

Luckily though, due in part to our superb level of Spanish and, undoubtedly, in part to the fact that we were a pain in her ass with our specific question, I and 3 other students were taken out of her class and merged into a new level 7 class. The new professor, Carlos, is fantastic. The man was born to teach, and is also doing his PHD in linguistics, which makes his explanations of things really interesting and clear, to me at least. I'm struggling slightly in this class, but I'd rather be the weakest speaker and learning than the strongest speaker and bored. We have a test to pass into level 8 on Tuesday, and we actually had class today (Saturday) due to the fast pace of the program.

Tonight, my flatmates and I are attempting to throw our apartment's first party. It will be small in scale, since we don't want to piss off our neighbors yet. I guess we'll see what happens!