Roma Album

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2016419&id=1149720713&l=129cb

Writing to come later. Laziness to occur now.

Perfecto

2/15/09

            Where to begin with this glorious weekend…

The boys went off to ski in Andorra, so originally we thought we would just be jealous of them and have a regalar type weekend here. We ended up having a great time in Barcelona.

            Things did not start off THAT great, Chessie had some friends visiting and the first night they were here, right after we left them to go to a dinner at our RA’s apartment, one of the girls got her purse stolen. Womp womp. What a nice welcome to the city. But she was a trooper about it and didn’t let it ruin her time.

            We also met up with more intercambio’s on Friday. This time Chessie and I met with young Spanish University students, one girl and one guy, Jordi and Marta. We went to a café and talked with them for a couple hours, they were both really great and we like them a lot.

So Saturday we decided to try going out to a new place, one that was really close to our house, right up on Tibidabo (the mountain behind our apt) It was a great place, very class class, and since it is embedded in the mountain it had a gorgeous view of the city at night. I wish I brought my camera, but o’course, I did not. We sat at a table by one of the windows overlooking Barcelona all 5 of us ordered one over-priced cocktail. We sat and chatted for a long time and thought we had better make it an early (3am at this point) night since three of us wanted to go to the Gothic Cathedral for mass in the morning. Before we left we went downstairs to go to the bathroom and that is when the music drew us in… none of us can resist dancing when we like the music so we ended up staying a couple more hours. What was really great about this place is that it was NOT a tourist spot. We were the only Americans in there. It also seemed to be an attraction for the middle aged crowd, which was fine with us because there were less of the creepers we usually encounter… though the creepers that WERE there were middle-aged… There was one group of younger, attractive Spanish chicos but they, like us, only seemed interested in dancing in a circle with each other this night, which was both hilarious and awesome to see.

So Sunday morning rolls around, I (like always) seriously consider not waking up when I planned to and just going back to sleep for hours. Somehow I managed to roll myself out of bed and made it to mass with Chessie and Meg. The cathedral was beautiful and we spent a while in there after mass to look at all the art. Then, as we’re leaving we hear this band and procession of people in the street, so we go to look at what it is and we see all these people with these matching outfits on. We weren’t sure what they were doing, and we were walking in the opposite direction of them, but luckily Meg saw a label on one of their shirts that said “castellers” which she had learned about. These are the people that make the human towers (as shown in the picture). We went and watched them for about an hour, it was so amazing to see. I was most terrified for the littleun’s who had to be like 4 or 5 years old who would just scale these peoples bodies to get to the top like no big deal. I don’t think I ever possessed that kind of fearlessness, def. not at the age of 4. We were just really excited that we happened to walk out of the cathedral at the perfect moment to see them, we had heard about them before and always wanted to watch it but didn’t know when it would happen. I still don’t know why they were there, there is definitely some sort of festival going on but I have no clue what, Carnival isn’t until next week.

After we watched them we went and got Hot chocolate and churros, which is just never a disappointment so no surprises there.

And then, we had the cake topper. As we are walking back to the metro we were thinking, the only thing that could make this day more perfect is if we run into those break dancers again. Lo and behold, there they are, performing in front of our metro stop. Clearly this was fate that brought us together ONCE again. So after the show, we really felt that we had no choice BUT to go and talk to them. So we went and asked them about how they all met (seeing as they are all from different countries). I guess there is a break dancing gym nearby where they all go to practice and that’s how they got together. So we finally talked to them and felt incredibly accomplished afterwards, having spoken to such awesomely talented chicos, and I left with their number, so we now really have break dancing friends to call our own. Que guay.

Directions

2/10/09

NOBODY can give directions in Spain.

Obviously within my first month here I have gotten turned around and/or lost a few times, whenever I need to find a store or like… my house, I ask people on the street for directions. Let me tell you - not once have they been correct. It is usually always the same sequence of events: They pause…express that they really have no idea where it is… take a random wild guess and send me on my way… stop me after I have gone 2 steps and admit that they really don’t know if what they told me was correct … point to another random person on the street and tell me to ask them. 

Repeat formula. 

The best part is, EVERY TIME the place I am looking for has been no more than 5 minutes away from where I asked them, and in one case, was literally two stores down.

The other day I accidentally walked down a different hallway and got off the metro at a different exit than I usually do so I asked a woman which way to Plaza Kennedy. This woman told me I was way off and that I would have to walk so far to get there. Luckily I have had enough experience with Spanish direction and also knew that there was no way that getting off at a different metro exit could place me THAT much farther away from the Plaza, so I politely thanked her but continued to walk in the opposite direction that she told me and found the plaza not 5 minutes away.  I have no idea why people don’t know where they are.

I had my intercambio meeting today and it was awesome. We went and got coffee and talked for about an hour before I had to get home for dinner. We spent about 80% of the time speaking in Spanish and it was great to actually be able to carry on a conversation, she said she thought I could speak and understand very well and she helped me clear up a few things I didn’t understand from my Spanish class because I have my first exam tomorrow. Then we talked in English for a while, which was also good because I love FINALLY being able to help someone else struggle through a language. She is actually better than I thought she would be, she understands a lot, but she hasn’t spoken English in the last 8 years so she still needs help with a lot. During our convo she also made me speak with a country accent at one point so she could hear it (but really probably so she could laugh at me, which she did). Let me just say, it is no easy thing to go from speaking in Spanish, to English, to a Southern drawl.

I got mail! Seriously so excited to receive letters today. 

Foreigner

2/9/09

I know I am getting less consistent with my updates, but luckily a journaling assignment has made me write again:

            I am sitting in a café across the street from my apartment, I ordered a café con leche, which I am quickly starting to become addicted to, which is weird because I generally don’t like coffee. Maybe I’m like a real grown up now.

            I came here to force myself to do work. I had nothing important this weekend and somehow managed to not do any of my homework for the week. I truly astound myself sometimes with the amount of time I can waste.

            I just finished doing the reading for my Barcelona class. I accidentally slept through it this morning. I will never understand the design of cell phone alarm clocks with the snooze button on one side and the off button located just one space away. When my alarm goes off in the morning the only thing I want is for it to shut up, so I slap it across the face with my finger and sometimes I hit the wrong button. That was the case today.

            The class I missed was a field trip to the Gotchic Quarter, which is a bummer because of any of the classes I would want to miss, a walking tour is not one of them. I have really been enjoying my Barcelona class. It’s gotten mixed reviews from a lot of students and generally the class is not that exciting, but getting to see and touch and visit the places we’re learning about has made it much more interesting. I really feel like I’m walking on history in a lot of places here.

            The reading we had to do talked a lot about Catalonia and the Catalan pride. It’s funny to see the differences in attitudes toward the Catalans. My senora hates Catalan, refuses to learn it, and gives her calendar, (written in Catalan), dirty looks when she has to look at the dates. My friends just got back from Valencia and said that they have their own language there too, which apparently was a fairly recent ‘take back the culture’ movement there. She was a little salty about the fact that, while in Spain, we have to decipher so many other languages. I haven’t really minded it. At first I was aggravated with Catalan, considering this IS Spain, why isn’t everything just in Spanish. But I have gotten used to it and I can see the point of wanting to preserve the language of your ancestors and taking pride in Catalunya. It was after all, a pretty powerful territory at one point. 

            I have a meeting with my intercambio partner tomorrow, which should be interesting. I feel a lot more confident when I have conversations in Spanish now, since I have to do it so often. But still, sometimes I can’t help but think about HOW DUMB I must sound. It’s almost impossible to appear at all intelligent in a language you struggle to speak. The other day I caught myself having just said a sentence that must have sounded something like, “I no need the dinner this night. I go to bar for futbol.” Eventually I put it more eloquently, but still, I think I sound like a caveman a lot.

Salada

2/3/09

            I asked Antonia the word for salty today. I wanted to know because I often use the slang meaning in English, such as, “I think she is a little salty about the fact that she wasn’t invited.” Etc… but I made the mistake of asking the meaning of this word right after we ate our over salted dinner. I think ANOTNIA felt a little salty about the fact that I needed the meaning, so I quickly (and by quickly I mean struggled and acted out many different scenarios while trying to come up with the meaning of ‘slang’) explained to her the meaning in English. (P.S. slang=argot in Spanish). She got the gist and was no longer worried about her seasoning skills (though she should be).

            The first Sunday of every month is a free day for certain Museums in Barcelona so I went with some friends to the Catalan Museum of art this weekend. It was the perfect day because it has been a little damp and dreary ‘round these parts lately. Though today the sun did come out, I was so happy I decided to walk home to enjoy the weather, only to realize I needed to turn right back around as soon as I GOT home in order to go to the intercambio meeting I had forgotten about.

            An intercambio is when a Spanish student and an English student get together to talk and help each other learn the respective languages. There were way more American kids who showed up than Spanish, so we had to group up instead of one on one. Chessie and I got placed with the same person, a woman who is probably late 20’s maybe early 30’s, named Isabel. We were both kind of hoping for someone younger so that we could maybe merge groups and get some more Spanish friends, but oh well. I still might email someone else to get another partner. I think we’re starting next week and we have one on one meetings with her to chat. We spent the entire hour and a half this time speaking in Spanish and I really don’t think this woman can speak English well at all. She only said a few words in English, I think she was a little nervous to try it out cause she said she hasn’t spoken it in ten years. Bettah him than me, more time to practice my Spanish.

            Chessie and I stopped in to visit with Maria again, that girl who works in the store on our street, the one we interviewed for our project. She is a hip hop dancer so we were talking about music. There is so much American music Spain, almost all of it is, but it takes a while to get here so she hasn’t heard of a lot of the newer hip hop songs from the US, so I told her I would put a bunch of my music on my flashdrive so she can put it on her computer and she was pretty excited about that.

            In other news: I booked my trip to Greece! I’m going for Spring break with David in April, I’m really excited, it is one of the places that I have wanted to visit the most. I love looking through my day planner now, my life has never been this exciting.