Vienna

Vienna was considerably more happy and uplifting of an experience.  I liked Vienna, or Wien, as the Viennese call it. 

 I went there to meet up with one of my best friends from high school, Melissa the bass player (NOT base).  I’d actually never seen one of her concerts, so I was pretty excited that the first concert I got to watch her in was a solo concert in Vienna. 

The first night was great—we did that reunion thing at the airport, that embarrassing running and hugging thing—and then jumped on a train, both trying to talk at the same time, just really excited that we were both in Vienna together. After we arrived into the city, we went straight to a pizza place, which I was thrilled about, seeing as I had been craving pizza for a good month or so (pizza isn’t a huge thing in Britain), and it being a Friday during Lent, the pizza was in the shape of a fish, which was also exciting.  I think the pizza was supposed to be shared—and I ate the whole thing.  Opps.

The next morning was the concert—and it was awesome! Melissa did great, actually everyone did!  It was short—about an hour—because everyone just went for a few minutes each.  But Melissa’s classes/ concert hall is in a freaking palace! Its not fair, she takes classes in this grand building, set with gold and marble, high ceilings, large sculptures and floor length mirrors—and I take classes in a cramped, creaky townhouse.  Oh well.  At least everyone speaks English, and I don’t have to use public transport.  Give and take, right?

Afterwards, we just explored Vienna.  It is a rather pretty city.  I’ve been reading a crime series set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, so I was thrilled to be walking along the Ringstausse and have Melissa say, ‘Oh, that’s the Kunsthistorisches,’ and I’d actually heard of it!  We walked over to Belvedere—a true palace, the palace of the Hapsburgs, or at least, one of them. It was—so grand.  Of course.  The gardens just went on and on.  The palace did too, we just didn’t go inside (it was costly!) an afforded some amazing views when you walked up this enormous hill.

Looking down, I realized that the city was really just piles and piles of glamorous marble, streets and streets of it.  Everything in Vienna is grand.  Excpet for their affinity with stringing wires (for the trams, for the street lights, for electricity), and their predilection for smoking, Vienna is wonderful.

Sunday was just as good.  I had to buy my bus ticket, which was confusing and not helped by my ignorance of German (I can now order tea Schwatz te mit milch bitte! or ‘black tea with milk, please!) but that’s about it.  We wandered around Stephenplatz, where we went inside the grand cathedral.  It never ceases to amaze me when I go to places like Vienna, like England, like Barcelona, and touch the cool stone of the walls that these walls were built 500, 600, 700 or even more years ago.  Before America was anything but a forested, almost untouched piece of land, lived on only be segmented tribes of Native Americans that had no idea that such a building could even exist. It never ceases to amaze me old Europe is.

We took lunch at a charming Café (I had a crepe with cheese, apples, and some kind of jam, it sounds weird, but it was so good!) and then headed over to the Danube, a short train ride away.  Everyone says that the Blue Danube thing is just a myth—and maybe its not as blue as, say, a blue crayon or the sky on a clear day, but I’d still say its pretty freaking blue.  Compared to the Mississippi, its…crazy blue. 

But the evening was the best part—we went to the opera.  I’d never been, but I had high expectations.  It just seemed like such a high-class, aristocratic thing to do—see an opera.  They’re always seeing operas in Victorian books, so I was very excited.  We got there—and the opera house is brilliant by the way—and waited in lie for what seemed like forever (I actually brought a book…) but it was all worth it.  We bought a 4 euro ticket to stand about 7 or 8 meters behind people that paid a god 100 or 200 euros to sit. 

Normally, singing in movies makes me angry—I just want them to get on with the story! (English major in me speaking) But the opera was great!  We had a quick dinner, which was good, it gave us energy to stand for 3 hours—before we settled down to watch the opera. It was crowded (we were basically standing in horse stalls) but it was all part of the experience.  They have these little screens that tell you what they are saying (it was in Italian!) but as not much really happened, and they liked to repeat themselves, I found myself just watching the characters, listening to their voices, studying the scenery.  I don’t know much about operas (or anything really) but I was amazing.  Too bad they died in the end—but hey at least they sang about it!

More Cardiff. 

Okay, so this is the bad part.  Kristyn really wanted to see a hockey game, so we bought tickets to see the Cardiff Devils—which is wayyy more exciting than it sounds. It was pretty cool, even though I know nothing about hockey.  It’s a pretty fast-paced game and really easy to lose track of the puck.  The Devils won, which was good.  The Devils fans also liked to do this thing where they took off their shoes and held them in the air whenever something happened (I was never clear exactly what that entailed…) But so yeah.  The game was fine.  It was what happened before we arrived that was the bad part.

We had to take a bus there.  And the bus, being a typical city bus, took us all over the place, meandering here and there through first nice, and then slowly grimier and grimier neighborhoods as the bus slowly ambled outside of the city.  We came up to a three-way intersection and saw a stopped red car off to the right side (i.e. the wrong side of the road here) and, thinking it hit another car, I looked at my seatmate and said, ‘Oh, that sucks.’  The bus slowed down to swerve around the car and as we passed it, we realized there was a man lying facedown in the road, halfway under the red car.  His jeans were torn, exposing the flesh underneath, and his arms were above his head as if he had tried to brace himself before he fell.  By his side, about 2 meters away, lay a bent, damaged motorcycle.  He wasn’t moving, and a little circle of people had gathered around him in a semicircle.

On the bus, there was a collective gasp as people stared at the man, unable to look away. There wasny any police there, no ambulance.  No one was doing anything.  And we just sat there on the bus, watching the scene outside.  The three rowdy men in the back actually stopped the bus and jumped off to ‘see what was happening’…pretty sick, right? And then the bus turned the corner and he was gone. 

Yet I couldn’t get him out of my mind.  That picture of the man, just lying there, unmoving, with the group just standing around him was burned into my eyes.  It really disturbed me, that feeling of helplessness, that I didn’t—couldn’t—do anything.  For days, I couldn’t get the image out of my mind, instead, sharing it with anyone who’d listen.  What did they tell his family? What was he doing there anyway? Why didn’t they pay better attention? Why do people ride motorcycles anyway, as dangerous as they are? I’m pretty sure that this experience, this image, as fleeting as it was, changed something in me.  I’m not sure what, but things suddenly seemed a little different, life suddenly seemed a more important. 

Thanks to some Google research, I later found out he died right there on the scene.  When the bus drove by, when I looked out that window—he was already gone. 

Caerdydd (otherwise known as Cardiff)

The day started off in madness. 

I went for a run, totally forgetting that the Bath Half was today, so as I popped out of the canal onto the road, I was thoroughly surprised to see throngs of people standing in lines that literally went on for several streets all clutching their numbers.  After breakfast, Sophia and I headed out to the train station to catch the 11:25 train to Wales.  Unfortunately, we forgot about the marathoners.  We spent the next ten minutes shouting things like “banana!” and “clownface!” and “Go dog!” to the various costumed runners. There were also an awful lot of people running for charities, which meant they had to wear really strange outfits.  Like the breast cancer runners—they each literally wore a single giant stuffed boob strapped to their chest (or back…).  It was strange.

After about an hour and a half, we arrived in Cardiff.  It wasn’t a terribly huge, impressive place—in fact, it was rather modern, even plain.  At least, until we got to the Castle.  The Castle was easily my favorite part of the whole trip.  It was so interesting!  The outer wall was impressive enough, but inside it, it was just gorgeous.  There was a huge open space, all green and wonderful.  Plopped in the middle was a still-standing medivel castle.  Off to the side, there was the more modern castle that the Victorians used to live in.

The whole thing started off with a bizarre movie set in modern Cardiff but with “history coming to life” through the centuries.  The modern girl was running around fighting football players turned to medeivel soldiers…odd.

The Victorian castle was pretty nice, mostly because it was really pretty without being over the top.  The rooms were done up nicely, there was an octagon stairwell (that we couldn’t use) the dinning room had a huge table, there was suits of armor in the halls.  My favorite was the library though.  So many books, of course I’d like it!  It was decorated with hand-painted banners bearing the names of the king’s favorite writers.  The only ones I can still remember are Aristotle, Pluto, and Dante.  I guess he was a fan of the classics. 

The medieval part of the castle was really great though.  You had to climb a host of stairs to get to the top, but the view was worth it!  Cardiff may not be the most glamorous city, but it certainly looked nice from above.  The stairs got steeper and steeper as you go through the stone rooms.  They weren’t much to look at now, but the Hugh, the audio-guide man, told me all about the lives of the families that used to live in these tiny rooms with walls as thick as a bank vault.  He also informed me to look at the medieval graffiti and the small hole in the lowest apartment that was apparently the toilet. 

After a delicious little lunch at a local sandwich shop, we headed over to the National Museum via the shopping district.  The shopping district was modern and placeless, but the National History Museum, alongside the courts and the town hall, were very grand and gorgeous.  We went inside the National Museum—but we couldn’t get through it all!  Cardiff isn’t big enough to have separate museums; so there was a whole art section, which included neo-classical, impressionism, sculpture, modernism, and even an exhibit on Buddhism, which I loved because it made me think about my  (hopefully) future Himalayan trek.  I was excited about seeing some Van Gough until I leaned in closer and saw that had painted that view 37 times so its no wonder they have one.  But the museum closed at 4:45, and after spending an hour and a half upstairs, we realized that we only had 20 minutes to see the science stuff.  Sometimes that gets really boring, and it was at first until we turned the corner and entered the dinosaur room.  I wish I got to see more of it, but the guards were literally herding us through the halls to get us out and the only exhibit that I truly remember seeing clearly was the one on prehistoric bugs—including a clump of giant cockroaches and a gigantic spider.  I was so traumatized that my heart didn’t slow down until after we sped through the rest of the dinosaurs, went outside, through the reception of an Indian wedding and were back in the center of town. 

Okay this is getting long, so I will continue this in the next post.

How to Relive Your Childhood...

Being an intern at a museum’s education center is fun!  It’s like reliving your childhood twice a week.  No really, minus the cleaning up afterwards, its spectacular.  In one workshop on architecture, I got to draw a line drawing of the famous Royal Crescent (a big, curvy row of fancy houses for Bath’s upper echelons).  Afterwards, the children all crowded around me and ooohed and ahhhhed, acting like I was freaking Leonardo da Vinci or something.  In another, there was an extra station set up, so I got to paint a box in the style of Mondrian.  (Afterwards, the kids made sculptures with wood scraps, but that’s where I put my foot down.) It ended uo looking more like a stained glass window, but whatever.

Today, the teacher, Chrissie, had this whole class planned out where she told that story about the hen who made bread and none of her friends would help her using little puppets, stuffed animals and various objects to represent the bread-making stages, and then we made bread!  I’ve made bread about twice in my life, so it was a very exciting experience for me!  At the end, there was an extra loaf, so then I even got to try some, and it was sooo delicious!  I did have to have an epic battle with the printer for a solid 30 minutes to get the thing to print out all the pictures of the kids for their little photo memory books, but the bread at the end was so worth it…

Onto St Andrews….the most Posh uni in Britain (or so I’ve been told…)

We took a 2 hour (48 mile) bus ride to St Andrews—probably the smallest  town I have ever seen a university in!  It was literally 4 streets long, butted on one end by this picturesque, rugged, rough Scottish coast, complete with, wait for it, cliffs and a medieval castle!  The university buildings were so old they had that tarnished look to them, dark and forbidding.  And then the quad was straight out of harry Potter…The town itself was pretty cute. Small, mostly dead, quiet, peaceful, friendly. I liked it—but I could never live in a place that tiny!  I don't really like people that much, and I dislike leaving my comfort zone (even though I do, all the time) but I still crave big cities, places with randomness, and long dark streets, able to walk for an hour and a half and still not reach the other side of town.  I like the feeling knowing that no matter how long I live there, I may never know all there is to know, may never see all the sights.  I love that. And that’s not something St Andrews could ever give me.

But that doesn’t matter.  It only matters what Tori likes, and she loved it!  I am not 99% sure will go there, which is cool yet frustrating (I never gave myself the option to leave the States, and I wish now that I did!)

It was dark when we got there, and we had no map, so we were a bit cluesless as to where to go.  But we just ended up asking for directions and found our hotel a few minutes later. After refreshing as best we could (because the French Airline forgot the champagne back in DC, they had to delay the flight and Tori only had 10 minutes to make her connection.  She did, but her luggage didn’t, so all her stuff was lost in France and it took until the next afternoon to arrive) we headed out to find dinner.  We choose a place that was a restaurant/bar, but it was late (ish—about 8) and I keep forgetting that stuff closes realllly early here, so it was already drinking time, and Tori freaked out about the whole bar setup.  So we ended up wandering around until we found a place called Tailend where they sold you two fish and chips dinners for 6 pounds—a pretty kick-ass deal if I do say so myself!  We carted it off back to the hotel and ate the entire thing with our fingers straight out of the greasy box, and we loved every minute of it!  Afterwards, we went to the Vic (short for Victoria—Tori’s favourite) and I bought Tori her first beer, which she hated.  But hey, its an acquired taste, right?  So then I got her a rum and coke (mostly coke) which she managed to drink without grimacing.   Although, she has not gotten the concept that alcohol, unless consumed for a drinking game, a dare/bet, or hurriedly because the cops are coming, is not something you gulp down in two seconds.  You are supposed to drink it slowly, you know, savor it. I think she just wanted to get it all over with, like taking Nyquil or something!

The next morning, we went out exploring. (At least, after we overslept.  At least Tori had the jet-lag excuse—I was just tired). We had the hotel breakfast scraps, and then headed out into the freezing cold Scottish weather.  The town was still pretty cute in the daylight, and now we could see the medieval-ness of it.  Tori wanted to go shopping, but I said no, we had to see the town. So we went to the St Andrews museum , which was pretty nice. It was dead quiet in there, and for such a little place, pretty interesting.  My favourites were a casting of a giant water scorpion that was found just off the coast, and an oddities exhibit that used to be owned by the university.  (These used to be super popular in the 1800s when travelers would bring back stuff that was beyond imagination to the local British people).  After that, we headed out to a lunch date with a current student, but Tori felt unwell and practically ran off back to the hotel to lay down.  Instead, Chelsea and I chatted about living abroad and sipped tea and ate Panini’s.  It was delightful. 

After a nap and some ibuprofen, she felt better, and we met up with another student, Meg, at a local coffee shop, where she and her Swiss friend answered all of my sister’s questions, and I focused on eating a delicious almond tart.  Meg then gave us an extensive tour of the area, including making us aware of the strange (but interesting) superstitions on campus (which was to avoid walking on a certain block on the ground…) She then pointed us to a little Thai place, which was featured on a Gordon Ramsey show—and he even liked it!  It was pretty damn good—though I’ll admit, I got the most unoriginal thing on the menu, Pad Thai as it’s one of my all-time favourites.  But it was sooo worth it! 

The next morning, I had to leave.  My day of traveling started at 5:20 AM (splendid…) and lasted right up until 30 minutes before my class started at 4.  Looong day!  It took 4 trains, a bus, and a nice little walk with my obscenely loud rolling suitcase, but I made it back in time for class.  (yipppeee) Anyway, the best part about the whole day was probably the group of 5 drunk men sipping beers out of pitchers that crowded the little hallway by the bathroom who I left convince me that the button-activated bathroom door was broken.  The station man then came over, did the complicated measure of pressing the button labeled “open” and then looked at me as of to say, “jeez, look how dumb these foreigners are…”  

Edinburgh, Scotland

One thing about Britain is that it does NOT know how to make food. Excepting the wonderful meal, fish and chips, pretty much all traditional British meals vary from weird to unsavory to plain disgusting—and the Scots do it the best.  First off, the Brits do not understand the concept of pudding.  Pudding is supposed to be light and fluffy and chocolaty, but the Brits just add the name “pudding” to any less-delicious dish to make it sound more than merely edible. They seem to think that adding a desert type to a meal makes it yummy! Yorkshire Pudding is a splendid example; since when has pudding involved meat anyway? Pie, too, goes the same way, like Shepherd’s Pie or Steak and Ale Pie.  But the grossest of all is Black Pudding (otherwise known as Blood Pudding). Ingredients: congealed sheep’s blood that ends up looking like dead worms.  Yuuuum.  Haggis to is disgusting.  Its pretty much the Scottish version of the hotdog: sheep liver, lungs, and heart all mixed together (with oatmeal and veggies) to make a dark-colored mush that they expect you to eat.  Good thing I’m on a tight budget and cant afford to eat out!

But anyway, Scotland itself!  It only took a 6.5 hour train ride (which was, in fact, 3 train rides.  Trains are usually awesome because you don't have to drive, you can just sit back and sleep or read and not worry about TSA agents, but here, it was pretty hectic.  They don't tell you which train is yours, they don't number them, and they only put the end station on the departures board. Basically you’re screwed unless you can get some help!) But then there I was, in Edinburgh!  I was only there 2 hours, but it was enough to see that it was a truly beautiful city—it was so blatantly old, but it was all meshed up with the new too, and it worked really well.  And it was so blatantly Scottish—they definitely played on stereotypes, bagpipes, kilts, tartan, and of course, the accents!  The streets were lined with cafes, shops, and people.  Lunch too was well worth the wait, a delicious mixed vegetable Panini (including avocados, something very difficult to find here!) and a gooey, yummy brownie.  And as pain-in-the-butt my little sister can be sometimes, it was sooo great to see her so unexpectedly!  It true that we get along better from a distance, but its also true that getting to spend time with your sister for a few days in Scotland when you weren’t expecting to see her until June at the earliest was awesome! 

The Cotswolds!

I’m still not entirely sure I understand what the Cotswolds are exactly.  Basically, from what I can tell, it’s a region starting in Bath and extending north. It’s a bunch of little hills dotted with medieval-esque little towns hugging the hilltops, connected to one another with a chain of green pastures filled with the sheep that have made the region prosperous for centuries.  In short, it’s a nice place to visit. 

The morning stared off chaotic, with a hugely hungover Ben stumbling down the stairs 10 minutes before we were leaving, looking like he had just been hit over the head with a baseball bat. We managed to somehow get him decent and dragged him all the way to the bus station, literally propping him against the wall while we waited for the bus.  All went well though, and before long, we arrived at the Broadway Tower, a big castle-looking thing on a hill.   It was four rooms stacked on top of one another, flanked by two turrets encasing spiral staircases.  I tried to read the information, but I didn’t get very far because everyone else just ran up to the top for the “view” which, because of an intense bout of fog, didn’t really exist. I did manage to learn that the man had the tower built as a gift for his wife so she could look out her window and see a castle.  I also learned that a man who was set to live there and set up a printing workshop was unhappily surprised to find a stubborn family of squatters living on the property who refused to vacate for months. 

We then walked about a mile and a half down the Cotswolds footpaths through sheep fields and mud puddles, climbing over stiles because gates don’t exist—and felt like straight out of Pride and Prejudice with our “hems 6 inches deep in mud!”  At first, I was kind of grumpy because my hands were really cold and I didn’t know that we were walking so far. But then we started running down a really steep hill and I slipped down it, covering my pants with mud, and decided it wasn’t so bad—despite having to be rushed off to a bathroom with warm water 10 minutes later after my fingers turned a magnificent shade of blue.

Lunch was great! We ate a place called The Mad Hatter (our primary reason for choosing the place…) which was decorated with fantastic Alice in Wonderland murals.  We ate traditional English food (fish and chips….yummm) and I even ate the peas they gave me, despite the deep loathing I have for them.  We wanted to get dessert (we want to try bannoffee pie because of Love Actually!)  but there just wasn’t enough time before the bus was leaving. 

Our last stop was at the Painswick Gardens, a cool little collection of “trails” interspersed with benches, tiny castles and huts, fake sheep (which we wasted no time climbing on!) ponds, fountains, and covered with their infamous little white snowdrops.  Plus, there was a maze shaped like “250” (for the 250^th anniversary) which we had fun running like crazy little children, screaming at the top of our lungs whenever we found one of the goals in the middle of each of the numbers. 

Lastly, we had our tea and cake, which of course was delightful.  One of the other girls opted out of getting the tea and instead got this drink called elderflower cordial, a warm, nearly-clear, sweet drink, which was really, really good—so good that I got a glass of it, and still good enough that we both bought a bottle of it.  Even better, the woman said that because its so strong, you only need to add a little bit to a warm glass of water, so the bottle we got went from 3 or 4 glasses of the drink, to 26 glasses!  Yes!  J

Cutest little kid story ever: 

I went to this program the Museum put on for kids in year 3 in a local primary school for kids in a poorer neighborhood.  They were to make landscapes out of clay, broccoli, aluminum, and oatmeal (porridge!) into a 3D garden.  When I got there, they were mostly done, so a teacher grabbed a little girl called Faith and told here to show me the gardens, which we she proceeded to do.  Then, after she did that, she turned to me and said,

“Where are you from?”

So I told her I was from America.

She thought about that for a minute, and then asked, “Do they have zoos in America?’

I thought this was an odd first question to ask, but hey, she’s a little kid. “Umm, well yeah, they do.  We have one near where I live.”

She thought about that for another moment, then said, “Do you work at the zoo in America?”

I really just didn’t know what to say to that!  It was soo cute—I had to hold in a laugh.  I was about to say no, when I realized my brother did, so I told her that.  The poor little thing probably now thinks that almost everyone in America works in a zoo now--or knows someone who does!  

This trip happened awhile ago, I am just very behind!  So much work to do these days...

Stonehenge: Welll, the Brits weren’t kidding when they said that it was a pile of rocks in the middle of a field—because that’s exactly what it was!  It was a short trip (about an hour) and I was just sitting there reading when all of a sudden, Jonathon was like, “Annnd there it is, just out the window.” And there it was. The fields were so green (all that rain!) and the stone were so…not that big.  I’m not gonna lie, they were a lot smaller and less impressive than all the storybooks made them out to be.  And then we stepped out the door and wham!  It was freezing!  Seriously, the wind was strong enough to suck up a small child!  Andrew Butterworth (an eccentric but awesome history buff who is also the internship coordinator…score!) gave us a quick history of the place but owing to the cold, the really loud winds, and just distraction in general, this is what I remember:

-the smaller stones were from Wales, 250 miles away, the bigger stones added hundreds of years later from 20 miles away

-Julius Caesar thought it was built by druids

-scientists recently found a wooden henge buried a few miles away

-over the years, stones have gone missing because people stole them to use in various buildings

-the first Stonehenge tourist came from Switzerland 300+ years ago

Salisbury: a heck of a lot prettier than the American version!  The city was quite nice, and pretty and everything.  We were quite fascinated with the canal—it was filled with swans (actually native to here!) and so everyone whipped out their cameras.  My friends and I were also somewhat fascinated with a submerged shopping cart that was in the middle of the canal with a bird perched on the handle.  The Cathedral was gorgeous—of course!  It would have been nice enough, but Andrew Butterworth’s talk again made it wayyy better!  We even saw the Magna Carta and I impressed everyone with my knowledge of the history on the English language!

Lacock=an adorable English village in which Harry Potter, Jane Austen, and several other famous and not so famous movies have been filmed.  The reason for this is because not much has changed since medieval times.  The paved the roads, they added cars, they put up some aluminum signs (enough to count on two hands…), and they people there learned the concept of personal hygiene (they got over their intense fear of bathing at some point) and threw away unnecessary article of clothing like corsets and veils and such.  In literally 10 minutes, you could turn this place into a Medieval village! 

Features of Lacock:

-A small brig for putting excessively drunk people into until they sober up

-Authentic, thatched roofs

-a ford (road that goes through a river) about 30 meters long that cars drive through

-Adorable, medieval cottages

-Authentic medieval smells, and authentic horse poop on the streets

…and lots more .

We ate in a pub that was the oldest working pub in the UK, and it was delish!  They had the food all ready for us (I of course had the veggie meal) and despite it being wayyy to early to eat (we’d only had luch like 2 or 3 hours before) we ate every bite.  Plus dessert! Then we did a pub quiz )in teams) and we got 11/12.  They only question we got wrong was about math—we mis-converted  feet into meters. Oops.  

La Gente de Mi Casa

 

And as for the people here—well, there’s 7 of us.  We all get along well enough, though I rather think I’m on the outs with some (mostly because I tend to dislike going out and getting drunk on a Tuesday night).  We tried to set up house rules on the first day—dishes, sharing food, overnight guests, parties, etc.  Basically, this is what we came up with:

-Do your dishes immediately after you use them (I don't think this has ever been followed)

-We’ll share some food, but other than that, we each get our own shelves (only the things nobody likes get shared, and literally every bit of food here has somebody’s name in permanent marker on it)

-Family dinner on Sunday nights (which turned into everybody but me and my roommate)

-Overnight guests are okay, even though its strictly against ASE policy. Oh well. 

I mean, they’re mostly okay.  A few of the girls can get a little snooty, and can be knd of selfish, even to each other.  (like a watered down Mean Girls before the practical jokes started) So far, it’s all working out though.  Ben (the only boy) is a real trooper and has embraced his inner…I don't know. Self. (Horror story: his original roommate died a few months ago because he was uber depressed and killed himself!  Gahh!  And I think I’m still FB friends with him…) And my roommate Sophia is pretty cool.  I mean, she’s got nothing on Mara, best roommate ever, but she’s still nice.  Very studious, very quiet, and very bookish.   We get along very well, and we’re both similar in that we don't get out much.  And we’re both a little nerdy, but that’s always okay! I watch more TV than her, I eat more than her, but then again, that’s true at home too.  I also wake up earlier than her (big surprise there!).

 So far though, Bath has been pretty great.  Everyone else is sitting around deciding where they’ll run off to—Italy, Prague, Paris, Spain, Germany.  But I’ve been to all those places.  I’ve been there as the tourist.  And its okay.  But I’m slowly discovering that traveling as a tourist isn’t nearly as great as really getting onto it, traveling as a local. All I want to do is go down to the nitty gritty, and experience things as the locals do. I want to make British friends, keep and visit the ones I already have, and see the UK.  I’m here for 4 months, and I actually want to be able to say that I saw it before I left, instead of saying that I filled my passport with places I “visited” for a day.  I’ve done that before, and you just never get that local flavor.  Living in Costa Rica, living in Barcelona, that was the way to go. I left feeling connected to the place, and I truly hope that happens with the UK. But to do that, I need to actually stay here and SEE it!

Ahh Britain.  The UK.  Its weird!  I’m going on week two now, and I guess I’m slowly getting used to its oddities…but not really. I still roll over laughing every so often when a British person says something weird.  I still forget to look the wrong way and almost get run over.  I still forget to walk of the other side of the sidewalk and almost plough into people.  And British accents still make me smile. 

So it’s cold and its damp here.  I don't think the streets ever dry properly.  And even if you look outside and hey!  It’s a wonderful sunny day, you still pack the umbrella.  But I like it.  The first week was so-so.  I’m not going to lie there!  It was orientation so yeah, there wasn’t a whole lot going on.  Plus, I got sick towards the end, so I had to miss the last day (like I shed many tears over that!) They threw a lot of info at us, some of it good, some of it useless.  I still don't know some of the people who I talk to everyday’s names. 

Right, so the places.  Bath itself is pretttty much what everyone told me before I arrived.  Old, pretty, nice.  I’ve learned that when it comes to getting descriptions of something, don't ask the Brits.  They aren’t so great at that.  But it IS old and pretty and nice!  The streets are cobblestone, and the buildings are limestone.  It’s small, and definitely geared to tourists and shopping. The center of town in the Abbey, a beautiful old church that once witnessed the crowning of one king, and the royal marriage of another.  Down the road, in an ordinary, slightly worn-for-the-wear brownstone, affectionately called “number four” is Jane Austen’s old house, the place where she lived as a child.  As with any European city, it’s old and tied to history.  I don't know a lot of Bath’s history, but I’ve got 4 months.  I’ll get there! 

I live in Prior Park, in a section called Widcombe.  It’s a decent sized townhouse with 4 bedrooms, a roomy kitchen and a nice parlor.  No piano though, that was a disappointment, thought it almost makes up for it with its extensive VHS collection.  My roommate Sophia and I made a pact to watch ALL the movies (except the really weird ones) before we leave!   My room is nice enough—its big, warm, the windows open, and the beds are even covered with bright, flowery hippie-esque coverlets.  My favourite (see what I did there??) part of the room though, has to be the shower.  I guess they were worried that we might not all be able to shower in the other two showers, so they put one in our room.  But the kicker is that its just a shower! I mean, it has a semi-opaque glass door on the front, but that’s it.  It’s so odd!  We mostly just use it as an oversized sink and a great place for line-drying our clothes.  BUT we did make another pact (lots of secret pacts here!) to each shower in it once this semester.  Not sure how that’s gonna go down, but whatever. 

Our center of everything is about a ten-minute walk away, in Nelson house. Basically, it’s a 6-floor townhouse with creaky floorboards, drafty windows, and a stone cellar filled with wicker furniture where we eat our takeaway lunches (its a lot cheaper than eating in!).  It’s stuffed with offices, kitchens, a library, seminar room, and a computer room, plus the cellar.

The End of Spain

So clubbing.  Last weekend, since it was my last in Spain, my friend Jade and I decided to spend it in Barcenoleta (the old part of Barcelona).  Unfortuentely, Friday night was an epic FAIL. It was raining, which was just gross, and then I couldn’t figure out how to take the metro near my house (the ticket machines were screwed up) so I had to walk to the far away station.  And then, sometime between standing on the platform, and arriving outside of Jade’s house, someone pickpocketed my phone!!  I was so, so mad.  And pissed. And disappointed at myself.  And then it started thundering which made Jade’s dad tell us to stay in, so long story short, we ended up watching the Hangover and going to bed early.

The next morning though, her dad convinced us to get these delicious little cakes from the market down the road.  The rest of the day was pretty slow—mostly packing and laundry.  But that evening, I came back to Barcenoleta and ate a delicious stir-fry dinner with them—one meal that I sorely missed.  Then, around 11:45 or so me and Jade headed out to the clubs, super grateful that it wasn’t raining!  We had to wait until about 1 or 1:30 before people really started to show up, so we just took pictures and chatted with some of the other earlybirds (that is, until they wanted to buy us drinks and then we had to make our escape).  But finally, we started dancing, and just had a good time. We had to avoid and refuse way too many weird guys but whatever.

 I’d say the highlight was after the professional dancers went up on the podium and started their little routine or whatever, so random drunk guy came over to me and shouted at me, “Be careful!  See all those dancers up there, in the leotards and the dresses? They’re all men!” And when I looked blankly at him (it was an odd thing to say) he assumed I didn’t know English and shouted “Hombres, hombres! “ I turned to Jade to point out this guy, but when I turned back, he was already gone.  It was hilarious though!  

We didn’t get to sleep until close to 5 AM—its crazy! In the “morning” after downing some fruit, Jade and I pitched in to help her dad make an omelet/Spanish tortilla for I guess lunch.  Eggs, milk, tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, spices…mmmm. It was so good! I kind of want some now actually….afterwards, I spent about an hour just sitting with Jade and her father sipping coffees and watching the ocean.  It was so nice and relaxing, and a good way to leave Barcelona J

WOW I am so behind!  Okay so, I have a lot of catching up to do.  Firstly, I graduated!  That’s always a great feeling, to know you’ve graduated.  I am now officially certified to teach English to non-native speakers abroad! 

After the “ceremony” (most informal thing ever!) we all went to a Nepalese restaurant…interesting choice, but hey, it was so good!  I had the “menu of the day’ which was vegetables, rice, and a kazillion kinds of sauces, and it was actually pretty spicy, I had to get a second thing of water.  As soon as I walked in, I saw a picture of the Annapurnura range (famous range in the Himalayas) and I said to the whole group, “Yeah, that’s where I want to go,” and they just looked at me strange.  During the meal we had strange discussions with topics ranging anywhere from geography quizzes (you would not believe how few people know that there are 50 US states!),  really bad mistakes that English learners have made over the years (usually accidently saying a swear word i.e. “fuck” instead of “fork” etc, or accidental sexual allusions), plus a lively debate on the random drawings of who the people painted on the front window were, and where they came from.

Afterwards, I walked downtown for one of the last times.  It was drizzling—kind of like “Hey, you’re going to England you better get used to the rain!” I went to the Museu Xocolata, which was actually really interesting. I learned a lot about where chocolate came from and its use through time. The ancient Aztecs and Mayans used to drink it on special occasions but it was cold and really bitter.  Then after Cortes came along, he decided that it was pretty great and took it back to Europe where all the nobles added sugar and drank it as a luxury. Later on, the French made it available to the masses in the form of bonbons.  And then, everybody started eating it.  Yay!!! But basically, the whole thing was just an excuse to showcase all these awesome chocolate sculptures all over the place—and some of them were really detailed too! 

On the way back, this woman stopped me on the street and asked me in Spanish where the Picasso Museum was.  This happened to me before, and I freezed up and ran off, but this time, I stopped and was actually able to help her by giving directions in Spanish. At first, she looked really apprehensive, but as soon as I told the street name, she smiled as she realized that I was right, and she was only about 4 blocks away. I felt like a true native!

My Tribute to los libros de Espanol... 

 

My 2^nd to last time teaching at BCN….and I can barely remember what I taught.  My head felt like it was splitting open all day, I’m definitely getting sick.  Tuesday night, I had a slight fever, I was really hot which is wired because my flat is always freezing, but by the time I went to bed, my teeth were chattering and I was so cold that 3 layers plus a thick blanket couldn’t warm me up!

But the good news is, I had more time to read!  I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I just love that name!) because he is an Hispanic writer and I am in Spain (at least a few more days) so I felt the need to throw myself into the culture.  But I really wanted to get something actually in Espanol—so a few days ago I went to a little bookstore and bought a book recommended to me—La Sombra Del Viento (The Shadow of the Wind) by Carlos Ruiz Zafron.  I didn’t realize until after the man rung me up that the book had 550 pages in it!! I’m on page 5.  It has A LOT of words I’ve never learned (like “con un leve asentimiento” which means “with a slight nod”) or thought about learning. But I bought the thing, so now I’m determined.  Who cares if I need Google translate to read it? Or of I have to make notes in the margins? Or if I have to read a sentence 3 times to get the quasi-full meaning? Whatever.  It’s good motivation—and a good goal to have.  By this time next year, I’ll finish the book and be so much better at Spanish!

Lessons learned:

So I think that I had two of my strongest lessons last week, both on modal verbs (or at least, similar to modals) and both teaching the upper intermediates.  I recently decided that if I cant teach kids, then I’d rather teach the upper-intermediates.  They’re past most of the nitty-gritty grammar, they lovvve to talk, and they’re pretty smart. 

Anyway, lesson one of the week was one modals (can, must, could, may, might, can’t) and I used the theme of ancient ruins.  It was pretty great, I had them all pretend to be explorers—they each had a different picture of a ruin that they “discovered” and they had to guess as to its original function.  They all used the grammar right, they had fun, there was humor, and I got good feedback.  Finally, I wasn’t nervous as I headed up to the front of the class!

Teaching on Friday wasn’t observed (by our teachers that is; they like to sit in the corner and quietly judge/grade us, but it always makes things a little awkward) so that was nice, at least in theory. I did the lesson on look/seem/appear, and since Americans love doctors and cops (according to American TV at least) I did the lesson on cops.

First, I found this cartoon of an old woman with two cops coming in the front door. She was holding a gun and there was an unconscious thief in the background.  I decided the gun thing was a bit violent, (it was a cartoon about gun control) so I went on paint, erased the gun, and drew in a baseball bat instead. It actually looked like it belonged in the original, so I was proud of myself. So then, I found all theses cartoons online and gave one to each student. They were all cops taking a coffee break, and they were discussing their recent cases, of what appeared to have happened, what it looked like occurred, etc.  It was awesome!

Baeceloneta weekenddd...

So…its Friday, and I’m going to Barceloneta—the old city, the place with alleys so narrow they don't look safe enough to walk down.  Its located on this awkward-looking peninsula on the ocean, and on Google maps, the whole place just looks like a smudge of brown.  Jade and I took the metro down, because it would be a good 3 mile walk, which isn’t so bad, except that to get there, you have to walk through so less savory parts of town.

I still hadn’t had any tapas, well that is, outside of Mariluz’s little party.  But we really wanted to go out to a tapas bar, so we did, and it was great!  We had Spanish tortilla (like a super thick omelets with eggs, tomato, and potatoes) the thickness of a child’s birthday cake, a Mediterranean salad (I ignored the olives) and fried eggplant…and it was all so good!

Afterwards we went back to her house where I met her dad, and we drank homemade Sangria, which considering the cheapness of the wine, was actually pretty tasty. Her dad’s cousin had just flown in from London, so I met her too, and she was pretty nice—you gotta love the Brits! 

We went clubbing at this place called Opium de Mar (strange name!) which was along the water.  It would have been 20 euros but we go there early, so it was actually free!  In America,  people head to the clubs around 11, 11:30, and they usually close around 2:30.  In Spain, anything before 2 AM is considered early!  Its crazy, but the places are all dead quiet until then.  Anyway, so the people finally turned up and we started dancing, and we had some more drinks, and yeahhh.  It was pretty funny because everyone would sing along to the words, so you thought they understood, right?  Well, most pop songs today have the words “put your hands up” in them, and then everyone puts their hands up.  Except that I was one of the only ones who actually did, because all these other people just memorized the songs without actually knowing what they mean!  (They also played some pretty explicit songs but I guess that didn’t matter either). I ended up dancing with a Dutch kid mainly because he actually spoke English.  In the end, Jade really wanted to get rid of this weird guy (there were some definite creeps there, men way to old to be clubbing) so we used the buddy system and left around 3:45, not to go to bed until 4 AM!  The metro stopped running hours ago, so I stayed at Jade’s flat—I felt kinda bad when we got back and woke up her father—but they have the strangest relationship.  I was apologizing profusely for waking him up (he was on the couch because his cousin was in his room) but all he wanted to know was how fun the club was.  Hmm.

Anyway, we had an early morning because we both had to head off to work on our one-on-one projects (to learn how to teach a student one to one as opposed to in a big group) so we both headed out, though not before Jade’s dad offered us everything under the sun for breakfast, and drilled us on whether we had fun at the club!  He even recommended a book for me to read, and advice on living in Bath! 

I was pretty much operating on 4 hours of sleep, which meant that I didn’t get a whole lot done and I needed a nap later on.  In the morning, I helped Mariluz scrub down the flat since she was having a party later in the day.  She was inviting a bunch of people from her old job (at Citi bank, before it was disbanded).  It was actually pretty cool—they were from all over South America (a common theme here, its like the NYC of Spain) and they all brought traditional dishes from their country.  And all of the food was amazing—I ate sooo much!

Let’s see—there were these little flaky rolls filled with cheeses or tuna or vegetables, there were these large pocket-type things with cheese or chicken, egg, and olives (I didn’t realize that until I bit into the pit…), a tune-flavored dip, and this really good bread+ jam thing from Venezuela.  Plus Sangria.  Real Sangria, curtesy of Mariluz.  They all spoke Spanish, and I tried, I really did.  They all laughed at me, and then asked for a translation.  But then one of the women’s husband brought their baby over and I played with him. See, I could say random stuff in Spanish, and he didn’t care.  And the dad was speaking Catalan, so he didn’t care either.  It was a pretty great evening though—I was so full and tired and all that Sangria, well by the end, everything was a bit fuzzy!

Things I miss from home:

-Mis padres, always :)

-My dogs! All of the them—Jazzi for the snuggling, Riley for her cuteness, and Sandy for her sweetness. 

-Mi familia.  Duh.

-Oatmeal (Seriously. It’s a good breakfast food.)

-Reese’s (WHY don't they understand peanut butter here??)

-dollars (Euros are expensive!)

-Running with the team

-peanut butter No more now that I found it!

-mom’s meals (really I do! All those vegetables and sauces and salads and soups that I can’t/don’t know how to make...yummm)

-Dinner with the fam (Now I eat dinner in my room, or with my landlady.  How sad.)

-family weekends.  Being a tourist would be even better if I was being a tourist with my family!

-Pancakes! Mmmmm.

-Cookies and brownies. (A candy bar is NOT the same thing as a well-baked brownie!)

-Tori's homemade biscuits...especially when she makes them snowman-shaped in the middle of the summer just because she can.

-Trees and other green things.  They just don’t have that in Barcelona…

-My car!  (I’ve used the metro maybe three times, other than that, its all been walking.)

-Recycling.  I think they do that here, but I am still a little unclear on how to do that, so the plastic bottles are slowly accumulating in my room…)

-The little used bookstore near the house.  (I love that place.  It’s so cheap, and well organized and its got all the cool old books in there.  The bookstores here aren’t like that at all. Plus, the books have the words going the wrong way on the spines!)

-Brad’s fish obsession.  Hey, it’s great to watch!

-Walking in the woods.  Especially with my dad. 

-Biking!  Its sooo much faster than walking.

-Adam’s magic shows…

-Granola!  I know they have it here, but I can’t seem to find it. 

-My apartment.  And my roommate!

-Sunday football…haha, the REAL football.

-The team!!! Especially Michaela's awesome ideas.

Hmm.  Basically, I miss food and people…

Well, this is a bit late, partially because I’ve been busy, but mostly because I’ve been lazy. 

Today I taught again, and once again, I was with Geoff ( a good thing too, cause he likes to draw smiles next to all his comments and tends to twist everything into a positive.) Anyways, one of the students asked me a question on the present perfect, and I had no idea! I kept thinking about a story they told about this one guy who didn’t know why the structure of the sentence was different, so he said it was because the statement was about outer space, and all the students believed that was the reason!  Yeahhhh, I didn’t want to be that guy. But we (me and the students) figured it out in the end.  And then Geoff told me that I was adaptive, that that came from working with kids, where the best laid schemes of mice and men just never work out.  So I guess that’s a good thing—I think it means I think well on my feet, and I’m good at quickly changing plans and going off in a different direction than my lesson plan says I will.  I never knew this about myself…

But anyway, what I’ve been meaning to write about is my landlady, Mariluz’s, party on Saturday.  I think it’d be classified as a dinner party (though I’ve rarely been invited to them so I don't really know).  She knew that I’d never had a Spanish tortilla (rather like a big omelet, but also cooked with potatoes), so she made one for one of the dishes for me, which I thought was so sweet!  She also made this kickass lasagna thing that was 10 times better than the traditional American variety.  It had fresh veggies, no meat or tomato sauce, and even the cheese was different.  I really need to ask for the recipes!  Plus, it was this one girl’ birthday, so that meant there was un pastel chocolate….yum ;)

And they kept pouring the wine!  As the night progressed (it didn’t even start until 9:30!), it got harder and harder to communicate.  They were all speaking Spanish (none of them knew much English besides Mariluz and one girl who’d had too much to drink to remember how to say much) and the night was getting pretty late, and then there was the several glasses of wine…. it’s safe to say that I didn’t get much.  

This one woman took a liking to me.  She was a Spanish teacher from Argentina, here only for a short time, but she sat down and started talking to me.  She wasn’t that good at English, and I wasn’t that good at Spanish, and neither one of us were that good at French, but we used all three to have a lopsided conversation.  She kept calling out to Mariluz to come translate for us, and the poor woman was getting all confused with the bustle of languages in her mind, until she started trying to talk Catalan with me, and we let her go sit down. But this woman (whose name I think I missed), she was a middle-aged lady with three sons. She spent a good portion of the evening trying to set me up with her youngest son.  She told me all about him, and why he’d be perfect for me…. He was tall, he had light hair, blue eyes, he spoke English, he studied at university, he was 24. Perfect!  She used that word an awful lot!  I never actually found out if he was here, or if he was in Argentina, so I guess I’ll never know. Oh well. 

The last guests finally left around 1:30, and then I pretty much collapsed into bed.  Four glasses of wine, lack of sleep, and the exhaustion of trying (and failing!) to speak and understand Spanish will do that to you!

Picasso...

Okay so…Friday.  Teaching was observed again today, meaning the tutor sat in the corner and wrote down literally everything we said or did. I didn’t really notice him while I was teaching, but afterwards, he pretty much tore our lessons apart!  I hope I’m getting better though—I have 3 next week, and I have no idea what I’m gonna teach for mine tomorrow!  Crap.

Welllll, anyway, afterwards, I went to happy hour with my friend Jade, at a nearby bar. If you can call it a bar—it has wicker chairs.  But it did serve alcohol, so that was good. The whole thing was orchestrated by the Barcelona teacher’s association, so there were all these random people coming and going.  Jen (the job guidance woman) told us that in Spain, you have to include a picture on your résumé, and after meeting some of these aspiring “teachers” I can see why!    

Well, me and Jade decided to go find another bar, but it was still too early by Spanish standards, so even though we found plenty of bars, there weren’t a whole lot of people in them. We ended up in an American pop-culture bar, but we were only there twenty minutes until our other classmates texted to say they were at the first place.  We went back, but Jade only stayed a bit because she was worried about taking the Metro.  I wanted to win favor, and do a little more “relaxing” so I decided to stay.  I only meant to stay another half hour, but I ended up staying out until 2:30, and I wasn’t in bed until three…oops.  I guess I got caught up in everthing.  (And they were all still there when I left!)

Saturday, I had to sleep in.  I was just too tired not too.  After a wonderful breakfast of eggs, I grabbed the map and some fruit, and headed downtown.  I had in mind that I wanted to see the Picasso Museum that my sister Tori had told me about—and had even visited!  It sounded really cool, so I was looking forward to it. It was only 6 euros (under 25 get discounts!) and it was actually pretty neat.  It started off with early Picasso paintings, and he could actually paint!  At the tender age of 13, he was painting like an adult.  He won some award when he was 15 by joining the I-painted-a-sick-person-to-represent-the-new-age-of-medicine movement that was taking off in his time, but after that, he got all depressed and started painting everything blue.  By mimicking other painters, adding his own flair, and mixing in the blue, his art started to become more wonky, and next thing you know, he had started Cubism. Freaking weird, slightly creepy paintings with lines and cubes and lots of colors that don't fit = cubism.  Before that though, he had a fascination with “the other” aka fringe dwellers. Inmate, criminals, crazy people, homeless, etc.  He did this one sketch of a homeless-looking man, with a caption informing us the man was crazy.  There was something about the man that just caught my attention, and I looked at that one for awhile. 

Well after that, I moved (a little quicker) through las Menias, the really wonky, disjointed paintings that he is so famous for.  Some of them are really cool, but some looked too childish!  At the end, there was a quote saying that he started off painting like an adult, but by the time he was an old man, he was painting like a child. What was that Shakespeare quote?  All the world’s a stage, it starts off with infancy, and ends with “second childishness and mere oblivion/sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”  Full circle.

Afterwards, I tried to find this church that was supposedly free, and I nervously walked through these really narrow alleys.  I really like how alleys look, but I was nervous because this is supposedly a semi-bad part of town 9frequented by pick-pocketers), so I walked quickly, with my head down, and my purse tight under my arm.  Unfortunately, I forgot about the seemingly endless lunch breaks everyone here takes, so it was closed and I didn’t want to wait.  Instead, I snapped a few shots, including a few of Passieg del Born (plaza where they used to joust!) and then headed back. I was gonna try to find and explore the Barrio Gotic, but I didn’t feel that great.  My stomach had been feeling off all morning, and suddenly, I just felf like crap.  So instead, I metroed back (I barely made it, it was sooo stuffy in the metro and I really didn’t feel good) took a nap, and skyped people from home. 

El Theatre

Oh yes, and I have to mention the Catalan theatre! I went there a few days ago with my landlady, Mariluz, who is a wonderful woman, and super nice.  I love getting to talk to her; she speaks pretty good English, so we don't have a language barrier at least!  Anyway, I was talking with her last Monday and she told me that she does theater as a hobby.  I thought that was really interesting, and told her so, so she invited me to go to one of her practices.  She’s been sick, so she missed a few practices, but she was really happy to be going back, and I was thrilled to get to experience something that I wouldn’t be able to do as a mere tourist. 

 She met me outside my school around 8—I grabbed this calzone-thing and some fruit for my dinner, which was actually pretty good—and then we walked to the theater from there.  It was in Catalan, which is the “local” language here, as everyone knows both Catalan and Spanish.  I was a little nervous because what did I know about Catalan? It all sounds the same to me! 

We met one of the other actors outside, and he did that kiss-on-the-check greeting thing, and Mariluz was all, “She’s from America, she doesn’t do that!” But hey, I’m here, I want experience things the “Spanish” way, so I assured him that it was fine, and now I do it all the time.  Well, there were about 15 or 16 different actors/actresses and one director (who to me, looked like he had a cork up us rear, but whatever) and they started, and at first, I was the deer in the headlights.  I had no idea what they were saying! 

It’s a musical, and the first act (maybe the whole thing) takes place in a bar that is situated under (or next to) a hotel.  It’s a comedy, so the characters include several nuns, a really awkward boy, a janitor who likes to sing who is being courted by an overweight waitress, and several loose women.  You can’t say it isn’t interesting! 

I understood it a lot better once someone gave me a script.  Because Catalan, I discovered, was actually French and Spanish mushed together with a funny accent—and I studied both languages at school.  So, I can’t speak it, nor understand much of it spoken, but I can understand it written!  (For the most part) It was a wonderful discovery. Really. 

It was great to watch them try to learn the dance, especially when they came down the stage and one of the women grabbed me and tried to get me to do it. And then at one point, the director pointed at me and shouted at me to get on stage before he realized that I wasn’t one of the actors—that was a bit terrifying!

As we walked back, Mariluz explained the premise of the play, and we were both pleasantly supreied to see that I understood most of it!  I guess I’m learning Catalan, eh? That, and I’m pretty sure its true that 80% of communication is body language. 

Plaça Jaume

Finally used the metro today, though I wasn’t brave enough to go alone.  I went with my friend, Jade, downtown to Plaça Jaume, because our teacher was having an art exhibition, and they promised (cheap) wine.  We got there early and ended waiting outside in thee plaza with a large group of protestors, chanting something about Tunisia and Algeria.  Not sure exactly what it was about, but we tried to stand aside, as the square was lined with cops.  It didn’t help that my friend, Jade, started talking about the corruption of South African cops and the intense security systems that they have in their houses (including panic buttons in multiple rooms!)—and then she told about a scam where “cops” i.e. men with fake sirens “pull you over” on quiet roads and steal your shit.  So, if you hear a siren and you’re on a deserted road, you just keep driving. Weird—and creepy?  Richard, who’s lived here for a year, then followed up with a wonderful story about himself. He was at the metro late at night and two men attempted to robb with a knife! Luckily, he was fine, he managed to step into an open café, but yikes.  DC’s starting to sound like a wonderful place!

Anyway, the exhibition. It was modern art, abstract actually, so I had no clue what was going on, I just looked at the things and tried to see stuff that wasn’t really there.  We wanted to search for our teacher’s hidden emotion, but I don't think we ever found it. But I must say that the evening was much improved with a bunch of us, mostly people from the school, hilariously trying to imitate each other’s and random other accents…southern accents, New York accent, Boston, Queen’s English, Cockney, Aussie, South African, and so on.  We were all varying degrees of terrible, which made the random, somewhat confusing art pieces that much better.

And then there was school itself.  I taught today, and it was considerably better than yesterday.  Yesterday I was nervous as hell, and it definitely showed.  I messed up a few times, I talked super fast, and even my lesson wasn’t that great.  But today I taught “elementary,” so everything was better.  They don't tell you your grade though, which kind of sticks.  It’s like a guessing game…

Annnd, we’re learning a lot of properties from both ling 101, and the History of the English language.  My teachers here are all very impressed that I know all the answers to the linguistics questions already, plus I keep inserting little anecdotes from linguistics, like child language acquisition, or how things have changed since OE/ME, even semantic shifts in words!  It is frustrating how they use some different symbols (rather than the c-wedge or the s-wedge), I guess it's the international one.  And the vowels trip me up, since the damn things are different with different accents, and we’ve got four or five different accents in our class!  

De domingo

Well, I slept in a bit, and got a late start.  But I really wanted to go to la Sagrad Familia, which meant I was walking down Traversera de Gracia forever, plus the Cathedral line was frickin long. So, I didn’t get inside until mid-afternoon.  La Sagrada Famila was…phenomenal.  It was huge!  The first thing you saw was the enormous (side) entrance, literally all done up for over 500 feet with carvings and sculptures and spiraling and intricate designs and alcoves with more carvings inside—it was something else.  I don't really know to even describe it!

At first, I just waked around the building.  Gaudí (him again!) worked on this giant thing for years, in fact, he died working on it.  It still isn’t finished—and they think that it won’t be done for 25+ years!

The whole place is created to look like a forest, with columns and branches to look like trees.  The guy loves natural stuff, and everything, though carved from stone or marble, still had a natural feel.  Or so the museum said, anyway.  There were the stained glass windows too, which were a magnificent array of colors, and I do realllly like colors….

And then there were the towers.  That was the best part! I took the nativity lift, all the up to one of the super tall towers.  You come out of the little door, onto a narrow bridge.  You look down, and you realize just how frickin high up you actually are!  I’m not one to be afraid of heights, but I’ll admit, I felt, um, queasy, just a bit, as I stood there at the top with the four or five other people and surveyed the view around me.  And looked down.  They always say, don't look down cause then you’ll fall down.  I looked anyway, and well, I’m still here!  I also had an overwhelming desire to chuck something off the tower, but I’ve heard that from great heights, even a lightly tossed penny can turn into a mini torpedo! So, I resisted. 

From the top, you could see more fruit imagery, and you could tell that this guy really did like nature.  Barcelona could do with more green space—are isn’t a lot of grassy or wild areas—so I guess he was improvising!

Then, you get to walk down the nightmare-ish tower steps.  I say nightmare-ish because the interconnecting tunnels in the towers remind me of a narrow labyrinth with the possibility off falling out of a window and falling 400 +feet, and its just creepy.  If they didn’t put little running man signs (the exit sign) everywhere, I’d be sure to get lost!  And I’m pretty sure that that will happen in one of my dreams soon enough, and I’ll wake up drenched in sweat, panicked as I try to find a way out. 

Parc Guell was odd, I’d say.  It reminded me of anchient ruins meet a once-grand out-of-the-away square made of mosaics.  At first, it was designed to be a gated community (like we have today), but the idea was too modern and it failed (all rich people wanted to be right in town, amidst everything) and so it later became a public park.  It was decorated with columns that looked like upside-down termit mounds (yet they still looked really cool), with the center section lined with multicolored benches similar to some other details of Gaudí’s works. 

Then I walked home, but I started to get a little turned around because the blocks were uneven and I missed my street and turned at the wrong one, and ended up taking the longest possible route back to the house.  Oops.   At least I’m back now, snuggled into bed, jotting this down!  I think I’ll finish this and post in the morning though.  Hah!  Another difference between normal teaching and teaching non-natives—never explain what you’re doing (like I just did) because it will just confuse them. And on that note….

(Too bad it took me a week to actually post this…)

El Fin de Semana numero Uno (En Barcelona)

I always thought that when you traveled, you’d have to have someone else with you because who actually traveled alone? That’d be weird.  But I didn’t want to leave Barcelona without seeing the sights just because it wasn’t working out with the rest of my classmates and I.  So I got some advice (and a very detailed, and very helpful!) map from Mariluz and went to bed excited—to some extent.  I did make the mistake of watching Black Swan online, and that was one of the weirdest and creepiest movies I’ve seen, so I probably shouldn’t have watched it right before I was planning on going to sleep. Oh well.  But I uickly found out that

De sabado

I was your average tourist.  I had a blast though!  I walked decided to walk downtown (about a 45 minute affair where I saw…

-Casa Míla, a crazy ass apartment building Gaudí designed but it was closed so instead I went to the art exhibition inside, where I got yelled at twice for taking pictures inside.  But hey, it’s was modern art, meaning there were lots of colors and I like colors! I played the language barrier card.

-Casa Batalló.  I realllly wanted to see the inside of a Gaudí building, so I bucked up and paid the fee.  It was the strangest, craziest, wonkiest place I’d ever been to! I felt like I walked into a real-life game of Candyland meets Narnia’s boat the Dawn Treader. So, so weird, but really cool!  I had a tour of an apartment, the attic, and the roof.  The roof was the best, because not only did you get a nice view, but this was were the Candyland imagery really took off.  The place is famous for having a dragon-like thing on the roof (like the back of a sleeping dragon) with bright colors and crooked designs everywhere!  The whole house is rather reptilian, and there is barely a straight line in the building!

 -Las Ramblas, AKA the place to go to get robbed. I didn’t—I was lucky! It’s a big street with an extra wide median in the middle filled with vendors and street performers and street artists (who get frickin pissed if you take photos of them…). There are overflowing flower stands, men selling these annoying, bird-like whistles that only interest immature boys, and pets (where Barcelona kids traditionally went to buys pets).

-The monument de Colón (Columbus!) and la Mar de Mediterráneo—Barcelona’s port.  It was a giant column with good ol’ Columbus pointing out towards the horizon.  It made me feel just a little closer to home, knowing that if I followed his direction (figuratively) I’d get home eventually!

I felt a lot better, because now I finally knew where all the streets other people had been talking about were located and now people can give me directions and I can actually follow them!  (In English, por favor…) I felt really independent, finding my way on my own and everything.  Annnd I ate at a little sandwich shop, then ate ice cream in January!  (Coconut, pistachio and fudge—surprisingly really good!)

I did buy some street art (of Casa Batalló.  I liked a picture of Barrio Gotic better, but I haven’t been there yet, plus Batalló is something I’ll always remember!)—I always do, since I think street art is soooo much better, more authentic than, you know, “real” (aka expensive) art.