I arrived in Barcelona on January 10th after a very long, and mostly sleepless flight. Luckily the plane was filled with a lot of kids doing IES Barcelona (my program) so I got to meet some people on the plane and not spend the entire flight cycling through the free movies they offered. Anyways, once I landed, I made my way through the airport and over to our IES orientation in order to learn how to get to my home stay. As it turns out, I accidentally checked that I would be finding housing independently of IES and so I had a minor freak out when I sat down with the IES worker and he asked me where the apartment I had found is. Luckily, I told him I actually wanted to be in a home stay so, after a very nerve-wracking half hour of him making phone calls, I found a home stay. It was a pretty scary start to my semester abroad but they reassured me that I wasn't the first case of that happening!
I eventually left the orientation room at the airport, hopped in a cab, gave the driver my address in some very broken Spanish and headed to my home stay. The apartment I'm living in is in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona, definitely one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city. The apartment's very big by Spanish standards, it takes up half a floor of the building, has 6 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. My home stay mom's name is Eulalia Romagosa and she lives here with her sons Luis and Ignacio and her daughter Maria. I also have two roommates, Travis and Mike. Travis goes to the University of Kentucky and Mike goes to CC (I didn't know him before, small world!).Needless to say, the house is pretty packed but it's nice to have so many people constantly around! I also got lucky because Eulalia is known throughout the IES home stay moms as being the best cook. She's been cooking us some incredible dinners since we've been here (some of my favorites have been Spanish tortillas, sausages with beans, paella, and chicken and brown rice) and I've been loving that!
Barcelona is a beautiful city, I've had a great time wandering around and exploring some of the different neighborhoods here. On my first night here, our RA Miguel took us walking around so that we could find the IES center where classes are. My apartment's about a 20 minute walk from the Plaza Catalunya, which is the main plaza in the city and where the IES building is. On our walk with Miguel, we walked down Passeig de Gracia, the biggest shopping street in Barcelona and passed Gaudi's La Pedrera and Casa Botllo. It blew me away that on my first night in Barcelona I was already seeing these incredible buildings right down the street from my house! Walking the streets here is a lot of fun, there are the huge Ramblas, shop-lined streets meant almost entirely for pedestrian traffic, big boulevards (such as Passeig de Gracia) and a lot of smaller streets that wind their way around the Gothic Quarter. Barcelona started off as an Ancient Roman town, so there is the older, maze-like Gothic Quarter and then it was expanded into the Eixample, the more modern, grid-based part of the city. It's nice that most of the city is built on the grid as it makes getting lost difficult, but it's still fun to wander around the Gothic Quarter, get lost and suddenly come out to the cathedral, a plaza or one of the city's marketplaces. The weather here has been nearly perfect (with the exception of a very cold week and a half in February) so it's been so easy to get up and go out walking around.
Getting used to the Spanish lifestyle has definitely been an experience. The biggest differences that I've had to get used to is the eating schedule, their generally slower pace and the late nights that they put in almost every night. As far as the eating schedule, Spaniards eat a very small breakfast (usually some bread with jam, maybe some fruit and some warm milk), then they eat their largest meal at around 3pm and then a small dinner. Eulalia feeds us breakfast and dinner, so we're on our own for lunch each day. Not only have I still not gotten used to eating dinner at around 9:30 each night but it's also been tough getting used to the much smaller portions that the Spaniards eat. Eulalia's been great about giving us a lot of food for dinner each night and I'm usually starving by the time it's ready. I don't think she's ever had a student staying with her who's eaten as much as I like to and she's always joking about me always being in the kitchen either making sandwiches throughout the afternoon for lunch or waiting for dinner to be ready! The Spanish also live at a much slower pace than I'm used to in the US and that's taken some getting used to. I didn't really realize just how slow they do things until I first went to McDonalds (yes I caved and did it a couple weeks in) and ended up waiting in line for about 20 minutes and then waiting another 15 after ordering. While it's been frustrating at times, I'm getting used to it!
After about a week of orientation, I started my classes with IES. I'm really enjoying all of my classes, I did a great job picking the ones that go on field trips and I also picked a few classes to learn about some Spanish history. The classes I'm taking are, Understanding Contemporary Spain (a history/political science class about Spain), Modernism in Architecture (perfect to be taking amongst all of the modernist buildings in Barcelona), the City as a Place to Live (a class about general city planning and urban development), History of the Mediterranean and Spanish. As soon as I arrived at my home stay, I learned that Eulalia speaks no English and I quickly found that my Spanish is rustier than I thought, so Spanish class has been a huge help there! The classes are all pretty interesting, but I've had a hard time getting out of my block plan mentality and being in different classes at the same time!
Since the weather's been so perfect, I've been able to see a lot of the city and experience what it has to offer. I've visited many of the parks here, Ciutadella, Park Guell, the Labyrinth Park, and Montjuic Park. Park Guell has been my favorite, it's entirely designed by Gaudi and offers some of the best views of the city. Ciutadella is the main city park and has a beautiful fountain, a botanic garden and a pond where you can rent rowboats. Montjuic is also an incredible park, it's built up on a hill, offers some great views and is where the main olympic stadium is built. I've also had the chance to visit the Picasso Museum, the Palace Guell (one of Gaudi's best works) and the Sagrada Familia. While I've been keeping busy, there's still so much I want to do and I can't help but feeling like I need to do all of it! It's also been fun walking down Las Ramblas to Port Vell and Port Olympic. The ports are beautiful and have some great boardwalks to walk along, nice little cafes and it's fun to people watch and check out the street performers down Ramblas and by the water. There's certainly no lack of things to do here and I'm very excited to keep exploring the city and finding what it has to offer!
Since being in Barcelona, I've also had the opportunity to do a little bit of travelling. The second weekend I was here, IES organized a program-wide trip to Valencia, a city a few hours south of Barcelona. On the way there, we stopped in Tarragona to see the ancient Roman elements of Tarragona. It was pretty amazing to see the coliseum there as well as the forum, circus and city wall. After lunch in Tarragona we headed to Valencia in our IES buses and spent the next day and a half in Valencia. While in Valencia, we took a guided walking tour of the city and visited the City of Arts and Sciences. The walking tour was fun because we had a very funny tour guide who took us into the cathedral and the market place amongst others. Valencia is a very beautiful city and it was great being able to tour through it with a guide! The City of Arts and Sciences is an ultra modern group of about 4 buildings hosting different museums and an aquarium. I took some great pictures of the City of Arts and Sciences and also spent some time in the aquarium because IES got us tickets to go in. On our way back that Sunday, we stopped at Torres vineyards, Spain's largest wine producers. We took a tour of the vineyard and did a wine tasting, it was delicious! Before getting to Barcelona, we stopped once more to have Calcotada, a traditional Catalan lunch. It was an incredible weekend, I'm so happy IES organized the trip!
I also travelled to Granada last weekend to visit my friend Eric who goes to CC with me. Granada was not at all what I expected, it's a very small city nestled right in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was so refreshing to get off the plane and be surrounded by mountains again, I've been missing the Rockies! It's a beautiful city though, and I didn't realize just how influenced it is by it's Arab culture. The first afternoon there, I got off the bus from the airport and got pretty lost looking for my hostel, but luckily met a kid on the bus, Andrew, who was looking for the same hostel so we figured it out together. I spent most of that day wandering around with Eric taking pictures. I was staying right by the cathedral in Granada (at a Hostel Funky Granada, which 100% lived up to it's name) so we walked around the cathedral and some of the small plazas near where I was staying. We then walked up into the Albayzin, the old Arabic neighborhood in Granada. The Albayzin is a neighborhood filled with very narrow, winding, vendor filled streets. There were also many tea houses in this neighborhood, something Granada is very well known for. So we wound our way up this neighborhood and eventually came out to this church right across from the Alhambra. It was amazing to see the Alhambra for the first time, especially at sunset. After taking some pictures, we wandered back down. We stopped in one of the teahouses for a bit, grabbed some kebabs for dinner and then went back to my hostel to hang out with some of the people I met there. That night, Eric and I went to an Irish Pub, Hannegans for karaoke night, it was a blast!
The next day, my friends Suzanna and Mari (both from IES Barcelona) got to Granada and we spent the day walking around the city. That night, we went to the Hammam, and ancient Arab bath house. Going to this bath house was one of my favorite parts of the trip, it was so incredibly relaxing and so cool to be surrounded by some of the ancient Arabic decor. I highly advise anyone going to Granada to go to the bath house! So we left the bath house feeling very relaxed and headed back to the hostel to go "tapas hopping" with a girl we had met at the hostel. One of the best things about Granada is whenever you order a drink at a bar, they have to give you a tapa with it. This was great because we went to a few different bars and tried the different foods at each. I went to bed very full that night! On the Saturday I was in Granada, Mari, Suzanna and I went to the Alhambra. I really didn't know much at all about the Alhambra before visiting and I was so blown away by the Arabic architecture and design there. The gardens were beautiful and I loved seeing the different tile and hand-carved plaster used to decorate the inside of the main palace. I also found it very interesting that there is a church and a monastery on the Alhambra grounds and that it was an entire city at one point. The Alhambra is built up in a hill over looking Granada, so the views from up there were the best I got all weekend. I really loved visiting Granada, it's a great city and it was fun to see Eric, I've missed my CC friends! I'm so excited to do a lot more travelling!
That pretty much brings me up to this last week and weekend. My friend Brian (from home) came out and visited me this weekend, it was so much fun having him here! He got here last Thursday night and I took him out with some of my friends to some of the bars and clubs here in the city (there's certainly no lack of them). We spent the next two days walking around the city and seeing the sites. I made sure to take him to Park Guell, Ciutadella Park and out for churros and chocolate (one of the more delicious Spanish foods). We also found ourselves at some basketball festival celebrating the FC Barcelona basketball team playing in the Copa del Rey. It was a pretty interesting experience, but fun to shoot some hoops with some Spanish kids. We also spent some time the next day hanging out down by the water and up at MontJuic since the weather was so nice. It was a really fun weekend and I loved having Brian here to see Barcelona and meet some of my friends!
Whew! Well that just about covers the gist of what I've been up to this past month, I'll make sure to update this as frequently as possible and keep you all posted on what I'm up to over here!
The photos I've included in this post are (from top): me at the Labyrinth Park, The Cathedral of Barcelona, The Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's Casa Botllo, Montjuic Park, me at the fountain at Ciutadella Park, some friends and I at the Arc de Triomf, Gaudi's Park Guell, Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences, the ancient Roman coliseum in Tarragona, and Mari, Suzanna and I at the Alhambra.
To see some more photos I've taken, here's a link to the pictures I've uploaded:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151170333500481.791977.588220480&type=3&l=7454b7d008
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