less than a day now . . . !

Today is my last official day in Barcelona. I took my last exam this morning, went to my favorite vegetarian establishment in the city for lunch with a friend, and did some last-minute souvenir shopping.

Now I'm almost totally packed. I'll be back in Barcelona on the 12th, but this is my last real, full day here. It's sad in many ways, and I know I'll miss the city, but right now I'm really anxious to get to the UK and see new things. I'm even more anxious to get home on the 14th!

Time to get packing.

quatre dias

Today is the last Monday I'll ever spend in Barcelona (on this trip, anyway. I'm going to say that because I would like to come back to Europe someday, and visit Barcelona to see how it's changed). And it went pretty well, I'd say.

We went up to Tibidabo, this mountain that overlooks the city and which has an amusement park on top. We took a train, walked a fair ways, and then took a funicular (I guess we'd call it a cable car) to get all the way up. It was worth it--we had some fantastic views of the city. There were these middle-aged British women trying to find La Sagrada Família down below, and I spotted it and took a picture. Then I tried to show them where it was--I even got out my camera and showed them the picture--but they refused to believe me. They thought it was the Barcelona Catedral, which it definitely was not. Silly ladies.

This weekend was also a good way to wrap up the semester. Saturday during the day I took a short trip out to Sitges with a friend from my research class. Sitges is a beautiful beach town less than an hour from Barcelona, to which I wouldn't mind retiring someday (but on a teacher's salary, that's probably too much to wish for). It has nine beaches, and some of the finest, cleanest sand I've ever seen at a beach. We wandered around the city and just had a nice, relaxing time looking at the shops and eating gelato.

Saturday night I went with some people to see the fountain at Montjuïc, ate some freshly baked pizza for dinner, and then saw La Bella y la Bestia--the musical, live, in Spanish. The show was pretty fantastic--the costumes and set blew me away, and it was really interesting to hear Beauty and the Beast in Spanish and see where the translation differed from the original English. The guy who played Lumiere was really great, and "Be Our Guest" was pretty much exactly what it should be on stage.

Tomorrow I'm just going to hang out in the city center, get lunch, and give my final research presentation. My professor read over my draft of the complete paper and said it didn't need anything more, given the time constraints. That was pretty nice to hear. Check the research paper off the to-do list!

I still have two exams ahead of me, but I'm sort of kind of done caring. I'm having a good last week in Barcelona, and soon I'm going to England (where I'll meet up with my mom!) and Scotland. After that, it's HOME!

and here we go.

Hey everyone! I'm sorry I've been such a sporadic updater lately. Things have been pretty crazy with midterms, my research project, and (of course) spring break. I also took a trip to Granada the weekend of 27th, which was one of the coolest trips I've taken yet this semester (although to be fair, most of them have been pretty amazing).

Granada is a wonderful city. I loved it for its small(ish) size and the atmosphere--it's very different from the style-conscious city that is Barcelona. I felt more at home there, if only because people weren't dressed to the nines while walking down the street. It seems like a really nice university town, and I found myself sort of wishing I'd studied there for the semester. But Barcelona has many of its own charms, so that wish wasn't too strong. After arriving via overnight train on Friday, I spent most of the day just exploring the city. I wandered around the Albaicin (an old, windy, and beautiful neighborhood in the city) for a while.


View of the Albaicin and the Muralla Arabe (Arab Wall)

I spent a ton of time at the Alhambra, an Arabic palace and fortress with some beautiful gardens in the same complex. I booked a ticket for Saturday and spent six hours just walking around, enjoying the views of everything. But since six hours just wasn't enough, I ended going back on Sunday--I was actually trying to find a park that a friend recommended I visit, but since it was closed and I was near the Alhambra anyway, I went in again. Here are a couple pictures:


Patio de los Arrayanes in the Palacio Nazaries


Palacio del Partal


Me next to the Palacio del Partal (which you can't see, but is to my right), with the gorgeous view of the Albaicin in the background

There are more Granada pictures here and here.

After Granada was a stressful week in which I tried to get a lot of work done on my research project. I managed to get two interviews done, even though I didn't have enough money for the train fares to and from the school where I did the interviews. But that's another story.

On April 3rd I left Barcelona for Italy. I flew into Venice and spent one night and one day there until John met me on Saturday the 4th, when we went to Rome. We spent three and a half days in Rome, and it was incredibly surreal the whole time to be visiting places like the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Vatican, and the ruins of this one old Roman port city called Ostia Antica. Rome itself is full of fun things to do (and tourists doing all of those things), and it was really cool to see all kinds of stuff that fascinated me when I learned about them in my high school World History class. We also saw some amazing art and ancient artifacts in museums (the Vatican museum has a sweet collection of ancient Egyptian stuff!).

From Rome we went to Cinque Terre, a beautiful series of five villages on the northwestern coast. We hiked quite a bit the one full day we were there; we went from the first village (where we were staying) all the way to the last village--a hike of around 9km! It was challenging, but a lot of fun. There were some beautiful views of the coast and the different villages from the path, and fortunately I didn't fall off the cliff-like paths like this one poor guy who was on my program...

After Cinque Terre, we headed off to Florence for a quick visit and ended up seeing some really cool stuff. I wanted to see Dante's house (which is actually just a house near where he probably lived) because of the Medieval Lit seminar I took last semester in which we read the Divine Comedy and learned about Dante's obsession with Florence, his hometown, but the museum turned out to be not-so-great. We did see a lot of really cool things, though, and I had the best pastries of my life for breakfast one morning. So that was nice.

Our last stop was Venice (again), since we were both flying out of the Venice airport. Those few days were cool; we saw some nice, quiet neighborhoods away from the claustrophobia-inducing crowds of tourists, ate some delicious (and cheap) pizza, went to the Correr Museum, and saw St. Mark's Basilica and the Doge's Palace (at the Palace I learned a lot about Venetian history). I looked hard for the Basel Bank on St. Mark's Square, but I don't think it actually exists (it was featured in Casino Royale, and was kind of the main reason I wanted to go to Venice...).

Here's a picture of the Grand Canal in Venice, taken from the Accademia Bridge the day I spent alone in Venice:



One cool thing about Italy was that I could generally speak to people in half-Spanish and they would understand me. I even understood a lot of Italian--knowing a little bit of Catalan in addition to my Spanish really helped with that. It makes me want to study languages forever and ever. Too bad I don't have time for more language classes at Grinnell...

All in all, Spring Break 2009 was a great success. We ate a ton of delicious food, and for once I wasn't forced to eat a million tortilla española sandwiches! I took over 800 pictures, which will all be up on my Picasa account at some point in the near future.

Now it's back to the grind of getting all my work done for finals and my research project--all of which will be over by May 1st. It's incredible to think that I only have 17 more days here (I have a countdown). There is so much to do on top of all the work--things I haven't seen or experienced in Barcelona yet. And then after that, it's off to London and Scotland until May 12th. I'll be home on May 14th! Weird!

travel marathon!

This past weekend was the start of a four-weekend-long "travel marathon" for me--first stop, Vienna! (Next is Granada, and after that it's two weekends in Italy for spring break.) There I met up with John, and was blown away by all the musical history in the city as well as all the wonderful sights and food.

I spent the night (Thursday the 19th) in the BCN airport because my flight to Vienna was at 6:30 on Friday morning. Needless to say, I didn't get enough sleep and ended up passing out on the plane from Barcelona to Vienna. Friday I spent the day by myself, walking around Vienna and visiting some music-related things--such as Mozart's house! (One of the many he lived in, anyway, which is now a museum.)

Saturday was a long day of sightseeing and at night we almost saw Joshua Bell live. But tickets were completely sold out--even standing room! Before that, we ate lunch at this great little place that served finger sandwiches for €1 each. They were pretty tasty, and there were some great vegetarian options.

Sunday we got up realllllly early to go see the Vienna Boys' Choir perform at mass in the Hofburg chapel. The singing was wonderful and had a very other-worldly sound to it. I would have liked to see some of the mass, too, but we were stuck in a very crowded standing-room part of the chapel and I was behind some very tall people. So that was sad. But it was nice, nonetheless.

We also saw the National Library (or part of it, anyway) on Sunday. That was a really wonderful, overwhelmingly ornate place--it was built for one of the emperors of the Austro-Hungarian empire (can't remember which at the moment, though). Compared to the Long Room at Trinity College in Dublin, it was huge and . . . well, like I said, a little bit overwhelming. The whole ceiling is covered with elaborate paintings, and the place itself just sort of oozed decadence and royalty. Not that that's totally a bad thing. But I preferred the Long Room to this, by far.


The National Library

Another thing we did on Sunday was tour the State Opera house. It was beautiful, huge, and the tour guide was really interesting and I learned a lot. Most of the building was destroyed in WWII, but has since been reconstructed mostly according to the original plans. Here are some pictures:


Inside the main hall thing, looking up at the seats directly facing the stage and the huge, awesome light fixture.


Going up the main staircase.

I came back on Sunday night, spent this week going to classes and trying desperately to set up interviews for my research project (and failing!), and getting ready for Granada. Oh, and coming down with a cold. Yessss.

So tonight I head off to Granada by train. I have a ticket to see the Alhambra, but nothing else concretely planned for the weekend. I'll be there until Sunday evening, when I take another night train back to Barcelona. Hopefully going to Granada makes me feel less sick, because this cold thing is really kind of irritating.

Anyway, there are pictures from Vienna here! And now I should go finish packing my stuff for tonight!

update!

Wow, it's been a while. Things have been weird--I got really sick the weekend of February 20th, spent the next week recovering, went to Ireland for 4.5ish days, came back to Barcelona for two days, went to Navarre for three days, came back to face the harsh reality of midsems, spent this past weekend in Barcelona, and here I am.

I have a TON of pictures from my trips to Ireland and Navarre. I took . . . over 200 pictures in each place? Woops.

To sum it up: Ireland was absolutely amazing. It's green and beautiful right now, so I can only imagine what it's like during the summer months. We saw the Cliffs of Moher and spent time in both Galway and Dublin. We also spent a couple nights in Lisdoonvarna, a small town near the cliffs. We walked from Lisdoonvarna to Doolin, a coastal town near the cliffs, one day and then rented bikes to get to the cliffs. That failed because it was rainy and cold, so we retreated back to Lisdoonvarna and went to the cliffs the next day--and it was sunny and beautiful! So that was really nice. Here is a picture of the cliffs (one of many dozens that I took throughout the visit):



Galway was a really nice, pretty little city. Dublin was really cool, too. We saw ancient books at Trinity College, which was kind of one of the highlights of the trip for me. What can I say, I'm a sucker for old illuminated manuscripts.

All the rest of my Ireland pictures are here.

The next weekend I went with IES to Navarre, which was kind of an organizational disaster but still a good time. We saw a couple old castles, lots of beautiful mountains, snow(!), and more wind turbines than I've ever seen in my entire life (the record prior to that trip was one, so it may not seem that impressive . . . but it was). We also visited a vineyard and some stops along the road to Santiago de Compostela, which was a huge route for pilgrimages a la The Canterbury Tales, except on the continent. We stayed in Pamplona, where Hemingway stayed and fell in love with the Fiesta de San Fermin, which includes the running of the bulls. There are lots of pictures
here.

In that album there are also some pictures from my weekend here--I spent a lot of time outside near the sea. It was warm and beautiful out, so I did a lot of walking and even spent some time at the beach! So there are some pictures of that in there too.

Here is a picture of the Castle of Javier in Navarre:

sick in barcelona!

It's been what, three weeks since I updated? Well, since then I've gone to El Parc del Laberint and Budapest. Not much else is happening here.

This weekend in Carnaval in Catalonia; there are big parties in Barcelona and in Sitges, a city about an hour outside of Barcelona. Unfortunately, so far I've been sick. I've been resting and drinking a lot of tea. I think I have consumed over 6 liters of tea since yesterday morning. This is getting a little ridiculous, but hopefully I'll feel better by Thursday--I'm going to Dublin then.

Because of the big events going on this weekend and this illness, I feel like I'm wasting my time here. While I think it's totally okay for me to try and recover . . . I still feel a little lame for not going out all the time. So once this stupid illness is gone, I'm going to try and do more where that is concerned (i.e., getting out of the apartment to see more new things and have new experiences).

So, yeah. Tea and sleep have basically defined this weekend.

The Parc del Laberint was a lot of fun, and there are pictures up on my Picasa account.

I took some pictures in Budapest, and those will eventually be up online . . . someday.

Yep. Time for some sleep. It's been a long week (I had something due or a test every day this week, so I think being sick is partially a culmination of all the stress).

the palau

Yesterday night I went to a concert at the Palau de la Música Catalana. The Sofia Sinfonietta (from Bulgaria) performed three pieces by Beethoven: the Egmont Overture, Piano Concerto No. 5, and Symphony No. 5. Their performance was, in the end, eclipsed by the beauty of the Palau itself. Here are some pictures that I wasn't technically supposed to take:


View of the stage from my seat.


The stained-glass skylight.


Close-up on the skylight. According to Wikipedia, the women make up a choir that surrounds the sun.


Lights and mosaic arches on the second floor, as seen from my seat.


Close-up on the right side of the arch over the stage. The sculpture is meant to represent the ride of the Valkyries in Wagner's The Valkyries.


The Sofia Sinfonietta after concluding their performance of Beethoven's 5th.

linguistic interference

I'm developing this thing where I have a somewhat hard time transitioning into English after extended periods of hearing/speaking Spanish. On Tuesday/Thursdays, I have 2 classes in Spanish about history and politics followed by one class in English about research. By the time I get to the research class, I am still wrapped up in a Spanish-language-world and it takes me a minute to get used to English again.

Also, I find that when I'm having a casual conversation with someone in English, I often use Spanish words/phrases, like "vale" or "si" or "por eso . . ." And now that I'm learning Catalan and trying to retain all the stuff we're learning, I have a tendency to walk around, muttering street/Metro stop names to myself to try and get the pronunciation right.

Hurrah for languages?!

Edit: I uploaded my pictures from last weekend, when I went to Girona and then the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. They're even captioned! Excitement!

travel plans

I just booked a flight from Barcelona to Budapest for the weekend of the 13th. That should be fun, and a little bit of a relief since my roommate's boyfriend is coming to Barcelona that weekend.

This past weekend I went to Girona (a Catalonian city, just over an hour outside of Barcelona by train) with a friend from class and two of her roommates. Girona has a ton to offer (like Arabic baths, an archaeological museum, a beautiful wall that you can climb and walk on, and multiple beautiful churches), but because the weather was really crappy the day we went it wasn't as good an experience as it would have been on a nicer day. We saw a bunch of cool stuff, but ended up getting soaked in the rain and paid way too much for a kind of crappy lunch. Oh well. I have pictures from that trip which I'll put online eventually.

Just because I have been thinking about travel a lot lately, here are other plans I have for this semester:

Dublin: February 26 - March 2
Vienna: sometime in March...?
Navarre: (study trip with IES) March 5 - 7
Italy: April 3 - 13
London/other historical sites in England: May 1 - May 5ish
Budapest (again): May 5ish - May 11?
Granada: sometime before I leave

I'd also like to take some day-trips to different places in Catalonia, like Sitges, Figueres (birthplace of Salvador Dalí!), and La Costa Brava (there's an amazing beach in a town called Lloret de Mar that has a castle! I know this because I saw a picture of it on a postcard).

I may end up going to Figueres one day this weekend; if not, I'm totally fine with staying in Barcelona and exploring. I'm planning to go to a concert at the Palau de la Música Catalana on Friday--they're playing Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and his Piano Concerto No. 5. Should be pretty amazing.

Madrid

This past weekend, I went to Madrid with three girls from my program. Despite the cold and occasional rain, it was a good time and we saw pretty much everything we had planned to visit.

We took a bus from Barcelona at midnight on Friday and got to Madrid around 7:30am on Saturday. We went straight to our hostel, checked in, and then went out to do some sightseeing. Here are some pictures from Saturday, when we went to the Museo del Prado, el Parque del Retiro, and Plaza Mayor (among other things).


In front of El Prado. We weren't technically supposed to take pictures inside the museum, but I snuck a few . . .


. . . this one included. It's Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Sons." I was particularly interested in seeing this one because a friend from school (hi, Mer!) has a print of the picture and we learned about Goya in Spanish 4 in high school. It was smaller than I expected, but still really cool.


After El Prado, we went to El Parque del Buen Retiro. It was really, really beautiful, complete with a large pond and a "Palacio de Cristal" (a glass palace).


Palacio de Cristal

Later we went to Plaza Mayor. It was quieter than I expected it to be, but that's probably because we went in the afternoon on a chilly Saturday. I think it's supposed to come to life at night. It's pretty touristy, though, so there wasn't too much to see except souvenir shops and some restaurants.


Plaza Mayor


Plaza Mayor

It was kind of gross out on Sunday (rainy and too cold to walk very far without losing all sensation in my feet). The tour of Palacio Real, the main thing we did that day, was mercifully indoors. It's an enormous, old, decadent palace that housed several generations of Spanish kings. Like at El Prado, we were forbidden from taking pictures inside the building, but I snuck a few anyway.


In this huge courtyard thing.


Beautiful ceiling (almost all the rooms had painted ceilings).


The throne room. The image quality is kind of crappy, but whatever. It's the THRONE ROOM.


There is a room called the Stradivarius Room. I didn't realize it would be full of actual Stradivari until we got inside and I saw glass cases with beautiful violins and cellos inside.

(Like always, there are more pictures here.)

All in all, the trip to Madrid was a good one. The experience of eating in Madrid, however, emphasized just how hard it is to be a vegetarian in Spain. In 2 days, I ate 3 tortilla española (basically, an omelette with potatoes and onions inside) sandwiches as main meals. I'm really glad I decided to live in an apartment in Barcelona.

This weekend I'll be in Barcelona, probably going back to Parc Güell and walking around the city some more. There's still a lot I haven't explored, but which I really want to see.

a lot of things

Okay. So I've seen a lot of really interesting sights since I last updated: La Sagrada Familia, El Torre Agbar, the sea (!), and a whole lot of windy old streets lined with beautiful buildings.

I'll give brief summaries of each thing; there are tons of pictures here that I won't post, but which anyone can browse if they so desire.

Last Saturday (the 17th) I went to see La Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's last project which is STILL not finished (it's been under construction for over 110 years). A lot of the work on the Sagrada Familia since Gaudí's death has been designed by other artists/architects. So while it's not all Gaudí, it is still impressive. Here are a few pictures:


The nativity facade. The angle is all weird because the building is MASSIVE and I am short.


The passion facade. Like a good deal of the rest of the cathedral, it's still under construction. The sharp, linear figures in the scenes aren't of Gaudí's design, and the artist who created them has received a lot of criticism because they are so unlike true human forms, in a way.


In Spanish, "La Sagrada Familia" means "the Holy Family." On a bunch of the corners of the building are the names of the members of the family.

After circling the Sagrada Familia for a while (I didn't go inside that visit; I'm waiting until it's free) I decided to go on a walking tour of El Born. The route was planned out by a guidebook my dad gave me, and turned out to be really cool.

One of the coolest things I passed was the Santa María del Mar. Its doors were open, so the classmate I was with and I went inside to take a look.







* * *

On Sunday, I took another guided walk from the same guidebook but this time through El Poblenou. I saw El Torre Agbar up close, and in my wanderings I had some delicious lemon ice cream and eventually found a beautiful park next to the sea. Here are some pictures from that walk:


Torre Agbar.


La Rambla del Poblenou


Nom nom nom. Delicious lemon ice cream from El Tío Che, an apparently famous ice cream and turrón shop. It's pretty cool that it's warm enough here (sometimes) to eat ice cream.


A path in the pretty park I found near the sea.


View of the sea from the park.

That's it for now. More pictures can be found at the link above. This weekend I'm taking a bus to Madrid with some friends from the program. I'm excited to see some more of Spain, especially since the regional differences here are apparently quite clear.

a few reflections

I'm not trying to be all "AMERICA IS SO BETTER THAN SPAIN" or "SPAIN IS SO WEIRD," but here are some things I've noted about Barcelona in the last week and a half:

- About 96% of the women here wear skinny jeans and leather boots. Even little children dress fashionably. It makes me feel like a frumpy, sloppy American for wearing casual shoes and hoodies all the time.

- There is this cool thing called Bicing which allows Barcelonans to check out bikes and return them at various points throughout the city. Yay eco-friendliness + exercise!

- McDonald's and Starbucks are everywhere. There are also Dunkin' Donuts and Burger Kings. I expected far less of a fast food presence, but clearly I was wrong.

- All the stores play American music. I think I've heard "Disturbia" by Rihanna and the Temptations' "My Girl" more than 100 times in metro stations by this point.

- Lined paper is very hard to come by. Apparently people here really like blank or grid paper. Also, they do not seem to have two-pocket folders anywhere!

- Mullets are really popular.

- It's really hard to find a place that will sell you chocolate chip cookies. There are wonderful little bakeries everywhere, though.

That's all for now. I have a lot of pictures to post, but I'll get to those sometime when I'm less sleepy and hungry.

Casa Batlló

On Tuesday I went with a friend from class to see Casa Batlló, one of Antoni Gaudí's most famous creations. It's located close to the IES centers in a really upscale neighborhood, and stands out as one of the most interesting buildings I've ever seen (granted, I haven't seen the Sagrada Familia yet).

We took a tour of the building with audioguides.


Casa Batlló from the outside.


Close-up on the windows.


Close-up of a really beautiful chandelier on the second floor.


Awesome window in the main room.


Beautifully tiled floor on the first roof (there are two!)/patio thing.


The uppermost hallway looks like the inside of a whale. The blinds that are built into the windows are designed to let in a lot of natural light without letting people outside the building see in.


On the spiral staircase going up to the roof!


The top roof is awesome. It has a great view, and some amazing mosaic chimneys. There's also that curvy-spiny thing that looks like the spine of a reptile, and for that reason a lot of people think the building is meant to represent St. George fighting the dragon.

Besalú and Vic

On Saturday, 450-some IES students went to Besalù and Vic, two medieval towns near Barcelona in Catalonia. It was pretty much the most yuppie-touristy thing I've ever done. Here you can see the crowd from just two of 9 or 10 busloads of people that traipsed through the cities:



Besalú is an important historical site because of its Jewish quarter and how well the buildings have been preserved. The river that runs near the town is water that comes from the Pyrenees, and apparently over time it filled up some of the buildings and preserved them. One of those buildings contained a water purification bath. Here's a kind of crappy picture of it:



Apparently men and women had different schedules for purification; that is, women had to enter the bath more frequently than men to rid themselves of sin. There was some interesting numerology behind the number of steps, but I forget the details.

Later in Besalú we saw a church that survived not only time but also fire during the Spanish Civil War. It was pretty impressive inside. There were some restored pillars near the alter, and you could tell which ones were restored and which were original: the originals were scorched black by fires and chipped by gunfire during the Guerra Civil. Unfortunately, none of my pictures from inside the church turned out too well.

We got some free time to go walk around Besalú after the tour, and there were a lot of really pretty, old buildings. Outside of a shop on our way out of the city, a man was offering samples of cookies sold there. I asked him what they were like, and after he described them to me he asked where I was from. When I told him "los Estados Unidos," he immediately lit up and said, "Ah! Do you prefer Bush or Obama?" I told him Obama, and he seemed pretty pleased.

Vic wasn't quite as pleasant an experience as Besalú. While it was pretty chilly in Besalú, it was even worse in Vic because it rained pretty much the whole time we were there. The tour was fairly interesting, in spite of the cold. Here are some pictures from Vic:


Main plaza in Vic. The arches on the buildings date back to medieval times when they were constructed for the markets that were held in the plaza.


Roman temple, or the reconstruction of a Roman temple that used to be on this site.


Inside of a beautiful church.

The trip was interesting overall, but the weather was pretty much the worst weather ever for tourism in Spain. On the way home, we had to be let off the bus away from our point of origin because there was a huge protest against the Israeli strikes in Gaza. Streets were blocked off, police were everywhere, and there was a helicopter circling the plaza where the protest was held. Powerful stuff.