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!

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!