Begin Week Three

Good morning all!  (Side note: I started this almost 12 hours ago and am finishing it now, which is why the hours don't match with it being morning) I just finished my delicious breakfast of coffee and toast with ham (which here is more like wide slices of thin, flat, non-crunchy bacon; sooo good), and am now hanging out in the living room/kitchen while my host mother is getting ready for work.  I don't have class until pretty late (noon on Mondays and Wednesdays, and 3pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays), so last week I ended up sleeping in until 10 or 11 every day, which is too late!  I'm going to try to get up earlier and go do stuff this week, even if just walk around the city, because sleeping 10 hours a day is such a waste of time.

So this past weekend.  Friday I didn't do anything before 3 (oops), then had class 3-6, then went home and sat on facebook until 9:30 (another oops) when I went out to meet my GA group and Lluís for the most enormous meal of my life.  We were going out to get tapas (I don´t remember if I´ve explained tapas yet; put simply they're special spanish snacks similar to appetizers except that usually people order them individually; you can get patatas bravas (potatoes), or salchichas (sausages), or other stuff) so I assumed it was a small meal.  But this was a very fancy tapas place.  We had wine, four rounds of tapas, AND a main dish.  I wasn't feeling incredibly well so by the time we got to the main course I couldn't eat any more.  And by the way, this whole eating huge meals isn't very normal.  Well, I guess sometimes Spaniards will eat a huge meal once a day, but I've gotten the impression that they like to eat a bunch of small meals throughout the day.  Which personally I like better than the American method of stuffing your face 2 or 3 times a day.  By doing it the Spanish way you can constantly be eating without feeling like too much of a fatty.

Wow I'm still on Friday night.  So afterwards our group split: all the Americans went off to some American bar called Dow Jones (oh so clever) while Lluís went out with his friends who had just showed up at the restaurant.  He invited all of us to go with them, but everyone wanted to go out with the CIEE people.  I was the only person who took him up on the offer.  Luckily it wasn´t too awkward since they were all really friendly and Lluís talked to me a lot.  But I will admit that when they were having a group conversation I had no idea what they were saying about 95% of the time.  They speak so fast!  Anyway, we went to a nice bar where one of their friends was having a birthday party, and I hung out there with them until we left around 2 (which is very early for Spaniards, might I add).

The next day, Saturday, I spent the majority of my day at el Parque Montjüic, which is on top a small nearby mountain.  It was beautiful weather to be outside too!  I´d say it was in the low 70´s, upper 60´s perhaps?  Up there we...

...explored a castle...

 ...walked around in the park...

...saw the ´92 Olympic Stadium...

 ...and walked past El Museu Nacional d'Arte de Catalunya (this is the view from the front facing away).

 We also found the most amazing pair of slides in the world.

We would have spent the entire day there but a father with his two girls showed up so we felt awkward and left.  All in all, Saturday was a great day.

Now for Sunday.  First half of the day I didn´t do much (again, the whole sleeping late thing...), although I did meet up with some friends to plan the weekend trips we want to take this semester (it's tricky figuring it out because we have class on Friday, so our weekends are short).  Short summary: Berlin and Prague on our 4-day weekend (I'm going to see the Berlin Philharmonic!!!) and Amsterdam and Brussels on a 3-day weekend.  The other weekends not reserved for studying we hope to go to Granada, Sevilla, Mallorca, maybe Salamanca, maybe somewhere in northern Spain.  We'll be somewhere in Spain the week before Easter for Semana Santa (Holy Week), and back in Barcelona for the Catalonian holiday, El Día de San Jorge.  Hopefully after the program ends I´ll find some time to go to France or visit my friends in Italy (one´s going to see family there, and another will be travelling around with her boyfriend).  My host señora also invited me to go up in the mountains behind Barcelona one weekend with her and Julia (her 4-year old daughter) to visit one of her sisters (my señora is one of twelve siblings!).

The big part of Sunday was the FC Barcelona game!!  Oh my gosh it was amazing.  The stadium was absolutely enormous, it was so cool!  European football is so much better than American football.  I'm adding this to my list of reasons why I'm never coming back home.  And of course Barça smashed Málaga 4-1.  Haha we also happened to sit in front of this huge group of guys who kept randomly yelling cheers, or continuing stadium-wide cheers after everyone else had stopped.  It was really funny.  At one point they started one cheer that went to the tune of the Yellow Submarine and my friend next to me started humming along.  Yet again, it was all in all a very good day.

I promised myself I wouldn't write enormously long posts, but I think that's going to be impossible for me.  Either you get all the details or none of them.  I'm gonna go with all of them because otherwise each post would be about five sentences long, which is boring. So anyway, I hope you all have an awesome day!  Adios!