9/19/10

I woke up and had some breakfast before heading to the beach to meet Emily.  The last two days have been rainy/ overcast, so I was excited for the nice weather.  The beach is about 40 minutes away between walking and the metro.  Once I got off the metro, I had to walk down Port Ville.  It was a nice Sunday morning stroll and it wasn’t too busy at that point.  I stopped in a supermarket and bought some peanut butter!  Finally, my search came to an end, and I no longer have to eat toast and butter.  I met Emily near a sculpture of 4 boxes stacked on top of one another at the beach.  We ended up seeing a few other people from our program there, but did not sit near them.  The beach was definitely a people watching place with a pretty good mixture of young and old people there.  There was one woman a few towels away who would not stop talking.  She was one of the few overweight people in Spain, she was entirely too tan and she didn’t pause for a minute.  She was talking in Spanish, so I could understand what she was saying, but I tried to block her out because after five minutes of hearing her, I was ready to bury my head in the sand.  Emily and I had a nice time at the beach though.  Emily went swimming with Lorenzo and Jack, and I stayed with our stuff.  You always have to go to the beach with two people, because you can’t leave your things alone.  In fact, a woman came up to us asking if we spoke Spanish, and then continued to tell us that her bag had just been stolen from right next to her.  She then continued down the beach to warn other people.  I left after a few hours to make it home in time for lunch. 

Today for lunch, Pepita had been cooking all day.  Her daughter and her daughter’s family was coming over to celebrate her grandson’s birthday.  When I got back to the apartment, her granddaughter and granddaughter’s boyfriend (17 years old) were already there, watching soccer on the couch.  Like in the U.S. Sundays are the days when all the teams in the Spain soccer league play one another.  I sat down on the couch with them, but it was kind of awkward, because they weren’t really interested in me.  Not to sound conceited, but I would have expected them to at least be friendly and try to talk to me.  I was the one trying to start all the conversations, but they weren’t too responsive.  After a few minutes with them, Pepita’s daughter, grandson (15) and granddaughter (6) arrived.  The daughter helped Pepita set the table for the meal, while all the grandkids and I sat on the couch watching soccer.  A few minutes later their dad came and then we all sat down to eat.  The dad was really nice and spoke pretty good English.  He spoke in Spanish to me, but a few times he would say things in English.

When we first sat down, Pepita’s granddaughters were speaking in Catalan, but their dad told them and everyone else to speak in Castellano (Spanish) for me.  Then he said something in English to me, and his daughter joked “Castellano!” because no one else knew English.  For our first course, we had rice with rabbit or pasta.  All the kids chose pasta, but I thought the rice and rabbit looked really good, which is was.  Our second course was some sort of beef dish.  Also, I thought it was really funny because they put out a dish of potato chips.  I never think of potato chips as something to put out for a meal, but they did.  They all drank Coke too.  For dessert, we had cake from a pastry shop which was vanilla, with vanilla and chocolate cream in the center.  I spent a while after lunch at the table with the adults, showing them the picture book of New England that I had given Pepita and drawing a map of the east coast to show the different states and how far away New York, D.C. and Canada are.

I left a little while later to meet Lorenzo, Emily and his Spanish neighbor.  Her name was Eva and she is studying English to be a translator between Catalan and English.  It was nice to have someone our own age take us around the city and she also brought one of her friends, Juan.  The deal was that we had to talk in Spanish and she would talk in English or Spanish.  We walked the Gothic quarters and into Old Town.  Even though I had already been there, it was nice to see it again.  She took us to this random little snack shop that she really likes and we got hot chocolate, churros and a few other pastries.  The hot chocolate was not like hot chocolate in the U.S., but more like hot chocolate pudding.  It was so thick that I could have put a churro on the top and it would have been suspended there.  We walked back through las Ramblas and I took the metro home for dinner.

After dinner, I took my laptop and sat on the couch.  I was planning on writing more for my blog, but I ended up showing pictures to Pepita for like an hour and a half.  It is nice talking to her and explaining things in Spanish.  Then it was time for bed and despite all the chocolate and cake that I had that day, the sugar could not keep me up.