9/7/10

Another long day… I woke up with a sore throat, but I’m hoping it will go away soon. I met the four other kids who live near me and we took the metro to class. For our conversation group we had a tour of the Facultad de Filologia. It is amazing how nice the building is for being so old. After our tour, I walked with my friends Morgan and Emily to the beach. Although it would have been more practical to take the metro to the beach, we decided to walk and Morgan and I bought cellphones. The cell phone was only 19 euro which also includes 12 hours of talking at .09 euros per minute. It is the phone that everyone in our group has, so I’ll pretty much just use it to make plans and meet up with other people. On our way to the beach, which was about an hour long walk, we randomly came across the Picasso museum. I will definitely be going back there. On Sunday afternoons the museums in Barcelona are free, so I will probably go back then.


We finally made it to the beach and we ate our boccadilos. The beach was busier than Castelldefels, but the water was clean and refreshing, which I did not expect for being in the city. After about a half hour on the beach, it started to rain and everyone ducked under and the overhang created by the board walk. We met up with another BCA guy, Michael, but at that point we decided to head back towards the university. We took the metro this time, but got off at a random metro station. It wasn’t too far from the university (about a 10 minute walk) and we took pictures in front of a giant fountain in the middle a park that was near the metro exit. Morgan decide to stay in the park and read her Harry Potter and the Sourcer’s Stone (in Spanish), while Emily, Michael and I killed time by looking in some stores on the way to the university. I am looking to buying a shoulder bag that is big enough to carry my books. Across the shoulder bags are all the rage here for men and women, and I’m not sure if it is a European thing or just a precautionary thing in the city—either way I’m getting one. Backpacks are few and far between and seem to be very American. After strolling the city for a while, we went to the Facultad de Historia and worked on our homework together. In art history, we learned about the Greeks and Romans, and their influence on Spain. It was really cool to be sitting and looking at a picture of the Colosseum on the slide show, knowing that I have the ability to visit it (if I want to).

I took the metro home after class and when we got to our stop it was pouring outside. We all ran home, ducking under overhangs. For dinner, my first plate was some chickpea and tomato dish, while my second plate had a salad and a cut of pig stuffed with cheese. It tasted like chicken cord en bleu (spell check), but did not include the chicken. For dessert I had watermelon. Apparently, the word for seed is pepita, and after I asked Pepita made sure to explain that her name does not mean seed, but rather is a nickname for Josephine. After dinner, I watched some Spanish TV, read some of the newspaper (I did the Sudoku too), and Pepita gave me a word search book. I did the first word search, which is actually called Sopa de Letras (Soup of Letters) and then I looked up all the words I didn’t know in the dictionary. Now I’m headed to bed, hoping to get rid of my sore throat and cough by tomorrow.