Barcelona! (Por fin...)

Life in Spain has settled down a bit and I love it. Sorry I haven’t written in forever! The trouble with normal life is it often seems silly to sit down and describe it. But I have done some interesting things since I last wrote so first I will tell you about my trip to Barcelona!

The ILP Spanish classes I was taking ended and finals were finally over and we still had a week until real classes started, so we all scattered to the winds and traveled where we could. 5 of my friends and I decided that it was a good idea to stay within Spain since it was our first big trip, and that Barcelona sounded really cool, so that’s where we went. The trip started out rather stressful because our flight was really early and at first we couldn’t find our bus stop since online it gave us a street name but no intersection. So at 6am the big group of us with our large backpacks was wandering around the street Gran Via looking for a bus stop that said aeropuerto (airport). We ended up getting super lucky though because we saw the bus from about a block away and even though we still hadn’t found the right stop we were able to wave it down and it stopped and let us on (I think it was my good bus driver karma kicking in since I would occasionally let really desperate passengers on even if they weren’t at exactly the right stop). Things went smoothly until we were just about to get on the plane, we handed the flight attendant our boarding passes only to find out that we were missing a crucial stamp we were supposed to have gotten outside security! So all six of us literally ran back, got the stamp (which just verified that our passports and boarding passes matched) and nervously waited in line to go through security a second time and sprint to the gate to get on our plane. The plane ride was really short and soon we were landing in Barcelona! We made it to our hostel with no problems at all, enjoyed a grocery store lunch of bread and fruit, and took a really long siesta. That night we took the metro further into the city and had a traditional Spanish dinner of paella, basically rice with seafood (I cheated and had steak instead of sea food though). We walked around a little bit and went to bed early (which is midnight here in Spain).
The next day we went and did some sight seeing and walked all around Barcelona. The thing that struck me as the biggest difference between Barcelona and Granada physically was that the streets were sooo wide there! I mean, they were really normal-sized by American terms, but they were always at least twice the size of Granada’s streets. The other thing was the metro. They have an amazing metro system that takes you all through the city in no time at all! It was really cool to be able to get around so fast. I must admit, however, that I really love that I can walk from end to end of Granada in just an hour, so I don’t ever really need public transportation to get around. We saw some amazing plazas with giant sculptures and even climbed up onto some huge lions and took pictures! That was probably the highlight of my day. Later we went to see Park Guell, designed by Gaudi. I’m not really sure what I would call the structure, it was kind of just a really beautiful platform with a pretty park up behind it. But the entire thing was covered in the most amazing mosaics! At the top we got to see a great panoramic view of Barcelona that was the perfect end to the sightseeing experience.
That night was the one night we decided to go out and see how the night life in Barcelona compares to Granada. I’m not sure if I have or haven’t gone into depth about the strange schedule we keep here, but it is very important to understanding the way life is here so I will explain. Early morning is 9am, and, for example, landlords still apologize when they ring the doorbell at 10am. Breakfast is small, usually a café con leche, which is what they call a shot of espresso mixed with milk, and a tostada , which is a small loaf of french bread cut in half and toasted, with something on top like tomato, butter, jam, pate, or salchicha (smashed up smearable sausage). At about 2pm it’s acceptable to start eating lunch, and the entire city (except restaurants and cafes) shuts down also. Lunch is really big and can be as big a variety of foods as in America. Siesta continues until about 5-6pm, and then many of the stores open again until 9 or 10 at night. Dinner doesn’t happen until 9 at night at the very earliest. After dinner it’s common to go out to tapas, which is the free food you get with your drink, and usually you sit and chat there until at least midnight and more often much later. Then if it’s a normal night you go home and get to sleep by 1-2am. If you’re going out that night, however, you go to Botellon, a giant parking lot that is outside of the city limits of Granada (but is really like a 15 min walk from the city center) where it is legal to drink in public. There thousands of student aged people save money by drinking their own alcohol rather than paying the often exorbitant prices in bars and clubs. At about 3am, but absolutely no earlier than 2am, people start going to the clubs. If you go to a club before 2am there will be almost no one there and it is really no fun to dance in an empty club. Even when you get there at 2am the club doesn’t get really full until about 3 or 4. Then people dance at the club until 7am when it closes, and finally go home to sleep.
So since that is the way things go in Granada, we were expecting the same from Barcelona. It wasn’t the same. We went to dinner at a restaurant-bar around 11pm and by midnight they were packing up the chairs around us! In Granada that would not happen until 2am at the earliest. So we ate quickly and started walking toward the club we were going to go to, and the streets were empty! There were no people at all and all the shops and bars were closed. I am pretty sure I have never ever seen empty streets at night in Granada. Maybe during siesta things become pretty dead, but between 11pm and 7am there are always people walking around. And bars and restaurants are always open at midnight! So it was definitely a shock for us. We finally found a bar that was open and hung out there for a couple hours before going to Razzmatazz, the club we had heard was the best. The club had 7 stories and each level was supposed to have a different type of music but really it was just a different variation on techno, so I was fairly disappointed. Still we danced and had a good night and made it home to bed by 7am.
As you can imagine the next morning we slept in and didn’t actually get up until afternoon, but then we went to the beach! The beach was really nice and the water was wonderful. It was about the same temperature as the water at Salobreña so it was perfect to swim in and be refreshed but not cold. The best part about the beach was that there were real waves! It was really fun to play in them in the earlier part of the day, but they ended up getting big enough that an announcement came over a giant loudspeaker in four different languages telling everyone that it wasn’t advised to go in the water at that time. A group next to us had a soccer ball, which we borrowed for a while and kicked around, but really it was just a super relaxing day laying in the sun and enjoying the beach. That night we managed to find a Mexican food restaurant with really really good really really non Mexican food. I got a burrito that was triangular, had to be eaten with a knife, and didn’t taste much like a burrito, but was really tasty anyway, and some of the others got burritos like me or hamburgers that were similarly delicious.
Our last day we spent on some more sightseeing and saw Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. It is a giant church all designed by Gaudi that is still yet to be finished. It was really pretty and reminded me of a giant sand castle made in that way where you drip sand from your hand instead of packing it down. Later we walked around more, spent some time at the harbor admiring the big ships, and ended up at a pretty cool fountain show. There was a giant fountain with lights and water streams that changed in unison to make pretty choreographed displays and a bunch of people were there crammed onto the steps in front of it to see the show. I thought it was really really pretty but after about half an hour I was pretty bored…and we stayed for another hour and it still didn’t end! But it was still cool because they played music while the show was going and one of the chunks of music was old songs that I remember being on the radio when I was little and that we all sang along to. Our flight home was at 6am so we didn’t book a hostel for the night to save money on our trip. So after the fountain show we got on the metro and made our way to the bus station where we hung out until 3:30 when the bus came to take us to the airport. It was a long night but we managed to entertain ourselves by making up ridiculous sleep-deprived stories so overall it was fun.
Barcelona was a gorgeous city and I really loved the ambience, the proximity to the beach, and the fun things we did there but over all it really made me appreciate living in Granada. Here things are cheaper, the city is the perfect size, the city stays alive all night long, and most importantly people really only speak Spanish. In Barcelona every other person spoke English to us! It was horrible. I much prefer struggling through my sentences and learning more about the language than having English as a constant easy crutch to fall back on in any situation. Here in Granada I feel like I am truly living abroad as a resident of a foreign country where as in Barcelona I felt like no matter how long I stayed there I would always stay a tourist.

After getting back from our trip to Barcelona, classes at University of Granada started (as a side note the university is call UGR for short and in Spanish that sounds like oo-kheh—ehr—reh). We were told to sign up for 6 classes and drop two, so our first two weeks of school were mostly centered on figuring out which classes to drop. What was kind of difficult about that was that two of my professors didn’t show up to class the first week! And one of them still hasn’t. So I ended up deciding to drop a history class that I wasn’t really interested in, and the class that the professor never showed up to. Which leaves me with Literatura Española I, which is the first class in the lit series here so it deals with medieval lit, Cervantes, a class that deals entirely with Don Quijote, Los Judíos en España, a history class about the history of Jews as it pertains to Spain, and Literatura Española V, which is the fifth class in the lit series and deals with the Romantic period in Spanish lit. So far all of my classes are interesting and I enjoy learning about what they teach, but it takes a huge amount of concentration to understand everything the professors say! Luckily though I have found that when I do make the effort to focus throughout class (with a little help from a café con leche occasionally) I am understanding the majority of the lectures, something I was a little worried about before classes started.
As I said at the beginning, life here is starting to settle down. A typical night for me is usually going over to my friends Armelle and Kelsey’s piso (they are both from UCSB and live together about a block away from me and are in two of my classes and we’re really good friends), cooking dinner (which usually involves a lot of really yummy vegetables with some spicy chilis thrown in since there is nothing hot in Spanish food), eating dinner (which so far has been beyond delicious every single time), and then drinking a cup (or two or three) or tea and chatting for a while (in English and Spanish depending on the mood).
Things are going well, I feel comfortable, I love Granada, I love my friends, and I love my lifestyle here. I often miss people and things from home and I even more often think of them and smile, but so far life here has been fun, exciting, and relaxed enough that I am absolutely positive that I made the right decision in coming to Granada to study abroad for the year.