Days 1 and 2

So yeah, I’m in Spain. The past 2 days have been crazy. The flight from Boston to Frankfurt wasn’t too bad (although I sat next to a family of three and their daughter had the “I don’t care about anything except my Ipod touch” attitude, which was rather annoying). There was a little turbulence but it wasn’t anything too bad. (Special note for Sarah and Allison: one the plane, I knew that it’d be a good semester abroad because on the flight, they showed a movie starring none other than the one and only Diane Lane! What a cougar… I ended up reading while listening to the movie purposely set on the Spanish option so that I’d get used to it.) The first flight took a little more than 6 hours. When we landed in Frankfurt, we had to get our passports stamped by this customs agent who was somewhat of an ass and didn’t show any emotion. I wasted a perfectly good thank you on him. I didn’t get much sleep and ended up napping for most of my flight from Frankfurt to Barcelona. I traveled with Cait, Lauren, and Emma, who are also doing the Trinity-in-Barcelona Program and it was nice not to travel alone.

After getting our suitcases from the baggage claim, we walked out to the lobby where my host mother Magda and the program coordinator Carlota were waiting, along with the other families. Magda is AWESOME and I couldn’t have asked for a better host mother. We started walking towards the car and I was thinking to myself “shit, I actually have to speak some Spanish now.” It wasn’t bad at all and she asked me about the food that I like and about my life in general (told her about how I HATE fish, but I didn’t mention my specific hatred of tuna). P.S. Pike brothers: unfortunately there are no fraternities in Barcelona so it looks like I’ll just have to run into a Pike by chance. It was hilarious because she drives this little two-seater that’s really nice and sleek (made by some car company I’ve never heard of). We finally arrived at her place, in which she lives on the primer piso (which is actually the second floor of the building). It’s a really nice place and is well decorated. I have a little room that’s really cozy: Magda keeps all of her books in here (she’s a Lit Professor) so it should motivate me to do some work every once in a while. I met my host sister, also named Magda, who’s really awesome. She’s a first year student at another university studying engineering. She speaks English really well and when I say really well, I mean PERFECTLY. She has better grammar than I have…go figure. She’s a hard rocker and listens to music like the Ramones, Green Day, AC/DC, Kiss, etc. It was cool chilling with her and talking about music and movies in English. We had la comida at 2 (really late for lunch in the U.S. but right on time in Spain) and we talked about the house rules, what beer is popular in Spain (and America… they’ve never heard of Bud Light), etc. The house rules are simple: what’s theirs is mine. She said that she considers me to be equal to her daughter and I can help myself to whatever’s in the fridge (kind of dangerous for me). She told me to bring her my laundry every day and she’ll do it, which is awesome. I definitely lucked out with the housing: they even got me a new bed that is incredibly comfortable.

After a nap, Madga (older) walked with me to the train station to take “the Metro.” It’s about a 5-10 minute walk, which I’ll need to take everyday in order to get to class. It’ll take me approximately one hour to get to class everyday because I need to walk 10 minutes to the Metro station, take the green line to the yellow line, and then walk a few blocks to the university. Hopefully, I’ll get used to the additional exercise plus, the weather is a lot warmer than I anticipated. It’s still cold, but it’s not freezing. I’d say roughly 40 degrees outside, but it feels a lot warmer because the sun’s always out. I took the greenline to a stop (parada) called Fontana. I met up with the three girls and my student mentor, Iolanda. Iolanda is unbelievably funny. She’s very sociable and open, although she mainly talks to us in Spanish. Her English is perfect and she can also speak Catalan, German, and French. It’s pretty ridiculous and impressive at the same time. She said that we need to speak as much Spanish as possible, even on our own because the group from the semester before us spoke too much English and some people didn’t improve their Spanish (thanks Darby…). We walked to this place whose name I don’t remember but it was really nice. There was a stage and theater on the inside, but the main room had tables for people to sit down and drink. I think Lauren captured it best, “this place looks like the one in Harry Potter” because the walls had sculptures/heads sticking out of it. They basically had a Jack Johnson CD playing, which was comforting. It’s funny because a lot of the music played on the radio is American, something I didn’t expect. After two beers (which Trinity paid for), we took the Metro back.

Today, I went to the department store, “el Corte Ingles” and bought an adapter for my laptop. It took me FOREVER to find it because I thought it’d be by the electronics but no, of course it was in the basement with the electrical supplies. I walked around for about an hour looking at everything (my favorite item was the DVD titled, “el Caballero Oscuro” which translated means, the Dark Knight) and finally mustered up enough courage to ask a sale associate (a big step in my book). He probably thought I was a dumbass or what not but I finally found it. It helps that I stopped at a Starbucks on my way back and ordered an iced chai (made me miss home a little bit). The walk back was very satisfying because I survived my first trip to a Spanish store, had an iced chai, bought my adapter and plus, the weather was beautiful. Everyone in Spain has a dog and it was really sad when I saw a beagle that looked just like Toby. It was all good, because I realized during my walk today that I’m going to love spending the semester here (an assessment that’s a little premature, but hopefully will prove to be true).

So the people in Spain take their lunch seriously. I just had a lunch that lasted 2.5 hours (insert one of Mike’s “sweet Jesus” here). We had paella (without fish) and then had a few more dishes before we polished it off with a glass of champagne. Afterward, we played a marathon dominoes game in which I won once and the two Magdas tying for first. La señora’s friend Mercedes came by to join us and she definitely lived up to her name: large earrings, hands and neck flooded with jewelry, fur shall, etc. Over la comida, the ever-popular topic of American politics took place with Obama as the main topic. Everyone approves of him for the most part and I’m sure I’ll be asked about him many more times in the future.

All right, this is ridiculously long as is. I’ll update again later. ¡Hasta luego!