Playing catch up

Some of the group wandered down to beach as we walked towards the glistening sculptural fish. I joined a few of my other classmates on the jetty. The sun was setting and the panoramic view of the city was amazing. The coastline, with its mountains in the distant and the newer beachfront developments, echoed years of change and growth layered on one another. It was beautiful. I've also mastered the art of panoramic pictures on my camera (thanks mom and dad!) and was able to capture not only the awesome sunset view, but my classmates in all three frames that are stitched together to create one seamless picture. The end result is a photo with the three of them in the picture three times. Its pretty awesome.







Finally, the two groups converge at the commercial center that is capped with the infamous fish. The center itself is really interesting, with its layered floors, fountains. stairs, and balconies. The whole combination is really something.


(Sweet pic of the Natural Gas Building on the way home)
Our group heads back out towards home after multiple hours of wandering through the city. We were all hungry and sore from the unintentional mileage we traversed. After making a quick dinner we wandered down to the plaza to see what the commotion was about. We could hear hip-hop music and we saw street performers. Hawra and I joined the small crowd around the people causing the ruckus. A woman got on the microphone and began speaking in a manner that was similar in gesture and tone to preaching. We were then approached by a woman who tried to talk to us about their demonstration. After conveying to her that we didn't understand because our Spanish was so bad, she grabbed one of her colleagues who did speak English. Maria then began to explain how much God loved me and wanted my heart. I understood her broken English and adamantly agreed with her message, explaining I was Catholic and also believed in God's love. She invited me to worship with them the following Sunday morning in their church in Barcelona. I may go eventually, but I want to exasperate the Cathedrals of Barcelona first. We then returned to our apartment and explained to our roommates that the people were Evangelical Christians who performed hip-hop dance routines and preached in the square on Sunday nights! After that we crashed so we'd be ready for our first day of classes.

Monday was the first day of class. Our studio is all of 1.5 blocks away so in the afternoon we walked over early to see if our Internet was up and running yet. It was not since we run on Barcelona time...which is a little slower than Americans are used to. We had a run down of the syllabi for our studio and history classes. We met Cece for the first time. She's really fun. A native of Hong Kong and educated in the states, Cece now lives in Barcelona permanently with her family (husband and daughter) and runs her own firm. She's worked for famous architects and firms in Barcelona, and is just generally and all around around smart and funny person. I have a great feeling about her class. We'll learn about architecture and urbanism with her.

For dinner we had another family style meal where everyone chipped in and ate together. It's homey feeling and I like hanging out with everyone.

Tuesday we met up with Christy Cole for our sketching class. She introduced the syllabus and then explained our first project. We were going to do a derive in which we are each drifters traveling on a path defined by our emotional response to urban spaces. It's kind of trippy sounding, but was very informative once we immersed ourselves into the activity. Christy dropped us off in an unknown location and then told us to pair off. One person would wander for an hour, while the other recorded their path and emotional reasoning for their chosen direction and then the partners would switch. I paired up with Hawra and got to start the activity first.

I chose to go towards the sunny part of the street because it look welcoming and I was cold. I then was distracted by construction on what look like a church, and was later discovered to be a museum of a palace. We wandered in and out of alleys, stores, museums, and quaint courtyards, until we switched. Hawra took a similar approach and we continued through quaint streets, uncovering beautiful plazas as we went. Along our journey we met Olga, an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher who invited us to dinner for Friday. She wanted us to mingle with some Spanish students. Hawra and I are always up for an adventure so we agreed and swapped contact info. She was very friendly and we're really excited to meet some fun new people.

An interesting art store we popped into led us to Ed, who at first was kind of a grouchy salesclerk. We talked to him about some art products and he began to warm up to us. His English was really good. We later found out he had lived in some small town in Michigan for 3 years on and exchange program for high school, which would explain the good English. He gave us his info in case we had any questions about the area. Hawra and I have extraordinary luck with people. We make such and odd couple too. She's not even 5 feet tall, from Kuwait, dark skin, and black hair. I'm 5'6" and super white with dyed red hair. It's actually quite comical to hear us both butcher Spanish when we try and talk to people.

After drifting through the city for a few hours we stumbled upon the familiar La Rambla and ended our derive. By then we were quite hungry and stopped in a Turkish style eatery to crab some falaffel. Exhausted from our travels we walked back to our apartment to join our other classmates and hear their tales of travel. We snuck in a quick nap before heading over to the metro to go to our first Spanish class.

Our Spanish classes are held in the International House, a few metro stops off the L1 from Plaza de Universitat. The Int'l house is a resource center that teaches many different language classes to people of all different native tongues. Our class is solely comprised of the people from Catholic here for architecture. Most of us are beginners, but some of the students definitely have a greater mastery of the language. Our teacher entered the room and we didn't know what to expect. He only talks in Spanish (its a rule of the class) and he dives into understanding how much we actually understand. We ask each other our names, what we do , and what we want to do in Barcelona. We finally get his name, Xavi (pronounced Cha-be). He begins to loosen up and he gets us laughing at different greetings and conversational Spanish points. Since our pronunciation was so bad we reviewed the alphabet to get a better grasp on phonetics. To practice we played a bit of hang-man as well. We killed a few people, but for the most part we were triumphant. When we began to mingle to practice more conversation skills, we all noticed how adorably small our teacher was. He wasn't any bigger than 5 feet and with his slightly graying hair, he looked so cute. All of us know love the 3 hour class that we thought we'd dread.
Tuesday night was another family dinner. Then the boys came over to hang out and Hawra and I went over to the 3rd apartment, which houses Emma, Kristin, PJ, and Nick. They each have their own bedroom and the apartment is a mix between old world and newer furnishes. Only one of the bedrooms has a window though, which wouldn't fly in America with fire safety codes, but in Europe, those laws are much different. We all socialized for a bit and then stopped into a local Internet cafe to update our friends and family on our whereabouts.

Wednesday...I'm still sick by the way. I have a frogman voice and when I get really excited and normally higher pitched- no voice at all since I lost an octave of my vocal range. It's fabulous. We finally have internet working in studio and keys to the apartments to get in...

(to be cont.)