hola a todos!
big news of week: the face of the new-born future queen (la enfanta) has been revealed. she is chubby but cute. this is, by the way, much more important news than that of the rioting and violence in france. also, it rained again for the first time since that week when it poured in october...that's a long time without rain which i have enjoyed immensely! it didn't even occur to me it might rain despite all the nasty rain clouds last night...but today it was quite the downpour. it's clearing up a little now though, so there's always hope.
i had a very good weekend this past week, full of meeting spanish people! woohoo! on thursday night my friend julia told us all to come to her friend's house, who she knows because he spent a year studying at her college in america. so we went to this kid's apartment, and he had a bunch of other friends over too so we got to speak in spanish! the guy's roomate was the nicest of all of them and me, tim, and amy spent a long time talking to him which was way fun. so hopefully we'll see them again sometime (the roomie says he has all 6 seasons of friends in spanish...and he said he'd lend it to me! so now i just have to call him...on my list of things to do).
and as has been the trend these last few weeks, after staying up very late that night, we got up way early the next morning to go to montserrat! montserrat is a very famous monastery up in the mountains, about an hour away from Barcelona. according to legend...the virgin mary suddenly appeared in a cave up there, so they decided to build a church. or something...it takes like 1.5-2 hours to actually get there because you have to take a train and then switch trains and basically go up a mountain (which is always fun) however, it was a very cloudy day so we couldn't see the awesome views as we had hoped...but it was still fun! i didn't take any pictures because my camera is "temporarily" out of service, but one day i will steal all my friend's pictures and post them. so montserrat basically took up my day from 9 am to 6 pm. we were all gonna hang out that night, like watch a movie or something, but that kinda fell through because when you don't want to go out anywhere, there's no where else to go with a big group. so tim ended up coming over just to chill, but it was a relaxing night.
he convinced me, however, to go the gym with him the next day to try aerobics because he figured i had no right to make fun of it constantly if i didn't try it, which is true. but oh my god it was the worst experience of my life and i'm never doing it again. that shit is hard! i couldn't follow at all, it was like a whole dance routine, and you all know my coordination skills are not quite up to par..so i quit that class early. i also quit the "basic" class that we tried next, because i did not find it all so basic. but whatever, atleast now i can make fun as much as i want :)
later that day we met up with amy and alex in search of a so called "chocolate festival" which is very hard to turn down...but we went to 3 wrong places before finally being told the correct location, which then took us forever to get to. and then we got there and the line was a mile long, so we bagged it and ate churros instead..mm...churros...
that night we made plans to go to a karaoke bar!! hmm...hehe...it would have been fun and we could have just laughed at ourselves and been stupid (which we did anyway) except that my friend katie's intercambio decided she wanted to meet us all that night...so she brought her husband (they're 28 and 33..far too mature for a karaoke bar) and we all felt incredibly embarassed..hahaha..but it was still fun because they were super nice! and her husband doesn't speak any english so we only spoke to him in spanish. and we sang summer nights in front of a bunch of spaniards, well...i more laughed than sang, but that's a whole nother story. :-)
and then on sunday i finally met my intercambio!! turns out she's a 19 year old girl, and she brought along her 17 year old friend too...i was the oldest! definitely didn't see that one coming. and turns out neither of them live in barcelona, one lives in villa somethin and the other in gava...so they're like 20 min outside the city, but seeing as neither of them have cars, it takes them a lot longer to get here (hence the only being able to meet with me on weekends). this also meant that they don't really know places to eat/drink and expected that i did...so we wandered down the ramblas and i decided going to starbucks would help make their american experience complete :) marta (the 19 year old) was not impressed with the coffee...it was fun though, marta is studying to be an english teacher, and christina (the other one..) wants to be a translator for english and german to spanish! she's quite the language lover. and she loves americans too, so she was really excited to meet me. i kind of liked her better than my actual intercambio...but that's fine. we talked for about 2 hours about stuff, nothing in particular. they both speak pretty well, christina a bit better than marta, and when i talked at my normal speed ic ould tell marta got lost. christina sometimes too...it's nice getting to talk to them because i get a better sense of slurred spanish speech (mumbling is universal!) and i definitely had some trouble understanding her sometimes. but i think i did pretty well. and she invited me to go out with her friends on saturday night! so that should be interesting...and she said no boys allowed, so i'll get to meet lots of girls i suppose. (oh, she also asked me if there were any hot american boys i could hook her up with, sadly i said no.)
and so begins another week of classes (well, considering i'm halfway through wednesday my week is basically over! mwahaha... 3 classes left!) hebrew is going really well, i still like it a lot. and this lady has sat next to me the last two classes so i now have a friend! she's like 40 something and is only taking it because for some reason jewish stuff interests her but she always asks me questions and we talked before class so that was fun. latin american lit is still rough...still can't find 2 books (grr) and she talks fast but i think i'm understanding the important stuff. i had my morfosintaxis midterm yesterday which i think went well. and spanish of the americans is goddamn boring. it's just linguistics and i want to die when i'm in it because he's like...and in venezuela they pronounce the final "s" like this. but in puerto rico they pronounce it like this. etc. for 1.5 hours. but tomorrow i'm meetig up with 2 other american girls in the class who go to UCs to try and sort out all the different sounds and vocalizations in different countries (there's about a bazillion varieites, so i'm looking forward to it.)
palmira is currently at her new informatica class so i don't get a home cooked meal today! haha i'm so spoiled...she already made me a sandwich and left it on the counter, which is kind of nice because now i can eat whenever i want.
ooh and palmira taught me how to say something new in catalan (i've already told some people, but they'll have to hear it again because i'm so excited about this!!): m'grada aquest xocolata amb llet i amb ametllas més que l'altra which means: me gusta este chocolate con leche y con almendras más que el otro...which means: i like this chocolate with milk and with almonds more than the other :-D i'm sure any of you who know french could have understood that without the spanish intermediary, but i think it's cool :)
anywayyy that's about all from spain....
until the next time (who knows when that'll be)
love,
sar
i had a very good weekend this past week, full of meeting spanish people! woohoo! on thursday night my friend julia told us all to come to her friend's house, who she knows because he spent a year studying at her college in america. so we went to this kid's apartment, and he had a bunch of other friends over too so we got to speak in spanish! the guy's roomate was the nicest of all of them and me, tim, and amy spent a long time talking to him which was way fun. so hopefully we'll see them again sometime (the roomie says he has all 6 seasons of friends in spanish...and he said he'd lend it to me! so now i just have to call him...on my list of things to do).
and as has been the trend these last few weeks, after staying up very late that night, we got up way early the next morning to go to montserrat! montserrat is a very famous monastery up in the mountains, about an hour away from Barcelona. according to legend...the virgin mary suddenly appeared in a cave up there, so they decided to build a church. or something...it takes like 1.5-2 hours to actually get there because you have to take a train and then switch trains and basically go up a mountain (which is always fun) however, it was a very cloudy day so we couldn't see the awesome views as we had hoped...but it was still fun! i didn't take any pictures because my camera is "temporarily" out of service, but one day i will steal all my friend's pictures and post them. so montserrat basically took up my day from 9 am to 6 pm. we were all gonna hang out that night, like watch a movie or something, but that kinda fell through because when you don't want to go out anywhere, there's no where else to go with a big group. so tim ended up coming over just to chill, but it was a relaxing night.
he convinced me, however, to go the gym with him the next day to try aerobics because he figured i had no right to make fun of it constantly if i didn't try it, which is true. but oh my god it was the worst experience of my life and i'm never doing it again. that shit is hard! i couldn't follow at all, it was like a whole dance routine, and you all know my coordination skills are not quite up to par..so i quit that class early. i also quit the "basic" class that we tried next, because i did not find it all so basic. but whatever, atleast now i can make fun as much as i want :)
later that day we met up with amy and alex in search of a so called "chocolate festival" which is very hard to turn down...but we went to 3 wrong places before finally being told the correct location, which then took us forever to get to. and then we got there and the line was a mile long, so we bagged it and ate churros instead..mm...churros...
that night we made plans to go to a karaoke bar!! hmm...hehe...it would have been fun and we could have just laughed at ourselves and been stupid (which we did anyway) except that my friend katie's intercambio decided she wanted to meet us all that night...so she brought her husband (they're 28 and 33..far too mature for a karaoke bar) and we all felt incredibly embarassed..hahaha..but it was still fun because they were super nice! and her husband doesn't speak any english so we only spoke to him in spanish. and we sang summer nights in front of a bunch of spaniards, well...i more laughed than sang, but that's a whole nother story. :-)
and then on sunday i finally met my intercambio!! turns out she's a 19 year old girl, and she brought along her 17 year old friend too...i was the oldest! definitely didn't see that one coming. and turns out neither of them live in barcelona, one lives in villa somethin and the other in gava...so they're like 20 min outside the city, but seeing as neither of them have cars, it takes them a lot longer to get here (hence the only being able to meet with me on weekends). this also meant that they don't really know places to eat/drink and expected that i did...so we wandered down the ramblas and i decided going to starbucks would help make their american experience complete :) marta (the 19 year old) was not impressed with the coffee...it was fun though, marta is studying to be an english teacher, and christina (the other one..) wants to be a translator for english and german to spanish! she's quite the language lover. and she loves americans too, so she was really excited to meet me. i kind of liked her better than my actual intercambio...but that's fine. we talked for about 2 hours about stuff, nothing in particular. they both speak pretty well, christina a bit better than marta, and when i talked at my normal speed ic ould tell marta got lost. christina sometimes too...it's nice getting to talk to them because i get a better sense of slurred spanish speech (mumbling is universal!) and i definitely had some trouble understanding her sometimes. but i think i did pretty well. and she invited me to go out with her friends on saturday night! so that should be interesting...and she said no boys allowed, so i'll get to meet lots of girls i suppose. (oh, she also asked me if there were any hot american boys i could hook her up with, sadly i said no.)
and so begins another week of classes (well, considering i'm halfway through wednesday my week is basically over! mwahaha... 3 classes left!) hebrew is going really well, i still like it a lot. and this lady has sat next to me the last two classes so i now have a friend! she's like 40 something and is only taking it because for some reason jewish stuff interests her but she always asks me questions and we talked before class so that was fun. latin american lit is still rough...still can't find 2 books (grr) and she talks fast but i think i'm understanding the important stuff. i had my morfosintaxis midterm yesterday which i think went well. and spanish of the americans is goddamn boring. it's just linguistics and i want to die when i'm in it because he's like...and in venezuela they pronounce the final "s" like this. but in puerto rico they pronounce it like this. etc. for 1.5 hours. but tomorrow i'm meetig up with 2 other american girls in the class who go to UCs to try and sort out all the different sounds and vocalizations in different countries (there's about a bazillion varieites, so i'm looking forward to it.)
palmira is currently at her new informatica class so i don't get a home cooked meal today! haha i'm so spoiled...she already made me a sandwich and left it on the counter, which is kind of nice because now i can eat whenever i want.
ooh and palmira taught me how to say something new in catalan (i've already told some people, but they'll have to hear it again because i'm so excited about this!!): m'grada aquest xocolata amb llet i amb ametllas més que l'altra which means: me gusta este chocolate con leche y con almendras más que el otro...which means: i like this chocolate with milk and with almonds more than the other :-D i'm sure any of you who know french could have understood that without the spanish intermediary, but i think it's cool :)
anywayyy that's about all from spain....
until the next time (who knows when that'll be)
love,
sar
posted by Sar @ 3:33 AM
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