semester: OVER.

well well well, i find myself blogging once again. i must admit i have been avoiding the task, and the more days that passed by the more i wished to avoid. the fact that i´m blogging is a pure testament of how little i have to do this morning!! i had to whip out the planner so i could remember all the stuff i´ve done since my last post. turns out nothing toooo exciting, but just being in spain is excitement enough.
so the last time i posted was the week of zero class. because i didnt know about it in advance, i didnt have time to plan anything cool outside of barcelona, so we all tried to make the best of being in the city when things were fairly often closed. there was also a fair bit of studying (ok lets be honest here...it was very minimal..) because i had hebrew and morfo finals the next week. i spent an actual solid chunk of time studying for my other class that didnt yet have a final (spanish of the americas) with the american friend i made in the class. that was fun cuz we´d just go to coffee shops and study, but also hang out and talk. a good combo. i invited her with us when we went to see the 3D IMAX of polar express heheh...surprisingly i enjoyed it. although the 3Dness made me a little dizzy at times. but we go to wear super awesome glasses ;) (see pictures...once i post them).
another adventure we went on was the chocolate museum, which turned out to just be a bunch of rooms with really meticulous chocolate sculptures! i took pictures of those too..some of them were amazing, like the sagrada familia in chocolate! wowie...but there was basically nothing on history, and there was no free chocolate (slight disappointment there). on saturday night me, amy, jess, and katie made it our job to make american style chocolate chip cookies because no one in spain has ever heard of such a thing! (we were shocked as well). it was really hard to find chocolate chips, and when we did they were expensive, and vanilla is also hard to come by...but we succeeded, and made really yummy cookies! and all the spaniards that tried them (amys host sister and my host mom to name a couple) so they were buenisimo! :o)
so the morfo final was grammar, aka whatever. not bad. and my hebrew final ended up being a lot of fun :) he gave me like a 5 minute oral exam, having me read stuff out loud and tell him what it meant. and at the end he was like ok fine, you know this. let´s chat instead! so we ended up chatting in spanish for 20 something minutes, about why he´s studying semitic languages, how i know hebrew, my spanish, etc...turns out (mommy you´ll find this interesting) his family has lived right next to the temple in the jewish quarter of toledo for many many generations, so he was always fascinated with the hebrew on the walls and stuff. and also he thinks that his roots on his mom´s side probably are jewish! neato. he was by far my favorite teacher. i went to hebrew class all this week even though i was done with it just cuz he was fun to listen to.
that day amy also left to go back to NY because her grandma suddenly died :( so that was extremely sad because me and tim were expecting to get to spend a few days just the 3 of us in spain. and also we didnt really get to say a good well-prepared goodbye...but i´m sure we´ll see each other again.
the next day was alex´s last night and she had a special request that some of us wander the gothic quarter with her to see the cool shops one last time. but our timing got messed up so we basically were looking at a bunch of closed shops....and after we met up with a bunch of other people and saw narnia! very cool movie, good thing i read them this summer hehe. although the movie let out at 12:05 (not that late), it was 5 minutes after the last metro ran, so i still ended up getting home really late because the stupid night bus didnt come for 30 minutes. grrr.
on friday we had a picture swap party with my closest friends where we each made a CD of our favorite pics and passe dthem around. so now i have all the best pictures of all my friend´s combined! yes! and that night we had a "dinner with the bestest of friends" (corny i know) because it would be ourl ast time eating together as they all left on sunday...:( it was a very nice dinner though so it was a good way to say goodbye (even though we saw them again). then after that we met up with the spaniards and had our goodbye night with them (of course going to bed at 7:30 am WOW).
on saturday me and tim went to our long-awaited cooking class!!! it was very fun :) we learned how to make: this yummy tomato soup, paella, tortilla española, y crema catalana. the most typical spanish dishes! the guy who ran the class was for some reason required to speak in english, and his english wasnt very good so me and tim chuckled sometimes. i sort of wish he had spoken in spanish. but whatever. the other people in the class were 2 belgiums, 1 italian, 1 german, and 1 somethin else...it was very small and cute.
for everyone else in the group that was their last night in bcn. people chose to wander the ramblas one more time and the gothic quarter, buying last minute gifts and souvenirs. we met them at 7:15 am at sans estació to accompany them to the airport. now they are all gone but me and tim!!! (and 3 andrews, but theyre kind of weird..heh)
and tomorrow...KEVIN COMES!. i´m in a state of shock. i have to get to the airport by 11 am or so, not too bad...when i go home for good my flight is at 8 am i think :( i´m gonna have to leave here at 5?? damn.
oh, so my spanish of the america final was EH. not so hot. but that class was dumb and it was impossible to study for and he did a very bad job of telling me what the test was gonna be (turned out essay questions). but it´s over. so who cares anymore. last night me and tim watched ELF to celebrate the christmas season...i think that makes 13 times now that i´ve seen it?? hehehe...
ok, i think i really have gone over these last two weeks in too much detail! but i dont know when i will next blog. maybe next time i´m in barcelona? (jan 2). until then...
sara :)

holaaaa

sooo..i definitely meant to post before this weekend was over, but..oops?
so back to last weekend...i had a really good one! haha. i saw the opening of harry potter, whcih i enjoyed a lot event hough a few key characters were removed. we saw the 12:30 showing so i got home late but it was worth it! a 2.5 hour movie, man oh man! then on saturday i wandered around gracia with tim and katie, hoping to find cute shops, but we must have been in the wrong part...haha but it was still really pretty cuz all the christmas lights were up (by the way they´re on all over the city every night now! and will be until january 6th). then later that night we went out with victor and andreu (alberto was sick), yay for spaniards! we had a lot ot fun and each got home around 6 am..
and then sunday i went to a barça futbol game!!! very exciting! barça played santander and we whooped them 4-1. and i even got to see a ronaldhino goal! his 50th as a barça player, and i got an awesome picture of it too (many pictures have been posted if anyone cares to check). it was sooo cold at the stadium though,a nd everyone around us was smoking something and somehow the wind always brought it right into our faces (oh ps i went with tim and heidi)..but that´s fine...we were definitely doing the matrix moves trying to avoid all the clouds of smoke coming our way. it was an amazing mob scene when the game let out because everyone was heading to the metro. it was so crowded in the metro we were all on top of each other (strangers too), yuck!
last week was my last week of both hebrew and spanish grammar classes. this week i have zero class because there are two national holidays (constitution, and something about mary i think), so they just decided to cancel the whole week of class! gotta love spain...next week i still have 4 classes (TOTAL), and then the week after that is the end! or something like that. i´ve been working on my paper for the lit class i´m in, and i have more than 3 pages!!! i only need to get to 6 and then i´m done! so basically i´m not worried about hebrew or spanish grammar, meaniing once i finish this paper i only have one test to really study for :) yay!
this past friday me and my closest friends went to andorra!! that´s right...that little tiny country between spain and france where there is no sales tax and things are CHEAP. not to mention it´s up in the mountains and there is snow :D it was quite cold, but i came prepared so i was fine. and the whole first half of the day it was half snowing (i guess that would be sleet?) but it was close enough to snow to make me happy. but then it just decided to rain which sucked cuz i didn´t bring an umbrella. but whatever! it was really fun just walking around with these gigantic snowy mountains flanking us, very beautiful! and of course i bought a couple things...nothign huge, but things were definitely way cheaper. however, it was 3 hours busride in each direction, so that kind of sucked, but it went by faster than i would have imagined.
on saturday we met up with katie´s intercambio and her husband who are such cute people. we saw the constant gardner and then went out for tapas at this cute basc place (sp?). her husband doesnt speak any english, so if we wanted to talk to him it was only in spanish, and she speaks very good english. so i felt bad for her husband because a lot of the time he was just out of it, but he was a very good sport and extremely nice. we ended up not finishing dinner until like 12:30 which i was shocked at, the time had just flown by.
yesterday (sun) we attempted to go to the cathedral to see some sort of dance thing that supposedly happens after sunday mass, but instead we came upon a gigantic crowd of people trying to buy christmas stuff because there was a little fair set up with trees and ornaments and every other christmas stuff you can imagine. and it was disgustingly crowded and i ended up leaving cuz i couldnt handle it. and since then i´ve been "writing my paper..." finally i feel like i´m getting somewhere, and there´s a slight chance i could finish it today! but unlikely. bahh.
it is now the 5th of december, meaning a ton of people are leaving incredibly soon (the 18th i think). it´s so weird! alex is leaving on the 16th, just 11 days! me tim and amy will be here to hold down the fort for a few more days, until our little group will break up as well. :( oh well, i still have over a month till i see the soil of good ol´US of A.
i suppose now i will sign off and perchance continue the pursuit of finishing this essay. what think y´all? i think blech! but i will also think veryyyy happy when it is finished...off to write!!
have a good day :)

FORÇA BARÇA!!

hello hello! time for yet another blog...
first i will do a brief recap of last week because i seem to have skipped all that..BCA organized a trip for us to go to the city of tarragona, so we got to see some pretty cool ancient Roman ruins from when tarragona was some sort of roman capital in spain. there was an aqueduct (2nd only to the one in segovia!), an amphitheatre (for like gladiator stuff), a circuit (like in ben hir), and lots of random pieces of wall. it was a really beautiful city, so it was fun while we were looking at stuff, but our 2.5 hours of free time got a bit boring because absolutely everything was closed. so we wandered for a very long time looking at not too much, but it was fun anyway cuz we are good at entertaining ourselves. that night a bunch of us went out to a flamenco bar so i got to see my first flamenco singing/dancing/playing of music which was really neat! it was obvious that the place was kind of oriented towards tourists, but that´s what i am, so whatever. it was cool. and that was also the day of the big barça/madrid soccer game (HUGE rivals) and barça won! so there were people running up and down the ramblas with barça flags and screaming and even later it got to be like fire crackers and loud things...people go crazy! but yay :) força barça!! after that we metroed it over to a cute neighborhood and went to a little mexican bar/restaurant and got margheritas and the most tasty guacamole ever...mmm gordo...
this week really flew by, i´m not sure why. on monday i finally went ahead and purchased a coat i´d been eyeing, after going into every store in the shopping region and trying on a million. so now i´m´not freezing all the time. because its cooold! sometimes it gets to 40, which i know sounds not too bad to you guys, but we don´t have snow, so it´s cold. this week i´ve also actually started doing work because the end of classes are just around the corner. i have my very first hebrew test this coming tuesday so i´ve been prepping for that, but i think after a day of studing i´m basically done already...so now i can move onto something else :-/ writing a paper perhaps? nooo say it aint so! i have no idea what to write...i think i´m gonna brainstorm and then go talk to my prof on monday and ask her if i´m even on the right track, because i just don´t know what they expect from a paper in spain!
so on thursday we had our "thanksgiving reception" organized by BCA and it was despicably pathetic. not only did we have nothing resembling traditional thanksgiving food, the tapas that they did give us were few and gross. a plate of cheese. cold and bland tortilla española chunks. fried dates, i believe? gross croquettes. and a plate of calamari (mmm we know how much i love squid). the end! oh, and never ending pitchers of sangria so every one got tipsy. that´s always good...well, we were all disappointed because everyone´s host moms are saying that every other year it has been traditional thanksgiving food, so basically we got jipped this year. and then hearing about other people´s yummy dinners at home was depressing! oh well. we still had a good time just hanging out. and after we went to a cafe for dessert which was tasty.
yesterday amy´s parents (who have been in town since wed) took me tim and katie out to lunch which was very fun :) another set of jewish parents is always amusing heheh. (ps her dad is also a doctor named steve!) and last night me and 3 others went to the spanish opening of harry potter!!! :-D i enjoyed it very much, although i sat next to a harry potter buff and him and me were discussing all the flaws throughout the movie....they left out some very peculiar things, things that seemed kind of important and were slightly eluded to, but were never completed as stories! a bit odd...i feel like 5 seconds here or there would have filled it out a lot more. but it was a huge book so they did a good job cutting it down i think. the special effects were way cool! i give a thumbs up :) but of course we went to a 12:30 showing and had to night bus home, so i didn´t get to bed till 4 am.
and now we have reached my present state of blogging at noon on a saturday, following waking up ;) hope all is well!!!
love
sar

bienvinguts!

it is currently 12:30 on a friday afternoon and i just got up! ahhh how lovely that feels...except now i´m a bit screwed because i dont have enough time to actually go out and do anything before i need to be back for lunch, so i´m left with blogging to fill my time! maybe ill go on a walk when i finish this.
but anyhoo, last week...let me think...ah, last week as i remember was nonstop rain. not a very fun week! classes were classes, and that was just about that.on friday night we saw a midnight showing of Elizabethtown, which was pretty awful, dont see it. oh but then on saturday night the 17 year old intercambio invited me to have dinner at her house with her sister, sisters fiancee, and 3 friends so i whipped up the courage to actually go do it. it was interesting...haha i´m definitely glad i went, but it wasn´t really what i expected. its nice to get a glimpse of all different sorts of spanish people though! i would put these people in the group of barça obsessive and low ambitioned...but that´s fine, it was an entertaining evening. and then they decided to go to an even later, 1 am showing, movie!! so we saw La Monja at 1 am. and it was all in spanish and i understood! except for the ending...but i dont feel so bad about that because none of the other spaniards iw as with understood it either. i think it was just bad writing that didn´t make sense.
i can´t believe it´s already friday!! this week went by really fast. i talked to all my profs and i know now if not the day, the week that all my finals will be! which is a very good feeling because it was a weight on my shoulder that i kept avoiding, but now that i finally have it worked out i feel better. and for my latin american lit class i don´t have to take the final at all! i talked to her and she said if i wanted i could just pick any text we´ve discussed in class and write a 6 page paper, and i said hell yes i´d rather do that than have to understand any random text on the spot!!!! so she suggested one text that i write about so now i´m working my butt off (well, relatively, the definition of that term has changed since i left cornell....hehehe) to get through this 40 page medieval spanish poem. it is really confusing and hard and i have to look up every 3rd word or something, but once i understand a page i feel very proud of myself, and usualy i find that it actually is very beautiful. and there are footnotes so that helps a lot too. i would say i´m about halfway through, which includes the 6 page introduction i read...i have a lot to go. but it hurts my head so much once i get through 3 pages that i have to stop. and once i stop i rarely get back to it cuz it´s such a heavy activity (hmm i don´t know if that translates well...in spanish we´d say it´s pesado, but i don´t think they mean it as heavy, but i´m not sure how to translate it other than it makes your head hurt)
today, although we don´t have class, my lit class prof is showing a movie about the poem i´m trying to read (or maybe just about the lady who wrote it, not sure) so i´m gonna go to that and hopefully it´ll be worth my time. then afterwards i´m meetig up with people to go in search of warmer coats!! because it´s getting chilly here and i have nothing to show for it...well that´s about all to update on here! my summaries are getting less detailed, or maybe we´re all just settling in and doing less stuff?
one month from this day the majority of the kids fly home!!! that´s scary...me tim and amy are going to accompany people to the airport and then leave alone. it´ll be weird. good thing we will get to delay our saying goodbyes!
oknow that is all.
love,
sar

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

getting lazy with the posts

so...i don't even know where to begin...
so the parents came and went. we had a good time :) we saw the sagrada familia, la pedrera (one of gaudi's most famous houses), walked down the ramblas and by the water, wandered old town, went to the picasso museum, and ate lots of yummy food! we went out to dinner with the spaniards (victor, andreu, and alberto) and another night with my señora, which was full of fun translating for me!! although i will give my mother credit that she spoke just enough that my lady could understand maybe half of what she said...bravo mommy!, and another night with my 3 closest friends. all in all a lot of good dining experiences!
i really enjoyed the sagrada familia though! for those of you who don't know what it is, it's an unfinished church started by gaudi in the...long time ago years...i'm bad with dates. but he died before it was finished, so now it's perpetually under construction and work only continues with money received from the public (i'm assuming from ticket sales to see it, as well). but i didn't realize it would be so unfinished! you walk in, and you're looking out at the sky because there's holes everywhere. it's really cool seeing a church in the middle of its being built, becuase you're just so used to seeing finished churches. and gaudi's style is just so wild, that it's fun to see on its own (i have posted pictures of it now for those who would like to see it). the pedrera was really cool too, but i had to run to class so i didn't get to take my time as much as i would have liked. but anyways, they've been gone for a week now!
this past weekend me and 7 other kids went to zaragoza! it sounds like a somewhat random destination, but it was super cheap (20 euros roundtrip) and turns out there were a lot of cool thigns there. i was a little worried at first that it would be overwhelming with a group of 8, especially since it was originally just a group of 3 and everyone kept being like oh i wanna come too! me too! but it ended up working out really well and we all got along and had a great time! we were only there for one night, but two full days, so we made the most of it. we went to a goya museum and saw all his famous prints, we went to some scultpure museum and left soon after cuz it smelled funny and none of us really cared...we went to the church in zaragoza which is very famous (del Pilar) because it has a pillar that mary apparently kissed, and it has a tiny statue of her on top, a museum about an ancient roman theater that was uncovered in 1972 when people were trying to build something on the site which was super cool, and we went to the 3rd best muslim palace in spain...and we explored, and shopped, and generally enjoyed ourselves :) we also went to the top of the bell tower in the church of pilar so you could see the view of all zaragoza. we got back to barcelona at about midnight on saturday night and were wiped from the 9 hours a day of straight walking.
yesterday most people in the UB didn't have class because today is dia de todos los santos and the universities are closed, but lucky me... i had both my classes! so that was a grand old time...but after class and after dinner me and a bunch of people met up and went to see Corpse Bride! how fitting for halloween. of course no one here actually celebrates halloween...ocasionaly you would see people dressed up, and then you'd look more closely and realize they were speaking english. stupid americans..and after corpse bride we went to a really cool bar, but it somehow decided to close at 1:30 which is absurd. but whatever, we left at like 2 (they don't kick you out, they just turn all the lights off..haha) and caught the last metros of the night. today is the actual holiday where people go to the cemeteries and put flowers and dead relative's graves. clearly a much more sentimental holiday than our american counterpart.
the big news in spain is that the future queen was born yesterday! it'll be on the news every second for the next week, i'm sure. the same thing: the interview with the queen and king saying "oh estamos encantados...si si si...ella es gordita, una cara redonda...si si si estamos encantados..." the same thing over and over! and then the prince saying "la princesa y yo estamos absolutamente felices...si si..." over and over...they've also told us a million times the height and weight of the baby, but i regret to inform you i don't remember the details. they're actually changing the constitution to make it possible for her to be queen, because before the law was that if the prince didn't have a son, then the son of one of his siblings would have to become king. a daughter couldn't become queen...now it's just the firstborn becomes the monarch, which i think is better.
this week begins midterms for my fellow BCAers, but i only have one midterm and it's not till next week. so people are probably gonna be busy studying. i guess i could study for mine, but that just doesn't sound like fun.
anyhoo, i guess that's about it. sorry i didn't really say anything id id last week, but it's just too hard to try and remember it! i need to be more punctual with this thing...although alexx is by far doing worse than me hehe ;-)
sara

been a while

so it's been about a week since my last post, i believe. so much has happened!! i'm afraid i will have forgotten some of it by now, or just that i will forget to mention something, but i also don't want to do post overload and recount every detail of my last 7 days in barcelona.
this past weekend was fun because i spent a lot of time just hanging out doing cool things around the city, and also because amy's host family was out of town and left her the house for the week! don't worry we didn't do anything rowdy, but we stayed up watching movies and just hangin...good times! she also ate dinner at my house one night to get a nice cooked meal with my señora, which was also fun :) on friday a bunch of us went to a mall near one of the university campuses and just checked out all the stores (maybe got a couple things...hehe) and on saturday in the morning/early afternoon me and amy wandered a really cute neighborhood (Gracia) in search of fliers for some sort of cooking class...we didn't find one, but the neighborhood had so many cute shops to look in that we didnt' realy care! later in the afternoon basically the same group that went to the mall all met up at the maremagnum which is another mall, but more importantly an IMAX theater! and it's right on the water, like literally, might even be sitting on piers. so we watched two imax movies, one about el misterio del nilo (mystery of the nile) and the other was something about adrenaline and sky divers. but they were both really cool. and since they were sort of documentary-ish, i could understand perfectly well because the narration was slow and clear! yay!
wow i've never written such vague posts before...but i figure this is better than overly detailed right?
let's see...other cool thigns that happened this week:
1) remember the lit class that i was excited about because i met a bunch of the kids in the class the day the teacher didn't show up? well if you didn't remember...it was cool because one of the girls was spanish and she was like yeah totally you can photocopy my notes and everyone was so nice and i was like yay i have a group that can help me with this class! and then..none of them showed up again!! booo...but i stayed in the class anyway because it will fulfill a gen-ed requirement for cornell and it's interesting. but then the spanish girl showed up this week! for the first time since the first week of class! so that really excited me because she could therefore from now on take good notes i could later look at. even though i have to rely on my own notes for the first 3-4 weeks...but, all that excitement vanished a tiny bit when she didn't show up yesterday, again! jeeeez...

2) for UHS people: i met a girl in one of my classes who went to middle school with lucas orme!! how random is that?? she goes to UCSB now. it was just random cuz this wasn't a class for american students, it's an actual UB university class, but somehow i still find my SF connections!

3) i got a phone call the other night while i was sitting in my apartment from some random girl, and she was like my teacher said you would like to do an intercambio (all in broken english, mind you). and i said oh yeah! i forgot that i put my name on a list to do that...and most people in my BCA group have put their names down to do intercambios, but i haven't heard of anyone else getting a phone call yet. it all depends on the person who gets your name, because it's their responsibility to ever call you. however...in the excitement and nerves of the phone call i told her that we could meet up this saturday and i didn't realize until after i hung up that i won't even be here!! so i tried calling her back on her cell but it was off, so i sent her a text message, but i haven't heard back yet...so i'm worried she's gonna show up and wait for me on saturday!! i'll have to call her back again...

4) my parents have arrived!! they got here yesterday afternoon at around 5 pm. i took them for a stroll down Las Ramblas and then a little bit by the water. then we made our way back to their hotel walking through old town. then we got dinner, but of course being jet lagged americans we were the only ones in the restaurant because we were eating so early! 8:45 ...ok not so early, but for here it is! i'm so used to the late night eating that i wasn't even hungry yet. pero bueno...no pasa nada :)

plans for the future:
tonight me and my parents are going to a concert at el palau de la musica and it's going to be alfred brendel performing (a pianist)!! now i'm sure most of you have no clue who that is, buti was looking at the website to see what concerts would be going on when my parents were here, and i saw his name and i thought...huh, that sounds familiar...and it turns out it sounded familiar because he's super famous! and my dad has recordings of him at home and everything. one of his favorite CDs is a recording of alfred brendel playing beethoven!! so i'm really glad that i found that so we can go tonight and make my dad happy :) and like i've said before, the palau is just an amazing building on its own.
on saturday BCA is organizing a trip to tarragona for the group! i'm sure everyone signed up to go, because why not? so that should be fun.
i'm sure i have lots of touristy type things planned for the weekend too because i've kind of been saving all that stuff for when my parents came. stuff like sagrada familia, picasso museum, gaudi houses (actually going inside instead of just staring from the street like i normally do), etc...
phew, now i feel better that i have posted. i could feel all the stuff to say building up, and now i don't have to worry about it for atleast another week! ;-)
adiosssss,
sara