So classy.

Hola! I realized recently that I really don't have many blog posts left! In fact, this is one of the last, there will just be four more after this and that fourth and final blog post I'll be writing in Minnesota! It was exactly four weeks until the end of the program last Thursday, so now it's less than four, and for one of those we'll be on spring break. Speaking of which, I might switch up my schedule a little, now that I think of it. I think my next blog post will be Thursday night because we leave on Friday. And then after that I'll post a blog that next weekend like normal and it'll be about our spring break trip. That'll be a lengthy one. We're going to Marrakesh (Morocco), and then Seville, Cordoba and Granada and we'll be gone for about a week. Don't worry, I already made an itinerary and a to-do list ;). (But really, I did.) But that's not for another two blog posts, back to the present!

So, Monday...I don't believe anything exciting happened on Monday. I really should take notes throughout the week so I can remember better, haha. Nope, pretty sure nothing on Monday. Oh! Except I got an email back from one of the internships I applied for. Unfortunately, he wanted to meet for an interview the next day and I felt a little bad explaining that I'm kind of out of the country and the best I could do is a Skype call.  Anyways, he asked when I would be available to start if I did get the position because they had been looking for someone to start on the 1st of April, which I obviously can't.  He said they'd be willing to wait for the right person, though, so maybe I still have a chance. I haven't heard from him since then though, or done any kind of phone interview because he went out of town. So I guess I wait and see. This one is unpaid, however, and the one I really want I haven't heard back from yet. But that was all for the excitement of Monday.

Tuesday, however, was actually exciting. The first part of the day was pretty uneventful, I went  grocery shopping, bought sunscreen (happy, mom? ;)) and tried to go to the library, but was outsmarted by the building and couldn't figure out how to actually get to the library part (design police! dysfunctional building!). Then I had class for a few hours, not particularly thrilling. After class, however, I went with some friends to a Barca soccer game! It was one of those things I felt I had to do before leaving Barcelona since their "futbol" team means so much to them.  I'm not a huge soccer person, nor sports in general, but I like to go to things like that occasionally for the experience and it was worth it. Our tickets were pretty cheap because we were high up, but I didn't mind. I thought it was actually a pretty good view, you can see a lot from up there. One downside is that it was kind of raining, but it didn't get too bad until towards the end of the game. Anyways, Barca won against Granada 5-3, so that was exciting, and their star player, Messi, broke a record for the amount of goals scored in his career in Barcelona! And I was at that game! Good timing, I'd say, on my part, that I chose that game to go to ;). Also, I felt that my professional soccer experience was complete because I saw one of the Granada players have *cough*fake*cough* a really dramatic injury.

Wednesday was pretty uneventful. I didn't get to go volunteer, yet again :(. This time because it was raining and seeing as we're recess monitors, we'd have nothing to do on a rainy day. However, this was literally only like the second time we'd had bad weather since I've been here. Apparently it usually rains all through February, but there was a drought this year. I didn't mind ;), but I'm glad thirsty Barcelona finally got some water. Now it's back to the typical 60s and sunny every single day. I can handle it. Also on Wednesday, I gave a 15 minute presentation speaking Spanish, not particularly enjoyable but I think it went pretty well. My professor told me afterwards she was glad I took the class in Spanish because I speak well :). Woohoo!

Thursday I didn't have class because I would usually only have one and it was cancelled :). Cara and another friend of ours, Nathan, who also lives up by us, went out for lunch at the parrot restaurant from quite a few blogs ago. It was fun and the food there is just really good. For the rest of the day I just did homework because it was still kind of rainy and because I've had a lot to do recently, with some classes starting to come to an end. Not a very exciting day, but that's okay, the weekend was pretty busy.

Friday we just have Spanish class and afterwards a group of 6 of us took the train to the town of Tarragona for a day trip.  It was an old Roman city and is said to be the best preserved Roman city in Spain, so it had a lot of really cool old ruins that we went and saw.  First we walked in the wrong direction and probably wasted roughly an hour, haha. I guess we should've had a map. But we had all day, so it wasn't a problem. By the time we actually found the old part of the city, we were starving, so we chose one of the cute little restaurants and sat outside (the weather had cleared up by this point in the week and it was a lovely day :)).  I plan on recommending that restaurant to anyone else in the program who visits Tarragona. It was so good and the guy was so friendly, and of course it was your typical Spanish meal meaning it was absolutely huge and took like 2 hours, probably. Restaurants in Spain always have a "menu del dia" or menu of the day for lunch and it's a three course meal (salad or pasta, main dish, dessert) and includes a beverage for usually around 10 euro and you just have like a few options to choose from for each course. It is so much food. I'm still not used to eating such huge lunches, but since the Spanish don't eat lunch until like 2 I would imagine they're starving! And no wonder they take a siesta afterwards! He gave us olives and potato chips and fuet (like salami) and then tons of bread with garlic, tomato, olive oil and salt so we could make our own pan con tomate, and this was all before the first course. After that we couldn't believe we seriously had two more courses coming. We eventually finished lunch and decided to actually see some ruins, since that was why we were there. We went and saw a few free ones and then went to the old Roman circus and the amphitheater and with the student discount each one was only 1,60 euro. It was so cool and Tarragona is right on the sea, so it's beautiful. It was a very successful day and then we took the train back to Barcelona to rest up for another day trip the next day!

Yesterday we had a day trip planned through our program to a Bodega Torres vineyards for a tour and wine tasting (I felt super classy) and then to a little village about 15 minutes out of Barcelona where Gaudi has (yet another) unfinished church that's one of his lesser known works.  We met our bus that morning and drove just a little over an hour to get to the vineyard and it was so pretty there. It's like the typical Spanish countryside with the perfect little vineyards and such and it was adorable. At first they weren't going to let us fully participate in the wine tasting because we were the last group to go and apparently the business students had behaved less than maturely on their trip (just not classy like me, I guess ;)). That's a common theme with the business students. They really don't even care what city they're in because they're just here to party. We don't get along with them particularly well and they refer to us as "those artsy kids" (we've toyed with the idea of playing it up just to mess with them: candlelight sketching sessions, dressing in black, reading poetry, etc., but we'd probably find it a lot funnier than they would) and are really puzzled by the purpose of our architecture studio. So there's that, but they decided we were classy enough to handle it without being stupid and immature so we did do the wine tasting in the end. But first, we went on a tour of the vineyard in a little train thing that was pulled by a minivan. It was so cheesy and great and there was one part where we went into the underground cellar and it was dark and creepy and it seemed like they tried to mix vineyard and haunted house because they like played creepy noises and I don't even know. It was very odd, the whole tour was like finding a golden ticket and touring Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. (That part reminded me of the part with the boat that always scared me when I was younger.)  Luckily no one turned into a blueberry or  fell into a chocolate waterfall and unfortunately I didn't see a Wonka-vator anywhere. After this and a short video, we went into the smell tunnel. Yes. Smell tunnel. We stood there and watched a video about the different seasons of grape growing and such and little canisters behind us sprayed smells. So we stood in a hallway and smelled the air. ("The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!" Similar, right?!) After that was the wine tasting (at 12 in the afternoon, just keeps gettin' classier). Apparently I'm still lacking the necessary amount of class, however, because I just don't like wine. We tried a white wine, a rose, and a red wine, and that's the order they went in my liking, with the red being my least favorite. It was an anti-beverage. Who in their right mind wants a dry beverage?! That completely defeats the purpose of drinking liquid! Anyways, after that it was then time to go to Colonia Guell and see some Gaudi.

Colonia Guell was a factory town and today it resembles a creepy little ghost town with Gaudi's unfinished church right in the middle, adding to the sense of its being abandoned. I'm pretty sure people still live there because there were lots of cars, but there were no people to actually be seen. All he ever finished of this church was the crypt and today it is a functioning church, but they don't plan to finish it like they do the Sagrada Familia, it's not nearly as big of a deal and hey, they've got a crypt, what more do they need? It was really pretty though, one of my favorite Gaudi works I've seen.  The tour guide, Ramon, was just adorable. He was so excited and passionate about this unfinished church and the genius who was Gaudi and with his really heavy accent it was just that much better. We had lunch in the town and then had some free time but there wasn't much to explore so instead we found a playground and played in it :). ('cause we classy, remember?) It was a fun time and then we came back and I did some more homework and tried to simulate packing for spring break, which is going to take some serious forethought.

Today, it's a good thing my iPod automatically changes with daylight savings time and knows I'm in Spain, because I completely forgot about it, but we're back to 7 hours apart from Minnesota again as of last night. If it hadn't changed on its own, I don't think I would've made it to the concert I went to today. I woke up this morning and was super confused as to why my iPod said 9:30 (the time I wasted to get up) but my clock still said 8:30. Anyways, I figured it out eventually and then got ready because some friends and I had tickets to see some sort of concert in the Palau de la Musica Catalana, which is an absolutely beautiful, fancy concert hall (Classy!). We had no idea what we were going to see because the website was in Catalan, but we really just wanted to see the building, so we didn't really care. We chose it because it was at a good time and it was cheap. So what was it, you ask? A family-oriented percussion show for children (so classy). It was wonderfully cheesy and really cute, so it was worth going to see the building and see all the cute kids, because they were totally loving it.  Afterwards we had to cut across the path of the runners in the marathon that was going on throughout the city when we decided to visit the Cathedral, because it's free on Sundays. So I got to go inside and look around, which I hadn't done yet, and it was very pretty, but I think the Basilica of Santa Maria del Mar is prettier. I think they should've chosen that one for the Cathedral building. But that's just my opinion ;).

After that I reluctantly headed home to study for my final next week...and predictably, said studying has yet to happen. Instead I applied for another internship, this one is with HGA, which is a super popular and well-known firm in the cities, so I'm not getting my hopes up by any means, but it would be awesome and it never hurts to try, right? And then I decided to write this blog, but first of course I had to make a new iTunes playlist to listen to while I type. So all this has now happened and it's 5 pm and I should probably do some studying for real. Next week's blog might not be particularly exciting since it's only going to cover Monday through Thursday, but I'll make up for it afterwards with my spring break blog :)! Have a lovely week! Adios!