First Impressions

I'm sitting in the kitchen area of my building watching Spongebob in Spanish. I'm relaxing with two good friends who, a mere week ago, were complete strangers. I'm entirely content, and I'm exhausted.

The last 200 hours of my life have been a whirlwind. I've been in Barcelona for a little over a week, and I feel like I've seen and heard and felt more than ever before. Even sitting down to write this feels overwhelming -- I guess I'll start from the beginning and Sparknote as much as possible.

Taking a cab to the hotel that we stayed in the first night, I could not have been more nervous. I tried to speak to the cab driver in my broken Spanish. He assured me that everyone spoke Castellano, despite the signs in Catalan. He explained the political situation and the increasing support for independence. He seemed excited that I was an American, especially when I told him I was studying and really wanted to learn the language. People here seem to appreciate it if you make the effort -- I'm quickly learning to get over the nervousness of sounding stupid. It's worth it.

The two girls I met when I walked into my hotel room have become two of my closest friends on the trip so far. I lucked out, and it was a real relief to meet people that I could connect to from the start. Our welcome dinner is kind of a blur, but the glass after glass of vino tinto definitely eased the awkward small talk between strangers -- and complete strangers quickly became friends. The loneliness I worried about before I left has yet to hit me, and hopefully it'll stay that way.

The next day we moved into our permanent housing. We're living in Melon (emphasis on the O), a residence with a bunch of other American and international students. It's modern, clean and -- most importantly -- a 10 or 15 minute walk from the beach. From the subway stop located just a block away, we travel to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Universitat de Barcelona and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, where we've been taking clases for the "proseminar." Our first class was last Monday, and it's an intro to Catalan, a strange language that more than anything makes me want to speak French. It definitely helps trying to get around the city, though, since all of the signs are in this official language of Cataluña. They say we'll be good enough at Catalan to be able to take a university class in it, that eventually we won't even notice when someone's speaking Catalan instead of Spanish -- but at the rate I'm picking it up now, I'm not entirely convinced.

I've been running a lot outside, just letting myself get lost, and it has helped me enormously to get situated. Since Barcelona is such an old city, a random turn might lead you to, say, a gothic building or an old aqueduct, for example -- I casually bumped into an elaborate structure picturing the birth of Aphrodite while running a mere 10 minutes from Melon. I've seen so many amazing things, and unfortunately, yesterday was the first day I've brought my camera to try to remember them. The overwhelming feeling I got when I started to snap photos was that this city is almost too amazing to capture on film.

Of course I tried anyway. We walked all the way west across the city to Parc Guell, the crazy and wonderful park designed by Gaudi. His footprint is all over this city, and it's awesome, and here are some snaps from my day:

A crazy thing about this last photo -- there's a huge immigrant population here that sells little trinkets here at Parc Guell and also on the beaches. It's totally illegal, and when cops show up they bolt. This picture from yesterday was taken right as a friend was in the process of buying a fan from one of them. All of a sudden hundreds of these guys snatched their stuff up and sprinted into the woods to hide because they heard the cops were coming. I've seen it happen a couple of times already, and it's a horrible thing to watch. The fact that they're willing to risk so much to sell little things to tourists for a couple of euros a piece really puts the desperation of their situation into perspective.