26 September 2007 · Comment [4]
I finally have time to post again because we're almost not vagrants anymore! Ha-cha-cha-cha!
Jovanna and I found an apartment in Barcelona! Awesomepants. It’s a half-hour train ride away from the city center, but it’s gorgeous and right on the beach and we have our own garden terracey thing! Plus it’s cheap, plus we don’t have to worry about people stealing things in our current junky hostel since we can move in tomorrow and I am so excited that it hurts a little. When we first started looking for an apartment, we were all about living as close to the city center as possible, but those ones are all super expensive and hard to get and today Jovanna made the good point that it would probably be awful to be surrounded by tourists and tourist things all the time for two months straight, which I guess is exactly what I’ve been doing for the past three months but at least the country was changing every couple days.
Today I started thinking about playing the flute on the street to make some money, but it sounds like you have to apply for a license and it takes months to get and besides I’m not very good at the flute anyway. But today I got the phone number of an animal shelter where I might volunteer as long as my eyes aren’t going to explode with allergies every single day! Um, yes. We’ll see how that goes. At any rate, I don’t want to just do nothing but loaf all day, but it’s hard to find a job for only two months so I keep thinking of things that I’m good for and am coming up surprisingly short. I could… make friendship bracelets? No! Stupid! Maybe I’ll just panhandle. Yessss, this could work. I do know how to say please and thank you and help me, I only have one lung in Spanish.
Also, it is so completely awesome to be in a Spanish-speaking country. The closest I’d ever been to one before this was Brazil, and most people didn’t know Spanish there and I’d only taken it for two years but now I can actually almost talk to people like a normal person! I was really worried about the Catalan thing, but everyone is fluent in Spanish and they don’t get annoyed with you for speaking like a foreigner and I’m definitely getting better already! Though I’m getting pretty annoyed about forgetting stupid words like “fork” and “jar” that are like, buried in my brain under tons and tons of useless information like the phone numbers of people I never talk to anymore and everything that Britney Spears has done to ruin her life over the past six months. Did you know that she asked Playboy if she could do a shoot and they told her to get her life together first? Oooh, Playboy burn! The most shameful burn of all them all.
But anyway, a ridiculous number of things have happened in the past week and I only have an hour left until this internet place closes, so I’m just going to put up a bunch of pictures and talk about them like always! Excellent. Also, my family’s coming in a week! Gonna be so awesome. Plus it gives me the perfect excuse not to run around doing tourist things all day, because I’ll just have to go back in a week so now I can just work on setting up a life! Neat. Okay, all these words are hurting my eyes, let’s get on with the pictures. Captions probably coming later on a bunch of them because I don’t want to do another rush job like that fiasco in Sarajevo.
Oh curses, I got all caught up watching dumb youtube videos so I’m gonna have to put off posting most of the pictures until later. But soon there will be approximately three thousand pictures here! Won’t that be exciting.
Update: Well it certainly did take three days to get around to captioning these. Whoopsies, who would have thought that setting up a little life for two months would take so much work? But now I have a cell phone and an apartment and groceries and if everything goes well today, maybe I’ll even have a purpose in life soon! I’m putting out an ad for language partners and Jovanna and I are going to put together an English class because her language partner’s boss is paying 26 euros an hour just to talk to a native English speaker, and I’m going to call the animal shelter this evening and Britt’s going to look online for laws about playing instruments on the street for money! Here, this is Britt:
I met her through Jovanna, who I think met her through the handball team at Cal. She’s a senior this year and she’s studying abroad in Barcelona! I like her very much. We got to know each other last fall when Jovanna took us both to her house in Carmel for the weekend and we went to Big Sur and her mom made us delicious undercooked pancakes. Mmmm, raw dough.
This is the library at Britt’s school! As you can see by the fact that there are like ten pictures, I’m a little bit obsessed with it. It’s just so archey and sunlit! The big thing going off into infinity is a light fixture on top of a bookshelf.
Some arches! Makes me wish I could fly around in them.
Hey hey, more arches. The only bad thing about this library was that they had like three books in English. But it’s cool because I still have a bunch of books left to read and allegedly there’s a really good used English bookstore around here somewhere.
More books! This was the legal section I think. Well neat.
More library! If only the shelves were filled with tons of reading books and there were squishy couches, I would never leave.
Yup, one more library picture. Just can’t get over the sunlit bricks, nur.
Some stairs in Britt’s university. They also have a government-subsidized cafeteria, which serves beer, which is also subsidized by the government! What a craaazy country.
This is my camera! Thought it was about time to post a picture of it and give credit where credit is due. I think the huge lens makes a big difference in how well the colors come out. It’s too big to fit in a pocket but not so big that I resent having to carry it around everywhere. That’s a hard balance to strike when you’re buying a camera for traveling but I’m happy I went with this one. Also the LCD screen flips out, which helps a ton with taking weird pictures so you don’t have to like, kneel on the dirty, dirty ground or anything.
This is the view from the window of our hostel in Barcelona! Well, one of our windows, because we got moved three times because that place did not have any idea how to run a hostel. Also they had lockers that wouldn’t lock? Why would you ever do that! I do not know. One girl kept getting her stuff stolen and it was sad. But the neighborhood was nice. It was the Gothic Quarter and all the streets were little and rambley, like this.
This is the Barcelona airport. Taken right after Duncan took off and then I slunk around in a depression for a few days. Meeting up with him first thing when I got to Barcelona was not at all a good idea. At least the airport was neat.
More of the airport. I felt like I was in Tron.
Yup, more airport. Makes me want to wear fluorescent colors and hack into a giant computer that stores information as giant images projected onto walls. Or is that Hackers? It’s probably both, plus every other movie from the eighties that had the slightest little thing related to computers.
The windows in the Barcelona airport. Yup, it’s sunset. I can’t decide if I hate this picture or not.
One more of the airport! I gotta say, it’s a much more pleasant place when you’re not waiting there at seven in the morning on Yom Kippur and you’re all exhausted and grumpy and just want Duncan’s flight to get in already and you think it’s over an hour late but then three days later you realize you just hadn’t set your watch back from Greek time, nurrrr.
Duncan! So awesome. Umm, yup. He’s m’boyfriend! And his tube station is Mornington Crescent, which is a song by Belle & Sebastian, which is a band that I love and that is very neat.
Monday was a huge festival in Barcelona and there was a parade with all these giant floatey things and they looked kind of funny because they walked with a normal person’s legs but they were way too tall for legs that short. The parade was way too packed to take pictures of them, but then we saw them walking back from the parade and that’s where this is.
A street in Barcelona! Basically I want to take a picture of every single street because this city is gorgeous.
Another picture of Duncan! At lunch on Monday. I was thinking about going on and on about how awesome he is, but I decided that instead of being endearing creepy, it would just be the regular kind.
Another street in Barcelona! So happy we live here.
A human castle! From the Mercé festival on Monday. This was so amazing and fun and exciting but then two groups fell and there are little tiny children on top and they fall the farthest and it’s awful so we ran away. Then I was looking at youtube videos of the festival and this one guy recorded them falling but played it back in slow-motion with really happy music playing in the background and it looked like they were all floating around and having fun and it was not like that at all! But this is a happier video of what it actually was like:
I sort of think this group fell on the way down and the little children started crying but everyone looked fine, unlike another group where one of the adults was unconscious and we don’t know if he was okay and it still makes me feel all cringey to think about it.
More castellers! This group was really neat because the outside ring of people came down and inside there was another, skinnier tower!
This is a team celebrating after they successfully made a huge tower and didn’t fall. Duncan and I somehow ended up right in the middle of all the groups and it was so exciting when a group was successful and it felt like everyone helped.
This is the team in the middle of making their castle. Below this tier of guys is an even huger tier of people all pushing on each other and providing a human cushion in case they fall.
More castle! Neat. The people get used as steps.
One of the castellers biting his collar, which a lot of people did and we think it was to keep their shirts tight so people’s feet didn’t slip around.
Now we’re in Santorini! Somehow I have no pictures from the first two days Duncan was here, probably because I was too grumpy on Yom Kippur and then the next day we went to the beach so he let me use his camera. But yes, Santorini. This is a church and it is at night. And that is the moon. Excellent.
Sunset from Santorini! According to the Berenstain Bears, all of those colors means there’s a lot of air pollution.
Another sunset! Neat.
A colorful little doorway! So awesome. There’s not a whole lot to say about most of these, so let’s talk about other things! I just put up an ad for a language partner on the Spanish craiglist like a half an hour ago and I already have ten replies! One from a guy named Jesus Fernandez Fernandez and I’m pretty sure I can’t not meet with him at least once. Also, I just set up a meeting for tomorrow! Perfect, I’m finally doing something with my life. Besides, you know, going to college and getting a job and all that.
A random little plant and a window in Santorini! Yup, just thought it looked neat is all.
Another church in Santorini! Or maybe the same one, I don’t know, they’re all blue and white. This one and its little peach belltower thing are on a bunch of postcards, though.
The most relaxed-looking dog there ever was! I’m jealous.
Some stairs, yup. Making neat little straight lines with each other.
A wall with a useless little window cut into it! I’d really like to know when most of these things were built, because they look completely art deco but somehow I got the impression that things have looked this way for hundreds of years.
A souvenir shop! So many colors. Kind of hurts to look at it.
Shapes! I just realized that I have no idea what these things do. Huh, that’s pretty wrong.
A windmill! I feel like it’s going to be a pretty useless windmill with just tiny sticks to catch the wind. Uh oh, it just hit me how everything in Santorini is designed to attract tourists and now I feel so used.
More of the windmill. The sneaky, useless windmill.
Another church! Yup, it’s colorful.
A spindly tower outside the church. Yay, pictures! And now a video!
I used to watch this obsessively last semester and get sooo excited about how perfect everything was going to be when I was traveling and then I watched it again yesterday and got a little depressed because this trip isn’t like, a magical odyssey of joy and gloriousness and I still get cranky and have to figure out irritating public transportation systems, but then I realized that my life is still infinitely better than it was when I had to worry about tests and homework and I, too, could totally put together a three-and-a-half-minute montage of awesome moments from this trip so it hasn’t been a waste at all and has in fact been nothing short of awesometastic.
And finally, this is Rachana! With her little brother, Neil. She’s coming to visit me in the first week of November and it’s going to be so great. We went to eighth grade together but didn’t get to be really good friends until college. She’s teaching English to little kids in France right now so she’s coming over when their school has its fall break.
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« We finally made it to Greece after 35 hours of traveling! Now just 9 more to go until we get to Santorini! Nur.» Estoy en Barcelona, viviendo en Barcelona... cholo.
hey, glad you found an apt. are there pictures of it?
— Chris · Sep 28, 09:26 AM · #
Woman! This is awesome. Man oh man am I jealous. But in a good, happy for you way and less in an I’m-going-to-kill-you-and-suck-your-memories-out-and-claim-them-for-my-own sort of way. Also, just by the pictures, I can tell Duncan is awesome and totally made for you. Look at those shirts he wears! They are kind of like your pig and frog socks when they make sweet, sweet love. Mees yous!
— Noaa · Sep 30, 07:00 PM · #
I just realized where I know Jovanna + that other girl! Handball PE and my brief stint on the handball team! Ok, I have officially emerged from lurk-ville…HI
— Molly · Oct 2, 02:57 PM · #
Aw look it’s me! I get to come in two weeks omg!
— Rachana · Oct 18, 12:29 PM · #