I apologize for the gap between blog posts.  The past few weeks I have been extremely busy with schoolwork and exploring Barcelona.

It was another exciting weekend in Barcelona.  The thing I like most about this city is that there are so many different things that you can do here.  I haven’t even explored the beach yet now that the weather is getting better.  I guess that is my goal in the upcoming weeks.  Unfortunately the school work is starting to pile up, and it seems that every day I lose more and more of my free time.

Thursday, February 24, I went to RCD Espanyol’s stadium with my Sport and Society in Spain class.  Espanyol is the other, less known soccer team in Barcelona.  If you didn’t know, the term “soccer” is never said here in Spain, or even in Europe.  Europeans always refer to soccer as football.  The stadium was very, very nice, having been constructed in 2009.   The tour started off with a 3-D movie about the club’s history.  After the movie, we got to see the home team’s locker room, which was very nice and clean.  The highlight of the visit was when we were allowed to go on the pitch (the field) and sit on the team’s bench.  We weren’t supposed to step on the grass, but some rules were meant to be broken…

Friday the 25th was an interesting day for me.  I made a last minute decision to go on a free field trip sponsored by my Sustainability class.  The field trip was to Can Masdeu, a former leper hospital that became a squatted settlement and is now home to ecologists and activists who live off of the land.  They build things completely from recycled materials.  For example, they use a bicycle to run a washing machine instead of using electricity.  They built a dry bathroom from used materials that they gathered around the community and in Barcelona.  It was a very interesting trip and I learned a lot.  The hospital that the 20 members of the settlement live in is very dilapidated, but they make the best of it.  I found the whole place to be very cool. It was an old hospital surrounded by gardens, in the middle of a mountain, with a great view of the city of Barcelona.  It is truly amazing what people can do with so little materials.   Unfortunately, it was a little awkward because I was the only student from the class who showed up, so it was just my professor and me on a 4 hour field trip together.  I hope he gives me some extra credit for that!

Saturday, the 26^th of February, was another long day.  My friend Molly and I set out in the morning to catch a train to the nearby city of Girona.  I had heard it was very easy to purchase a ticket at the train station, but naturally nothing is ever as easy as people say it is.  It took so long to figure out how to buy a ticket that we missed our train.  Once we finally found an employee who spoke a little bit of English, we discovered that we had an hour to kill until the next train.  We explored the area near the train station and found a really cool city park.  It was really pretty even though the water was a nauseating color of green.  This park even had a giant metal dragon that doubled as a slide.  Because I still have the mind of a twelve year old, I was enthralled with this dragon.  I couldn’t believe how fast you went down the slides!  It was a lot of fun, even though the whole thing smelled like urine and I’m pretty sure homeless people slept in the dragon.

The train ride lasted about an hour and a half, and showed us some of the countryside of Spain.  When we got off the bus, we ran into two other kids who are studying with us at IES and the 4 of us joined forces for the adventure.  Girona is a very interesting city.  It has residential buildings that tower over a canal-like river.

  The buildings are very colorful and the river is nearly still, which allows for a unique reflection of the buildings in the river.  Throughout the history of the city, it was home to Romans, Moors, and Jews.  Influences from each of these inhabitants are present in the city to this day, which makes for interesting multi-cultural sightseeing.  There is an Arab bathhouse, which was really just some ruins.  Since I like archaeology, I was intrigued by the old architecture of the bathhouse and the artifacts that remained.  There was a beautiful iglesia, or church, which had many shrines and a cloister.  We also walked through the Jewish Quarter.  The streets were so tiny and beautiful with flowers and vines hanging from the balconies above.  The streets and walkways seemed to disappear into the buildings as they wound through the city.  We then walked to the top of the fort structure that overlooked all of the city.  It was so beautiful with the mountains in the background.  After that we walked along the “Great Wall of Girona”.  It is a fortified wall that surrounds the old city of Girona.  I don’t know the real name of the wall, but it reminded me of the great wall of China, only not as great.  After walking along the wall, we finally found our way to the Catedral de Girona, which was a truly impressive Cathedral.  Unfortunately, I got scolded for taking a picture and disrupting the sanctity of the cathedral.  I’m Catholic, so I was offended that I couldn’t take pictures of how ornate everything looked.  There were about 25 shrines surrounding the altar.  Each shrine either contained a sarcophagus or a gold altar piece from another church.  After exploring the cathedral for a little bit, and being denied entrance to the bell tower, we decided to head home.  On the way home, we made a pit stop at the Cinema Museum.  This museum charted the first hundred years or so of film.  It was fascinating to see the way film progressed.  Being somewhat of a film and cinema geek, I really enjoyed looking at all of the antique cameras and recorders and video boxes.  After spending a long time in the film museum, we hopped on a train back to Barcelona.

On Sunday, I went to my first Spanish movie theater.  My “Contemporary Spanish Film” teacher challenged us with viewing a movie in Spanish, in a Spanish cinema, and writing a review about it.  I had never watched a foreign movie without subtitles before, so I knew it was going to be an experience.  I bought my ticket and the guy at the ticket booth mumbled something in Spanish to me.  I just replied “Si,” and headed into the theater.  Well, apparently in Spain they give you an assigned seat in the theater.  I should have realized this when I saw people getting kicked out of the seats by others.  I was sitting in a nearly empty row in the middle of the theater.  About two minutes after the movie starts, I see two older ladies walk into my row and I just rolled my eyes.  Of course, I was sitting in their seats.  They refused to sit anywhere else in a nearly empty theater.  They insisted on sitting in the seat I was sitting in.  So I had to crawl over people to find a new seat somewhere in the theater that would not be occupied.  It was very annoying and the language barrier was frustrating.  The movie was Tamien La Lluvia which in English is “Even The Rain.”  It was an excellent movie, from what I understood.  I enjoyed going to the theater, but I would appreciate subtitles.

This weekend also marked the end of the time of “Rebaixes” or sales period.  For two months, nearly every retail store in BCN offered great deals on clothes.  So on the last day of the sales, I took advantage of it and made some interesting purchases (including a V-neck). Still not so sure how I feel about that one…

I’m a little bit behind on my blogging, so I am going to write three one-week installments to catch up instead of writing an incredibly long and ponderous post.

Hasta Luego!

~Sean

Location: Girona, Spain