Week 2: Back to reality

After our extraordinary weekend in Andorra (in Rome for some others from our group, and here in Barcelona for the rest), we had a full week of classes during our second week in Spain. A "full week" for us means Monday-Wednesday, 9:00am-1:00pm (usually runs a little late, though). Beyond that, the days have all kind of run together, so rather than reporting chronologically, I'll just generalize about different aspects of our days and hit the highlights. Sound good? (If it doesn't, that's fine, just drag your mouse cursor up to the top-right corner of your screen (top-left for Mac-users), find a little 'X', and click on it.) Haha ok here we go...

Class:

We generally struggle out of bed around 8:15 or so to get down to breakfast by 8:30. We eat breakfast in time to make our 10-minute walk down the hill to our classroom and arrive within ten minutes of the 9:00 start time. (Punctuality is not a huge concern in Spanish culture, so we are trying to embrace that.) Our first 2-hour session is a lecture-based course taught by a professor from the school here (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) named Rosella. In her cold-molasses-thick Spanish/Catalan accent, she teaches about the development of the European Union. So far, the class has been focused on explaining policies and problems with the EU using basic economic theory on a supply/demand graph. She's a pretty good teacher, and it's interesting being taught by someone from a completely different culture. She uses different types of examples and has a slightly different perception about many things. Unfortunately for most of our class, the room we are in is not air conditioned, so the temperature hovering around 80 degrees combined with a voice that is easy to tune out (because it takes such effort to decipher) leads to a superfluous level of heads on desks or at least bobbing down and up. She's pretty good about letting us take breaks in the middle of our long lectures, and the occasional breeze through the open windows is refreshing enough to keep most of us awake. Our grade is based on 3 problem sets (basically one per week after the first week) that we get to work on together outside of class, and a report/presentation at the end of the course that covers an EU issue of our choice. (No tests!)

Our second class session is 2 hours with our Texas A&M faculty group leader, Daria Panina. She is teaching a course about International Business (a management class). This is a really broad topic, but so far we have covered some European Union development and economic theory that overlaps with the first class, some analysis of how culture effects economy and vise-versa, and some trade theory. It's pretty cumbersome, but pretty interesting at the same time. Even though Dr. Panina is a native Russian, the (relative) in-severity of her accent is a welcomed change for the second 2 hours. On top of that, the fact that she lives and works in the United States gives her the ability to relate concepts to our perception and worldview on a different level than Rosella can. Our grade in Dr. Panina's class is based on a group assignment, 2 small quizzes over important chapters, and a group project at the end of the class. (No tests here either!)

The class load is just enough to require some work and thought to earn the credit-hours, but isn't so much that it takes up a huge amount of our time here. An hour or two per week outside of class is about all we need to get everything done. The grade distributions for these classes in past years have been ridiculously high, so we can focus more on learning and the experience of studying abroad rather than worrying about our grades like we do during the fall and spring in College Station.

Afternoons:

So yeah, we are usually done with class and back to the hotel by 1:30 or so. This leaves a plethora of options for the rest of the day. We found a grocery store a couple of train-stops away, so Scott and I have sandwich stuff in our hotel room to save some meal money. We usually make lunch out of that. Some days we'll head to the beach for the afternoon, some days we'll go sightseeing, some days we'll just stay in and nap.

On Tuesday this week, I went on the Fat Tire Bike Tour through Barcelona with a handful others from our group. Fat Tire is a small company that does bicycle tours through 4 cities (Barcelona, London, Berlin, Paris). It's basically designed to cater to young people from English-speaking countries. The tour guides are college students or wanderers from around the world (the three that we met were from St. Louis, Missouri; London, England; and South Africa). It's a really cool concept, and the company was actually started by a Mays Business School at Texas A&M graduate. (Whoop!)

Anyway, we met up with the tour guides around 4:00pm, grabbed our bikes, and headed out with our mean tour guide, JJ (the South African). We started in the Barri Gotic riding through crowded narrow allies among cathedrals and castles from the Gothic Era, stopping along the way to hear JJ explain the historical significance of the most important places (with plenty of his dry humor sprinkled in). The tour continued in the same fashion to some of the major sights of Barcelona including the Arc d'Triomf (rip-off of the more famous one in Paris), a couple of parks, the boardwalk and beach, and perhaps the most famous construction site in the world, La Sagrada Familia. This is a huge cathedral that was designed by the famous architect Gaudi. (He has basically an infinite about of work here in Barcelona.) He wasn't able to finish it before he died (it was designed to be a multi-century project), so the construction continues today as the construction company rakes in 11 Euro per visitor (multiplied by many million visitors per year). The building is already really impressive, and it's not even close to being finished. The tour finished around 8:00pm, we all had a really good time, and even got a discount card for the one in Paris (where we will be next weekend). With a student discount it costs 18 Euro (20 for everyone else), and we all agreed that between the entertainment, the information, and the ease of the tour (that is, seeing all the main stuff in one afternoon) that it was well worth it. We even got some restaurant tips from the tour guide, who has lived in Barcelona for 3 years.

Food:

The food here is really good; I haven't had a meal that I didn't enjoy yet. There is a lot of seafood, a lot of pork (especially ham), and some chicken, but almost no beef (unless you go to American restaurants like McDonalds or Hard Rock).

When you think Spanish food, you probably think of tapas and paella. These are definitely the most common foods here (and luckily, two of my favorites). These are not so much dishes as they are ways of eating...

Tapas is basically a bunch of smaller plates of food, usually served family style and shared by a group. These plates could have grilled or fried vegetables, fish, chicken, or pork, steamed mussels or clams, croquettes, Spanish omelets, bread, and calamari. The idea with tapas is to sit and eat over a longer period of time. We got a great tip from the Fat Tire tour guide on a local favorite tapas place call El Tropezon. 5 of us went and our food only costed about 45 Euro. The Sangria de Cava was also really good there. Cava is a sparkling white wine that is local to the Cataunya region. 

Paella is a dish that originated in the south of Spain, but it has become something of a national dish. Paella is a rice dish that is typically served family style in the vessel that it is cooked in (also called a paella). A paella (the pan) is a shallow pan with short, angled sides and two small handles. The dish is rice-based, with a saffron-based sauce. These are about the only limitations. In Barcelona, most of the paellas have seafood in them, which is delicious. I've tried a summer vegetable paella which was also good, but my favorite paella so far was from the buffet we ate at in Tarragona last Thursday. I don't know what it was called, but it was basically paella with roasted red peppers and mussels.

We've also found a lot of Mediterranean food that you would think of as Greek or Israeli. There are pita places and felafel bars dotting nearly every street. This food is really healthy and really good when it is fresh. Makes for a great quick lunch or dinner.

There is a huge open-air market here in Barcelona called La Boqueria. (There's really no direct translation, but it basically means like "the mouth place".) There are countless fruit stands, deli counters, and butcheries. For 1 Euro, you can get a fresh fruit juice in countless combinations of flavors. My favorites so far are pina-limon (pineapple-lime) and mango-fresca (mango-strawberry). There's a vegetarian food stand in the back called Organic. They offer some good pitas, pizzas, and a delicious rice and goat cheese stuffed roasted red pepper.

From the grocery stores, we usually get sandwich stuff because it's easy and because it's delicious. The best meats are pork-based, but many of them are pretty fatty. We've stuck with regular old ham most of the time, and let the bread and cheese work around it. A wider variety of cheeses are available and affordable here in Europe. We've eaten a lot of havarti and edam cheeses with our ham. The grocery stores have regular sliced bread, but they also have full service bakeries with an unlimited variety of breads. Maybe the biggest difference in eating sandwiches here is what goes with them. When we walk down the chips aisle, we see flavors like Herb, Mediterranean (onion, pepper, and garlic.. tastes a lot like BBQ flavor though just lighter), Dill and Rosemary, and even meat flavors like Ham and Chicken! (They actually taste like ham or roasted chicken.) I found a flavor of Doritos called Tex-Mex... so I had to try them. I was disappointed, though, because they were basically just the Nacho Cheese flavor in an orange bag.

Anyway, I'm sure you can tell that we are not going hungry over here. I'm excited about going to Paris this weekend to try some new foods there as well.

MontJuic:

This weekend, on Saturday, we (Mallory, Tara, Christina, Bailey, Katie, Scott, and I) checked out MontJuic... a mountain on the edge of Barcelona. Once we got up there, we went through an art museum dedicated to Joan Miro, an artist from Catalunya. After that we walked around the Olympic Stadium and the Olympic plaza area which was really awesome. We then headed over to the steps of the National Museum of Art of Catalunya (the Catalan people think that that their state should be a nation independent from Spain like it was back in the day). Below (that is, down the slope of MontJuic) the Museum is Placa Espanya, and between the two is "The Magic Fountain". We went and ate over by the plaza and then came back over to the fountain around sunset for the show. The fountain and lights were timed with music (a lot of American and some Spanish) and it was really quite impressive. The area was packed with people, locals and tourists alike. If you can only see three things in Barcelona, I would recommend La Sagrada Familia, MontJuic, and Parc Guell (the next highlight).

Parc Guell:

The story behind Parc Guell goes something like this. Gaudi (before he started La Sagrada Familia) was commissioned to design and build something on this really rich guy's property (the guy was named Guell) for him to have as like his backyard for the house he was going to build. Gaudi built this park (pictures later) that is really hard to explain in words, but it is really cool and creative. As the story goes, Guell HATED it, so he decided to build his house elsewhere and eventually the park was opened to the public and named for the rich guy (Parc Guell). We checked that out on Friday this week and spent the whole afternoon there. There were Spanish Classical guitarists doing their thing for tips and selling CDs; they were really legit. From the top couple of levels, you can see over the whole city to the Mediterranean coast, its really cool.

Anyway.. That's just a little bit more of when we've been doing over here. I really appreciate your reads and comments. Hopefully I'll be able to post again soon with some more pictures from this week and weekend.