Welcome to the much-anticipated blog entry for this week! Hopefully it won't be quite as long as last week's!
So. Tomorrow I will have been here in Barcelona for a whole month, and I can't believe it! That will be a month down in what seems like the blink of an eye. Suddenly my time here is seeming very finite, and it's like... eek! I'd better do more partying!
However on the partying front I'm doing not too badly! Tuesday night was the last 'party night' of La Mercè (Barcelona's biggest festival), so there were lots of celebrations in my Residencia. We went down towards the beach, drank too much sangria and played lots of silly games, and it was good because there are hundreds of people living in this building and there are still loads I haven't met!
We played this game which had soooo many references to Spanish popular culture, like you have to sing this song by this person... it all went way over my head, but it was fun anyway! I just laughed. Afterwards we went on to the Parc del Fòrum for the Escenari Electro-(BAM)... or something. The Forum is like a huge outdoor venue, so it was like a crazy electro concert with flashing lights and stuff, outdoors, but partially under cover. I think if I'd been a bit less sangriafied then it would have been pretty spectacular, there were so so so many people dancing. It seemed like a thousand “Lava Ignites” full of people had been poured into the place. Here's a picture which I found on flickr to give you a bit of an idea what it was like... because I didn't have my camera.
We had the day off on Wednesday due to La Mercè, so I went to see the Castellers again, Plaça Sant Jaume was ab-so-lutely packed, you could not move. After that I went with one of my amigos and one of his amigas for a general wander about, we went to Maremagnum down at the port and had waffles, then played with toy fish on ribbons. Umm, I don't know how to describe it. You know Poi? Where you spin fire about? Like that, but with colourful fish instead of fire, haha... never mind.
The other night out this week was Friday, we went for a Chinese and then to pubs and clubs, it wasn't an unusual night but it was really fun. Since we had Wednesday off, nobody seemed to be too exhausted... even at 5am people were still like “after this song.... ok no, after this song we will leave...”
As for classes, I can't complain too much. For PCD I have a wee assignment I'm trying to do with concurrent threads and what-not. It's quite difficult because it's all written in Catalan, meaning I can get the gist of what I'm supposed to do, but the nitty gritty details are a bit blurry still. I have a lab on Dilluns so I can ask for help then if I need to. My other classes are getting a bit harder, but of course they are! Week one was never going to be as hard as they were going to get. My Analysis and Design of Algorithms course is going to be a bit of a pain in the butt I think... it's important, but it's annoying. I still do not care whether this algorithm is Θ or Ω of n(loge2n) or whatever, it's boring.
I'm definitely making progress in the Catalan department, I can do basic verb conjugations and speak about very basic things, but I can understand quite a lot. You begin to notice things, like equivalent words between languages. Like in Catalan they say aleshores which seems to be equivalent to the French alors. And they say encara which seems to be the same as todavía in Spanish. I still find it awesome that they use the letter X so much in Catalan; Xocolata = chocolate. Funky!
Contrary to what I thought would be the case, although I am eager to be good at Catalan, it's the Spanish which is frustrating me more (because that's the one I'm actually speaking in!) I wish I could swallow a dictionary, because I have to say “¿como se dice...?” more than I'd like. But yeah, slowly but surely the vocabulary is growing.
Anyway, I am totally loving it. It's great that you can just get your cafè amb llet and sit in the sunshine studying in between lectures, it's great that everything you need is so convenient in the city, the people are genuinely lovely and the nightlife is brilliant! (I haven't even been to the big famous 'uns yet... Razzmatazz, Pacha, Bikini etc.) Although I must say, when it comes to shopping, I do miss Tesco! haha
Anyway, that's all for now.
Adéu!
