Edinburgh Exchanges

Welcome, once again, to Barcelona!

So, what have I been up to over the last week or so? Uni work is still time and effort-consuming, which is unfortunate because I have realised that I could quite happily get by in this city without studying or working. Yes, the finances would be a bit of a problem once the Erasmus grant ran out, but I am Scottish and I'm a student – I know how to be thrifty!

I was working on this annoying assignment thing for Concurrent and Distributed Programming... and I just could not get the stupid program to work. I went and asked the lecturer for help twice, but none of the advice I was given was of any use at all. So anyway I wasted lots of time on that assignment which I should really have been spending revising for my mid-term “control” for Operating Systems. For operating systems, we have three “controls” - they're optional (yes, optional) mid-term exams which, if you do well enough in (on average), allow you to skip the final exam.

Operating Systems is probably the hardest course, and it's taught in Catalan, so probably I couldn't, realistically, have done quite that well this early on. To cut a long story short, it didn't go that well (I don't think, haven't got it back yet), but I know I will be capable of doing the stuff once I actually get round to learning it properly. On a happier note, my Mum and Dad were visiting this week, from Friday night until Wednesday afternoon. The exam was on Tuesday at 8am, but we were out at a restaurant until like midnight the night before. Meh...

So anyway, with my parents here we discovered some fantastic restaurants in Barcelona... (write them down, they're all really great): Marmalade in El Raval, La Rosa Negra on Via Laietana, La Luna off Plaça de Santa María, and Telirium in Les Corts. Mum and Dad arrived on Friday night and we went out to eat and drink; the food, sangria and company were all top notch! ;-) Somehow seeing your parents after seven or eight weeks seems like more of a big deal when you're abroad!

On Saturday we took the Renfe to Girona, a city just over an hour inland from Barcelona. What a bonny place. The shops, cafes and buildings were all really lovely and very clean, although unfortunately it rained buckets in the afternoon and (typical tourists) mum and dad had to buy emergency ponchos. Here's a picture of us in Els Banys Àrabs de Girona, which were built in 1194 (so, a fair while ago). Even if it's raining, definitely take a day-trip to Girona.

On Sunday, the sun decided to come back. I worked in the morning, then in the afternoon we went for lunch at Buenas Migas down at Barceloneta (goood flapjacks btw!) and had a look at the goings on around the beach and Port Vell. Probably the best thing about Sunday – MAMMA MIA! We went to see the musical (in Spanish, claro) at Barcelona Teatre Musical in the evening. It was so good! Really well done, good performers and stuff. I really liked the fact that it was in Spanish, I did learn stuff, believe it or not. 4 days on, I still occasionally have “por eso... gracias por dejarme cantar canciones!” popping into my head. (Thank You For The Music).
Here's a tune, it's called “Dame Dame Dame”, Guess...:

What else? Umm... more assignments, mid-term exams are coming soon in some subjects. My Catalan really has improved heaps though, I honestly understand lectures in Catalan just fine, as long as the lecturer speaks clearly enough (which they do). And my new Catalan class is good, a few of us from Orientation Week have been reunited, and it's not too stressful.

Oh, I forgot to write about last Thursday. It was a party with RESA – the company which runs my Residencia and a few other Residencias in Barcelona. They hired out a club and gave us alcohol etc, so it was good! The staff in the club would be the definition of the word “gilipollas” though. And that's not a good thing. Guess how much it was for a drink? 9€. Yeah, really. I wouldn't be in a hurry to go back to Nick Havanna (near Diagonal station).

Here's a photo I took. Who's more photogenic, the girls or the boys???

Right, I need to go and do the dishes so I can cook since I don't have any parents here to feed me!

….. It’s been a good night.  On Friday night there was a large Edinburgh contingency and a number of other UBC students heading downtown in a limo in celebration of a 21^st birthday.  I was one of them.  The limo ride was; an experience, I can’t say I managed the getting in and out of it with particular elegance but it was totally worth it!  We were also treated to VIP seating, queue jump, free club entry and free Cosmopolitans. Once inside “Plaza” and having returned to mere-mortal status extortionate drink prices lead to the accidental failure to return the tequila shot glasses and salt.  I’m not quite sure where the logic was in that one – a desperate attempt to get better value for money maybe??  Lots of dancing and a few more beverages later I found myself running for the last bus in order to get a brief two hour kip before my alarm clock went off.

4.30Am. Needless to say it wasn’t my finest hour.  Once my backpack and I were safely installed in the car I promptly went back to sleep and awoke 3 hours later to find myself well and truly out of the city high in the mountains.  Honestly, I can’t tell you exactly where I was other than north and east of Vancouver.  I’m having issues differentiating mountain ranges: last week I think I claimed to be heading to the Rocky Mountains but I don’t think that was entirely true.  The Pacific Coast Mountains may be a more accurate description.  Either way; there were mountains and they had snow on!

The objective of the weekend was to carry out essential maintenance on the Brian Waddington Memorial Hut and the trail leading to it.  The hut is one of four run by the Varsity Outdoors Club of UBC.  Saturday’s job was to clear the paths of Alder trees so I pretended to be a lumberjack all day with secateurs and a saw.  Towards the end of the day we hiked up to the hut to find snow on the ground and a partially frozen lake which provided much entertainment for the rest of the daylight hours.  Once it was dark food became the priority and meals were cooked; tortellini was on the menu and one VOC-ers created a Cheesecake (I have no idea how!)  Fed and watered we settled down round the songbook to perform a few of the classics courtesy of The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.

After a much needed early night, Sunday was another day on manual labour, this time I was mining.  Or rather; widening and flattening paths and trails to make the hut more accessible with the help of a beasty mattock.  Once we got back to the cars in the late afternoon I was shattered and slept most of the journey back.  There was a brief stop in Whistler for dinner followed by more sleeping ‘til we got back to campus at about 10.30pm….

…..At which point I sat down to finish writing the essay that was due in on Monday.  Staying awake and typing words in a coherent order didn’t seem to be working well for me so I caught up on more sleep and spent much of my Monday morning typing away. 

My realisation over the last few days: the work is never ending.  From what I can see I don’t have a break from deadlines and exams until Christmas which is rather a bleak outlook.  Thankfully Christmas just got way more exciting than trees and tinsel. Two of my best friends from Edinburgh will be heading to my side of the world so it’ll be more a case of snow and snowboarding as well as the usual festivities.  Definitely something to look forward to!

I’m sure the time between now and then will fly by; my weeks are kept continually busy by choir, rugby and that university malarkey.  Plus keeping up with the lives and loves of people on both sides of the Atlantic prevents me from twiddling my thumbs, which I think, while living in Vancouver, would be impossible. 

The half term holiday was a welcome break from Haverford’s student-imposed work-hard-play-hard ethos. I spent three days in and around Philly, then travelled to Washington, D.C to visit friends (Rachel and Clair) from Haverford, and then caught a bus to New York to visit a couple of friends and my cousin.

DC is a great city because even though you’ve seen it a million times on TV or in films, walking down a road and seeing the White House a mere forty feet away is pretty exciting (maybe just for politics junkies, come to think of it). The journey there, however, was hell. A quick word of advice: never take Greyhound buses – they overbook, they make promises they can’t keep, and they keep you waiting in grim bus stations filled with people straight out of a Jerry Springer show. But $76 out of pocket (after the bus was delayed by 3 ½ hours I gave in and took an Amtrak train), I arrived in D.C and immediately felt as though I was in an episode of the West Wing.

The White House (as if you needed telling).

Rachel’s dad is an economist at the Federal Reserve, and he took Rachel, Clair and I to lunch there. It was all very exciting – we had to be background checked before we were allowed in, which wouldn’t have been a problem except I gave the security officials my British passport number in order to gain clearance, but it doesn’t have a visa in it as I’m here on my American passport. I spent the night in fear of immigration officials, a fear which (thank God) never materialised.

Lunch at the Fed was lots of fun. I’m a big geek, so to see the meeting rooms where Ben Bernanke (the Fed’s Chairman) makes all the big decisions was really quite exciting. Afterwards we went walking around the Georgetown area, a very pretty and incredibly wealthy district packed with designer boutiques and women toting tiny dogs.

Having learned my lesson about Greyhound buses, I took a Bolt Bus (direct, cheap and with free wireless) up to NYC, and arrived deep in TriBeCa four and a half hours later. I met up with my friend Ben and his friends, and chatted and drank the evening away in a bar in Brooklyn’s chichi Park Slope neighbourhood. The next day I schlepped over to my cousin’s apartment in midtown Manhattan, and then spent an interesting afternoon in Chinatown whilst my friend Laura practiced her Chinese.

Chinatown, New York - A shop that only sells one type of grapes.

On Saturday, my cousin and I queued for cheap tickets to see Avenue Q. If you haven’t heard of it, imagine a dirty version of Sesame Street with songs called things like ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’. After that, my cousin had been given free VIP passes to watch a band called The Secret Machines, which was exciting as we got to watch from a balcony, above the madding crowd.

I was really ready to return to Haverford by Sunday. I didn’t think that I would miss it whilst I was away, but found I was homesick on Saturday night not just for home, but for Haverford too.

The hefty workload returned first thing Monday. But on Tuesday I went with the two other members of my English class and our professor to watch Tom Stoppard’s Rock N Roll, formerly of Broadway, at the Wilma Theatre in Philly, all paid for by the college.

It’s been a ridiculously exciting week, and I’m looking forward to a rest. However, it’s Hallowe’en this weekend, so I don’t think that's going to be possible.

Don’t let the ghouls get you.