Ok I'm on a break now between two classes, I've got 35 minutes so that's not really enough time to do any work, right? So here I am blogging.
First things first, today it's been raining (weird...) so I'm wearing my Edinburgh hoody. So. I'm sitting in the labs working away, and then another guy comes in wearing another Edinburgh hoody! To cut a long story short, he's one of the Barcelona Erasmus students who went to Edinburgh last year. That was cool, he says Edinburgh is now like his second home! We talked about things like... Mondays at the Crags, Wednesdays at Cav, Fridays at Why Not? and all that sorta good stuff. Yay. Edinburgh. It is ace.
Anyway that might not be particularly relevant to anything. Earlier today I had my first Parcial exam for Analysis and Design of Algorithms. It was two and a half hours long... what a beast! Longer than many final exams in Edinburgh. Luckily I think it went quite well, I managed to answer all of the questions using my most fluent Catalan (at one point I forgot the word and just wrote ???"Binary Search"???Búsqueda dicotómica??? en Castellá) and I even managed to write the algorithms and analyse their costs. Certainly feeling more confident about it than the stupid Operating Systems exam last week.
A general overview of the week! Well right now is basically mid-term exam time so I have been trying to do revision. The workload is still pretty heavy, my workload is like a queue data structure in which the rate of pushing exceeds the rate of popping! Went out last Friday for eating, drinking and dancing, which was good. Then on Saturday night I went to Razzmatazz, one of the best known clubs in Barcelona, to see the Canadian band, Dragonette. Sadly, due to "technical issues" with Razzmatazz, they couldn't play, but I still had a good night and I spoke much more Catalan than I had in the whole rest of the time I'd been here (due to the fact that it was just me and one other guy and it was like... let's just speak Catalan and see how it goes). Razzmatazz itself wasn't exactly what I expected. It was really big, but there were loads of people and LOADS of guiris (tourists). In the "Pop Bar" it was basically all music which I know from British adverts. Razzmatazz? I don't think I would totally recommend it, although the Killers are supposedly performing there in March and I'd love to go to that.
I keep learning things about "real" Catalan which contradict what my teacher says... like she says a certain word doesn't exist in Catalan, but EVERYONE says it. She says you don't "fer" a coffee, you "prendre" a coffee... but EVERYONE says "fer". The Catalan courses are sooo worth it though, when I speak to people who are finding their classes hard to understand in Catalan, it's just like... thank goodness I don't really have that problem.
Now I'm kinda at the stage where I see people who I got to know at the start, and it's like "Heeeeeeeeeyyyy old friend, haven't seen you in ages!" So it's more like catching up with people and getting to know people better, rather than meeting people for the first time and asking all of the necessary introductory questions.
What else?? I've bought some cool new clothes, I've got some new albums to listen to (Spanish music, of course) and things are good! Now, I better make a start to these two assignments I need to do for Monday. Oh also this weekend is Halloween (here they pronounce it like "ch"(as in loch)-al-oween, it's funny) so I need to sort out what I am going to wear!
