Well, yup, this post is a little bit later than intended. It's just that I've been having one of those "there aren't enough hours in the day AND night to do everything I need to do" phases... there is light appearing at the end of the tunnel though so it's not too bad. Plus, it sounds like my course friends in Edinburgh are having an even more flat-out time of it than I am, so I won't complain too much.
In fact, I won't complain. I'll start with Halloween. Guess what happened in Barcelona on Halloween?
Come on... guess...
...That's right, they put up the Christmas lights, of course!
They're not switched on yet, but the streets and halls are well and truly decked. Halloween is not nearly so much of a big deal here as it is in bonny Scotland, although there were a few oddly dressed people going around. This is some of the group of us who went out to fiesta painted like some sort of vampirey things:
So anyway, a lot of Catalans think that Halloween is too commercialised American (even though... *cough* I'm fairly sure it was originally a celtic thing). Traditionally, they celebrate Castanyada instead of Halloween, which involves various traditions with "castanyes" (chestnuts) and "panellets" (sweet little marzipan tarty thingies). Instead of all that humble family goodness, we ended up drinking "sangre" (blood) in bars and then dancing it off later on.
I have now booked my flights home for Christmas, which is kinda scary if you think about it! Well it is for me, because Christmas=revision. Because if Christmas!=revision then exams=failure. Also, by then it'll be half-over.
Before I came here, I read a lot of stuff about people on Erasmus exchanges. I heard that everyone goes through phases of everything being great, then suddenly everything is depressing, then it levels out and life is good for the rest of the time. For me, so far, this hasn't been the case. I would say that it's always been good, but there have been times of extreme heaps of work which just aren't so fun!
Not that I'm longing for home (sorry homies), but it will be nice to see everyone and have a nice comfy spot by the fire watching Christmas rubbish... with my UNIX manual in hand.
So! Since it's not the start of term and it's not the end of term, it's still "mid term"... meaning the exams are stilllllll going on. That ADA exam I thought went pretty well? Well, it turns out that I did well enough to not have to sit the whole final exam (just!) but my mark was lower than expected, because it felt like it went pretty well. The other day they had a review kinda session to see our individual mistakes, so it was a combination of silly mistakes, misunderstanding the Catalan, harsh marking, and them finding my Edinburgh way of writing algorithms "molt estrany!" (Very weird). I blame Inf2B. Yes, I'm going to get that sorted out. 
So it's now up to me whether I do the final exam or not, I'll probably do it because it's a bit of a gamble if I don't, but we'll see.
The other subjects are going alright (Operating Systems is still a bloomin' pain in the butt which demands so much time, effort, concentration and 8am starts - take note if anyone reading this is coming here!) Concurrent and Distributed Programming is fine, although the lab sessions are demanding. Programming Languages is still my favourite.
Catalan 2 is now well underway, I can now subjunctive-imperative-indicative-whatever-it up, whatever. Gramatically though, there are still things I don't know... and obviously vocabulary-wise there's a long way to go!
Umm... what else? I've signed up to do talk10 - a language exchange programme like Edinburgh's Tandem, so I should soon be meeting up to get some more practise. It's not as though I don't speak enough, but I suppose if the whole point in the thing is, like... speaking, then I will maybe learn more.
The weather is good again, slightly cooler, but still nice and sunny and pleasant.
Also I'm really enjoying the Spanish music. Yep, it's not quite as innovative as ours can be, but it's good. Lots of Spanish classic songs to get to know (OMG Fraser you don't know blah blah blah?!?!) but I'm getting there! Building up a wee collection to listen to on the metro, heh heh. At the moment, every time you go out you hear this song, and you can't stop singing "teniiiiiiia taaaaantoo.... que daaarte! Tantas cosas que contaaaarrte!" when you leave. Guess what's number 1 in Los Cuarenta Principales? Good ol' Katy Perry - I Kissed A Girl. She must be sick of cherry chapstick by now!
Anyway that's it for the noo, got a class from now until 7pm. Then it's off to revise for my looming Programming Languages exam.
