So, this is a little bit late in being posted but never mind.
Having slogged my guts out, sacrificing my Christmas holidays and everything in order to be ready for my exams, they were finally over. After the exams I had 3 and a half weeks off before class officially started again, so I made the most of them! It was such a relief to finally not have to worry about academic things and to be able to get a reasonable number of hours' sleep!
First of all, I had a couple of friends from home come over to visit me for a few days. That was really great fun, I got to be a tourist again and we went to all of the popular tourist spots, and then out partying until late. During this time I realised my love for Dulce De Leche... we went to have waffles for breakfast with this stuff on them which is like caramellish condensed milk, basically, and it was the best thing ever. Soooo we bought a jar from the supermarket to be able to recreate the joy at any desired moment. We tried to meet some of my erasmus friends for karaoke, but it turned out that the karaoke bar was long gone... in the end we were all probably too drunk to notice and we ended up in Sala Apolo, a huge club which is literally crawling distance from my residencia. Anyway, it was action packed but there isn't a huge amount to say about that weekend though other than we had a great time eating drinking dancing and visiting things!
After they left I bought myself a wee suitcase to exactly meet Ryanair's hand-luggage dimensions, for I was going to Sevilla for a few days! Incidentally my flight cost me 2.80€. Decent, right? But I wasn't about to let them off with charging me for having overweight luggage! So I went to Seville with one of my Erasmus/Informatics friends and a bunch of people he knew, and we had a great time! Seville was really really pretty, but looked totally different from Barcelona - much more arabic. I literally have never seen so many oranges in all my life. We saw lots of things including Alcázar, Plaza De España, Archivo General De Indias, Torre De Oro, a flamenco show, lots of tapas... all very Spanish. It did certainly feel more Spanish than Barcelona, I guess the lack of Catalan had something to do with it, and just the general meditteranean feel of everything. It was all thoroughly enjoyable (weather one of the days was 23ºC so we had wine on the terraza!) I would say I'm still loyal to Barcelona though. Although Seville was beatiful and great for a short break, it felt like we already knew it fairly intimitely by the end of our stay. Whereas in Barcelona, there's so much to do that you never feel like that, you're always discovering new stuff.
When everyone else set off from Sevilla back to Barcelona, I caught the train down to Málaga to catch a flight to Edinburgh. Sorry to offend anyone who likes Málaga... but compared to Sevilla and Barcelona, what a dump! I suppose it didn't help to make it seem beautiful the fact that they'd just had some kind of superstorm which had torn the side off of the British Consulate! I got a decent haircut there though, while I had a couple of hours to kill!
While I was in Málaga airport, all of the flights to London were coming up Cancelled, Cancelled, Cancelled,... due to snow. I was just dreading that the flight to Edinburgh'd be cancelled as well, but it wasn't. Instead, we got on the plane, and I got put at the window, trapped beside 2 old people who were disabled and spent half the flight using a breathing machine thing. Behind me there was one of those annoying "I know all about planes" guys. So I decided to have a coffee. Not smart! I then couldn't get out to the toilet because the old people were also fat and couldn't move. Then they announced that Edinburgh airport was closed due to snow and that we were going to just hover around until it re-opened. Then they told us that we didn't have enough fuel to wait any longer, so we had to land in Glasgow. After what seemed like the longest flight of my life, at least I finally got to pee! But then I had the fun of sitting on a packed bus to Edinburgh, crawling along a snowy M8. Ohhhh joy. Did they not know I was supposed to be in Frankenstein's an hour ago?!
It was so, so great to be in Edinburgh again. There were people I hadn't seen since before exams in second year, so I had such a great time catching up with everybody. It was lovely how pleased everyone was to see me, and it definitely reminded me why I love being a student there. Although I was glad to be going back to Barcelona for round 2, I knew that I had Edinburgh waiting for me at the end of it all, and that it would still be wonderful as ever!
After a quick jaunt back up to Aberdeenshire to get some home comfort for the weekend, I came back to Barcelona just in time for my Catalan class.
As happy and positive a blog as this has been, during the holidays I got my grades back from the exams... and that wasn't so happy. I definitely chose too difficult courses for my first semester, but I did it because I was trying to find courses with the same names as those offered by Edinburgh. For one of the courses, Analysis and Design of Algorithms, I read the list of final grades online. Out of roughly 150 students who took that course, 88.4% failed (and yes, obviously I was one of them!). My exam results were very disappointing, but compared to the other erasmus students on those courses I did well! I must admit I was pretty annoyed at having worked so hard only to fail anyway. I really dislike their exam marking system here - everything is marked out of 10. That would be all well and good, but in an exam it means that with a small error you can end up losing 10% just like that (which is even easier to do when you slip up with the language). It also got on my nerves that invigilators would arrive late, and that the exams had grammatical errors in them! It's like... fine, if you must write your exams in Catalan, at least write correctly.
Future informatics students at UPC should absolutely take this into consideration. DO EASY THINGS FOR THE FIRST SEMESTER. Way back at the start, they told us "all Erasmus students fail". Well, I should've listened to that and given myself an easy life. This semester is going to be better hopefully, although I'll have a couple of resits.
