modern art! makes me! want to rock out!

to explain the title of this entry, it is a line of a song i was just listening to, and it applies to this entry because of our little dali trip on saturday.

this past week we finally wrapped up the intensive spanish course. our teacher was a little bit ridiculous towards the end, and we had a pretty intense schedule for the last few days, involving a paper, two short essays, and a 20-minute presentation on a topic within our academic specialty. Unfortunately, while my classmates got to talk about Spanish poems and whatnot, I got to give my personal analysis of the growing gap between young liberal voters and older conservative voters, including differences in their beliefs on the economy, role of religion in the state, and a pan-European identity. But today I started real classes at UPF! I only had one class today, and not until three o'clock- Modern Spanish Literature. It seems like it will be a really cool class, we spent the first two-hour session going over a timeline of major events and trends in Spanish literature since the twelfth century. Since literature, like any art form, is heavily influenced by political events, we had a history lesson as well, which I badly needed. All in all, a good first day. Tomorrow I'll be taking Spanish Language & Society (sounds fancy, but your basic Spanish class), 20th century Spanish cinema, and an art class that I am hoping to switch into. But enough about class.

This past week and weekend I spent wandering around the city some more, as usual. My wanderings last week took me to a couple more art and history museums, as usual. Today I ventured past L'Eixample (pretty much the city center, northwest of my residencia) to Gracia, which google maps says is about 4.5 kilometeres away. it was a good walk, and i hit up the alleged best pastry shop in all of barcelona (i have to say that i was not disappointed), a couple more produce/meat markets, and a paper store to purchase a notebook. Sidenote: 99/100 notebooks you find here are made with graph paper. It is bizarre. You have to go out of your way and pay a lot of euros to find normal lined paper. I was successful in the end. Anyway, that was today, and all before class at 3 pm! Having class late is such a good idea.

On Saturday, we went on a CIEE excursion to Figueres and Besalu. Figueres is Dali's birthplace, and the museum there is amazing. I am a huge Dali fan, and the museum is really extensive. We spent some more time just walking around the town, because it's quaint and historical. From there we moved on to Besalu, another small town which used to have a huge Jewish population. We saw the old synagogue, mikvah, and remnants of the Romanic period in general. Sidenote, speaking of Judaism: shana tovah to those to whom it applies!

The Figueres/Besalu trip was definitely the highlight and principal part of the weekend. One of my friends from high school, Dina, also came to Barcelona over the weekend with a friend from her program in Paris. That was really fun, and I spent Friday and Saturday night with her. On Friday, I went out to dinner with a big group, since my friends Christine and Sarah also had friends visiting this weekend. We had some delicious tapas and introduced the non-Barcelona folk to the glories of pan con tomate and patatas bravas.

the rest of this week will be devoted to birthday festivities (it is 12:02 AM here, so happy birthday to me!) taking place tomorrow in the form of a nice quiet dinner out with a few program friends, and classes the rest of the week. And then, on Friday, I'm off to Rome with Mimi! We're staying in Rome Friday thru Monday, and leaving really early Monday morning to spend basically 36 hours in Venice. We are ambitious travelers, but that's how we roll. I am so excited- Rome is the place I have most wanted to go in Europe. If you have any suggestions of how to spend my limited three days there, I'd love to hear them. As far as birthday presents go, I think a trip to Rome and Venice is pretty tough to beat.