Gaudy Gaudi

Due to the postponement of orientation until Tuesday, Friday through Monday were open to exploration, debauchery, and a fair about of alcohol consumption. Friday night we met up with the other Stanford girls and a few others from the program, and over the weekend we gradually met the rest of the students on the program. There are 13 of us in all, including 4 from Stanford, one from Dartmouth (Scott, my third roommate, who arrived late last night), 6 from Portland State (the school that runs the program), and two from Mercyhurst College in Erie, PA.

The couple who run our program are truly a Jack and Jill of all trades; they run ALBA, they run a travel company that organizes day trips out of the city, and are part owners of a bar in the one of the nightlife areas. They're well-connected to a lot of the tourist-oriented people as well as many locals, and with their help we've found many great bars to try.

Many bars also serve food or tapas, and one such bar we went to serves them almost as a butler would at a cocktail party. When you enter this place, they give you a plate, and then you go around grabbing bread-mounted tapas for your plate. They're all made up of a piece of baguette with meat, cheese or fish on top, and are held together with toothpicks. You can also order glasses and bottles of wine, standing in groups around tall tables or at the stand-up bar. At the end, you hand them your plate and they charge you based on the number of toothpicks you had (assuming none accidentally fell to the floor).

Besides partaking in the multitudinous bars the city has to offer, we've spent some days seeing the more touristy attractions as well. Most notably, we saw two of Antoni Gaudi's projects: the Parc Guell and the Sagrada Familia. The most ridiculous cathedral ever built, La Sagrada Familia remains unfinished even after 100 years of construction. It is the one people refer to as the "drip castle", because of its lack of straight lines and unique architecture. Inside, the columns are tree-like in their conception and geographically complex in their construction, not to mention ten towers, 300 feet tall. Those towers await the addition of eight more towers; the tallest, representing Jesus, is expected to be around 500 feet tall. Gaudi designed the cathedral, and it was essentially all he worked on in the final years leading to his death.

Before building the cathedral, Parc Guell is a collection of Gaudi silliness that makes you feel a bit as though you're traveling through CandyLand. It's a large park on a hill in the northern part of the city that has a view of the city and the sea, and contains many nature-inspired installments including a long "wave" of rock (imagine the view of a surfer riding inside a tube of a wave), intricate houses and other architectural indulgences.

We went from there to a supermarket for 0.79Eur bottles of wine, and then to the apartment of some of the other students a bit farther from the city near the beach. We opened the bottles, spent some time sitting on the beach (and freezing, it gets cold at night especially on the water), before heading back to make some dinner.

Around this time Scott, our final roommate, finally arrived. He had a tumultuous trek from Rome completing his 3-week European adventure and slept for about the next 16 hours.

On Tuesday we finally had orientation, which basically consisted of a 1-hour conversation followed by a 2-hour lunch. The directors gave us a handout including lots of tips on making the most of time in Barcelona, in addition to our cell phones. Turns out classes are going to only be on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and all after 1pm. Not too shabby. I'm taking Spanish for 3 hours twice a week, in addition to Modern Art and Architecture in Spain and International Economics. The classes are only with the kids on our program, so they range in size from 3 to 10 students. The Econ class is being taught at a local university (as opposed to the International House, where the ALBA classroom is), so that should be interesting.

With all that free time, we're already starting to think about travel. My roommate, David, and I are considering a Moroccan adventure for next weekend, with roundtrip flights around 90Eur. Should be quite a trip.