Home

When I thought about writing a blog about going home, a million titles popped into my head taken from songs about Home. Home, home on the range immediately morphed into home, home can be strange in my mind, because in many ways going home for the first time was extremely odd. Having never lived in a house other than the grand mansion of Lawndene Hall before, let alone living alone in a different country, it was exciting for me to return to something I had always taken for granted. Examples include having my clothes washed for me, having my meals cooked for me, being able to drive a car, and simple small things like there always being food in the cupboards and milk in the fridge. Not only did I get spoiled something rotten when I got back to Ma and Pa, I also found I had to take a number 8 bus on Saturday afternoon, and even worse a taxi that night (during the Jazz, what were we thinking?). I couldn't just zip my T-Trimestre metro card through the Pueblo del Obispo station and be in Calle de San Patricio in seven minutes.

ASIDE: Bit of Spanish humour for you there, look up those fictional metro stations in spanishdict.com to find out why. Speaking of my excellent blossoming sentido de humor in Spanish, I made my first pun in Spanish yesterday - we were drinking tea in a cafe and my friend didn't like her iced chai tea. She to me: no me gusta. I to her: no té gusta. A ha, ha ha ha.

So the strangeness of being home was one thing - after seven weeks of being a grown-up I was allowed the luxury of being taken care of for a few days, which was awesome. The next song that sprung to mind was one that I listened to obsessively during the summer, Fuel Up by Stornoway. The line in question goes it's nowhere you've been and it's nowhere you're going, home is only a feeling you get in your mind from the people you love and you travel beside. This was definitely something I experienced during my weekend in Cork. It wouldn't have mattered to me if my parents had moved into a granny flat above a Chinese takeaway in Macroom town centre, as long as we could still be chatting and looking up pictures of cats together I was happy (a family that LOLs together stays together). Equally, it didn't matter to me what I did with my friends on Saturday or Sunday night, as long as we just had the chance to hang out together again (though Mrs. Reidy's baked goods were appreciated as always).

The final one is by Villagers - can you wake me when we're almost halfway, I don't want to take this trip alone, cos I'd never reach my home. In a way going home was less about physically being in my house in Cork for a weekend, but more about the idea of the journey from Barcelona to Cork. Getting out of Erasmus Land and back to Cork Land was inherently good for me, because there are much fewer laws in Erasmus land (for example, it is perfectly acceptable to wear your pyjamas until mid-afternoon, eat entire giant bars of Milka chocolate to yourself, amuse yourself for free by playing with the iPads in Fnac and drink calimucho on the step outside your house) and it put my feet firmly back on the ground. Being away from my apartment and my flatmates and my university and my friends and the tapas and the sangría gave me the chance to reflect on all the things I still have to do here, and the aims I had before I came. And so I could return to Barcelona on Monday evening a bit more pumped for the rest of the term until Christmas. Except Aer Lingus had different things in store for us, delaying our flight four hours, which meant I left my house in Cork at 3.45pm and didn't arrive in my apartment in Barcelona until 1.45am.

Apart from that hiccup, it was a really great weekend, full of the normal expected antics like playing Super Mario Galaxy with Donnacha, having Curry and Beer night with my parents, drinking tea with Ms. Laura Hurley, being in the Bróg with all my friends and practically everyone I've ever met in my entire life being there (that's Cork for you, that'd never happen in Barcelona, except for the fact that when I was going to play on the iPads in Fnac yesterday who did I happen to see coming out of El Triangle shopping centre on Plaza Catalunya only our very own Nóirín Deady, Co-Ordinator of the First Year Experience in UCC), as well as the more offbeat antics such as doing a jigsaw puzzle (Donnacha to me: we fit together like two pieces of this jigsaw puzzle! I to Donnacha: thank God we have each other. Nobody else would have taken us. Now, I'm looking for a bit with some sky on it..), doing the Bandon Walk and having an entire Christmas dinner. Clearly a win of a weekend.

Unfortunately I didn't even have time to unpack or reflect on my lovely weekend, because the day after I got back I had to go to classes again, and work practically nonstop on an assignment I had due in to my Political Theory class on Thursday. I finished it on Wednesday night, all 1,000 words comparing the theses of Hobbes and Rousseau through Spanish. Leviatán and Del Contrato Social are no harder to read in Spanish than in English, because neither makes a whole lot of sense the first time you read it anyway.. It's one of those reading a paragraph three times before you even begin to understand it sort of things. Then I had another harrowing experience with the printers in the law library, someday I'm going to kill all law students and their useless photocopying ways. This week I also started my Spanish course for Erasmus students, and it's going really well - it's mostly Italians who think they know everything because let's face it, they're shit hot at Spanish. But there are some very nice people too. We had a sort of scavenger hunt around the Gothic quarter on Friday, which our group came last in because we didn't realise we had to turn over a page to actually answer questions and do tasks. Bit stupid of us really in retrospect.. But it was still good fun :)

Now I'm heading to Penneys, because we're having a Hallowe'en party in my apartment on Sunday and I have to look at ideas for costumes. The current one is Vampire Sarah Palin, but I'm open to suggestions!

Andalucían Adventure (featuring other musings)

I find that after being in Barcelona for six weeks, I still haven't found any sort of pattern that I could describe as being "normal life". What I thought was normal life for the first few weeks was probably just settling in. The period after that brought the craziness of the Mercè and the subsequent recovery. Then there was air shows and beaching, and my first visitors, and my first visit away from Barcelona. It's quite funny, every week is completely different, in a way that life in Cork is by and large the exact same from week to week. The variables in Cork are things like gigs and the cinema and nights out, but the variables here are almost constants, in that there's always something different going on - every day I get about four invitations from different Erasmus organisers for a different club night or outing or party.

So normality has evaded me for a while, which is good and bad. It's good because I'm never short of something to do, or somebody to hang out with, or somewhere to go. Barcelona has an endless supply of attractions and restaurants and bars and cool spots, so even if I had nothing fixed to get up to, I could always just hit the streets with my unlimited Metro card and find something to do. I suppose the bad part is that stamina was never really my game, and MY GOD am I exhausted!

My actions of the last week have taken me from my apartment to all of the tourist sights in Barcelona, and to Málaga, and along the way I've slept in twice, missed one class, turned up for one class that was cancelled, got three hours sleep in one night, got twelve hours sleep in one night, went to a Star Wars exhibition, watched my first Woody Allen film, drank sherry for the first time, ate aubergine for the first time, got taken out to dinner and have witnessed my supplies in the fridge dwindle to a solo pot of jam.

All the touristy stuff went down when my friends from the fencing club came to visit. More enthusiastic visitors to Barcelona I have never seen! Our feet beat the streets of Barcelona from Barceloneta to Passeig de Gràcia, to Plaza Urquinaona where we met some of my other friends, and ordered the most random pizza ever.. It was about 22 inches in diameter, and had pepperoni. Mushrooms. Goat's cheese. Chicken. Aaaand..pineapple. Man it was weird, and kinda cold by the time we got it down to the mad windswept beach at Barceloneta to eat it, but maaan..it was good too. Over the rest of the weekend we took in Park Güell, the Sagrada Familia, Montjuïc, the church of Santa Maria del Mar, the Gothic Quarter and this awesome flea market down by the port that I never even knew existed. It's also fair to say that over the weekend a lot of tapas, churros and sangría were consumed :)

Tuesday was Columbus Day, which is a national holiday in Spain, so I didn't have any classes. So it was excusable that I slept until midday. What is not excusable is that the next day, when I did have a class at 10, I slept until 11. Oops. The rest of Wednesday was relatively successful though, in that we finally made moves towards registering at the UB to be real, actual students, with real, actual privileges like being able to get on to the Campus Virtual (UB version of BlackBoard) and take books out of the library and all that jazz. About time, says I.

On Thursday I was only slightly less useless, and actually got to my classes on time, only to find out that Contemporary Spanish Theatre was cancelled, and I didn't know about it. Oh well, it meant that I got to go have coffee with two nice girls in my class, and not have to do my mad weekly dash across the city from the Philology Department (yes, philology is a word) to the Law Department in such a short space of time. After my Political Theory class, I thought I'd be productive and practical and print off my boarding passes for my trip to Málaga at the weekend. For the UCC heads, you know how much law students typically print and photocopy, right? Well, Spanish law students do the exact same, except guess what? There is one printer for the whole law library. So that meant queuing while some wan photocopied page upon page from a book on Teoría Constitucional, then to discover that I didn't in fact know how to use the printer so I accidentally printed out 17 pages of law notes instead of a two-page boarding pass. Conclusion 1: printers are difficult in every country. Conclusion 2: law students are the same in every country.

Friday was the day that I jetted off to Málaga, and it involved getting up at 4.30am to get the first FGC to Provença to get the first metro to Sants Estació (and that was weird, because everyone on the platform was either up early to go to the airport or out reaaallly late and only just shlepping home) to get the first airport train to the plane to Málaga to the bus to Marbella to the bus to Estepona to meet my Uncle. I had such a good weekend thanks to his excellent hospitality and company, as well as those of his friends who were also visiting. Who thought you could go swimming in the sea and have a barbecue in October? For someone who's never spent October anywhere else but Cork, I can safely say not me! It was a really interesting experience to go elsewhere in Spain for the weekend, and not just elsewhere but somewhere very very different to Barcelona. Barcelona strikes me as bohemian, big, pretty, diverse and just a little bit grandiose. However, Andalucía brings you back down to real Spanish soil with a bit of a bump. Where Barcelona is modernist architecture, graffiti and millions of different people from everywhere in the world milling around the streets and the shops and the restaurants and the metro stations, Málaga is those big, rough, brown mountains surrounding thousands of second homes and bizarrely-located Dunnes Stores. Andalucía is in a way more masculine than Cataluña, and it was definitely a welcome break to get out of the city and into a pueblecito for a weekend.

So now I'm back home in sunny but chilly Barcelona, me and my pot of jam. This weekend I'm going home for the first time, so that means seeing my parents and my friends for the first time in about 7 weeks, something I'm ridiculously excited about. For now though, I really must go buy something for dinner.

Why I'm looking forward to October

Reasons why I'm excited about all things October:

1. It marks the end of my first month in September, which I got through without any major mishaps, tantrums or breakdowns, unless we count the Blender Incident, about which we will say no more.

2. October is bringing me my first visitors, in the shape of four awesome girls I know from the UCC Fencing Club. It's doubly exciting because one of them is celebrating her birthday, and triply exciting because one is coming all the way from Rome! Hurray for fencers! There'll also be a flurry of Cork madness at the end of October, when two Hurleys will descend on Barcelona, one from Madrid and the other from Strasbourg. There will be much eating of goodies and talk of lovely jumpers, and how sometimes.. When you're not wearing a jumper.. And it's quite late in the year.. You can get very cold.. Strange..

3. This month I'll also be leaving my apartment for a period of longer than a few hours - I managed to get return flights to Málaga to visit my Uncle for just €20, so I'll be in Manilva with him from the 15th to the 17th. How the Malagueños will take to someone from Barcelona we'll just have to see...!

4. I'll be taking another jaunt away from my apartment the following weekend, when I'll go home to Cork for the first time. This is something I'm really really excited about. I never expected to be such a homebird, especially in such a wonderful city, but I'm hoping a trip home will give me a bit of a reboost.. Seeing my friends and family will be awesome, and hopefully I can head back to Barcelona with renewed energy!

5. I have to register my subjects with the University before the 22nd of October, so I'll finally be an official student here. Which will mean proper access to their version of BlackBoard, the Campus Virtual. Also proper access to the library, the internet, and I'll be able to enroll at the gym, which means a return to fencing!

6. One of the UCC girls here is going to turn 21 on the 30th of the month, so that will at least mean a cake and some tapas, and the day after is Hallowe'en.. I'm not sure how or even if the Spanish celebrate Hallowe'en, but I'm certain we can think of some form of mischief to cause :)

7. Lastly, as much as I love hot summer weather, October is a good deal cooler than September. That doesn't necessarily mean I can't go to the beach or anything (I was there on Sunday after all!) but it does mean no more ridiculous sweaty metro journeys and being able to get to sleep easier at night, which is always nice :)

Happy October everyone!