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.
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