The descent of the blues, and how they blew away

Anyone who knows me is aware that overall, I'm a pretty positive person. Nothing really bothers me too much, I'm quite calm and mostly I take things as they come with a good attitude. For some reason, last week, all that changed, for the crappiest few days that I've had in a long time.

I don't know what brought it on, nor when it started. But it was Monday when I noticed it. This huge bout of despondency and apathy had come a-knocking to my door, let itself in, and plonked itself on the couch, without so much as a shall I put the kettle on from me. For the whole week, all I wanted to do was stay in bed. All day. Nothing interested me - not class, not fencing, not anything. Only negative thoughts inhabited my brain - all I could do with myself was make unfavourable comparisons to other people. She's on Erasmus and has more friends than me, he's more dedicated to learning the language than me, they've got better social lives than me, and so on and so forth. The only thing I can say is that if Last Week's Livi had met 13 Year Old Livi, they would have been fantastic companions for one another in total lack of self-esteem. Except Last Week's Livi didn't just have that to worry about - I also was concerned about money and budgeting, something I'm not used to at all, and my bank balance is screaming out for me to manage it better. An extension of that is getting a part-time job here to ease the pressure a bit, and a summer job in Ireland or elsewhere to give me something to do for the summer (as well as finance my fun for the summer). Add to that all the expectations that I was heaping on myself as regards college work and making the most of my ever-shortening time here in Barcelona, and the result is not pretty in the slightest.

Still, I trucked on. I went to all of my classes, did all of my homework, went to the gym, did my laundry, cooked my food, all pretty normal and standard stuff, but it taxed me much more than usual and I didn't get the normal amount of enjoyment out of it. And then something happened to lift me out of all of this.

It was Friday, and I had toyed with the idea of going to a concert all week. The plus side was that it wasn't expensive, and it was only a five-minute walk from my house, and it was Fran Healy - the lead singer of Travis, my favourite band when I was 11/12, and thus a huge player in the formation of my musical interests throughout my teenage years and right up to now. The drawback was that I had to go alone, and that made it unappealing given my already disaffected outlook on everything. But I pushed myself. I made a plan to buy my ticket on the way to the gym, and despite everything in the world telling me not to buy that ticket (bad weather, the guy in Fnac first mistaking the name of the venue and then not accepting my voucher or my card, the ATM in Fnac rejecting both of my cards, the invisible ATM in El Corte Inglés, having to trek all around the shopping centre to find a working ATM, the lack of Fran Healy's actual CD in Fnac for me to prepare for the gig), I bought the damn ticket. I gave the two fingers to the universe and told it I had had enough, and that my depression was to get the hell off my couch and out of my house.

So that night I strolled on down to Sala BeCool, and slid past a security guard that wasn't even the slightest bit interested in the fact that I had a DSLR in my bag and I would be taking photos all night (in Razzmatazz they're not cool with that, neither are they in Palau Sant Jordi). The support act was good, a young American guy in bare feet and a wifebeater singing about how his girlfriend didn't want him to cry, she didn't want a man, she wanted a stone. And then Fran Healy came on. And instantly, the second he started to sing and tell jokes and stories about the background of his songs, songs that had meant so much to me when I was younger and still mean so much to me today, everything lifted. He was singing all his new songs from his solo album mixed in with old songs that reminded me of being in primary school and the girls in my class making fun of me for liking Travis and not Westlife, of getting their third album The Invisible Band for my 12th birthday, of burning their next album from my best friend when I was fifteen, of welling up when listening to certain tracks from my favourite of their albums, of being seventeen and my first and only time seeing the band perform and how we interrupted their soundcheck, of the burning disappointment of their latest album, and of earlier that day, cycling down Avinguda Diagonal and listening to their back catalogue on shuffle. This was the band I grew up to, and I realised that as long as this guy with the stupid hat and the grey stubble and the Scottish accent was still making music, I would still be listening to it, and I would still be growing up. All those stupid worries from the last week vanished as I took photos of my childhood hero and sang along to songs that he had written when he was my age.

I have a bit of a reputation for being a total groupie at the best of times, and true to form I stuck around after the show to see if I could meet Mr Healy. In the past I've waited upwards of an hour and a half to meet a musician, sometimes in the freezing cold (Franz Ferdinand), sometimes in the rain (KT Tunstall), sometimes in the back room of Cyprus Avenue for two hours and they don't show up (Fight Like Apes). After two hours of playing onstage, Fran Healy didn't give himself a break at all, and didn't even put down his guitar before he started signing tickets and taking photos and shaking hands and making small talk. Still, I waited about twenty minutes. I told him how Sing was probably the first single I ever bought, and how I had been feeling low lately but that night had really cheered me up, he signed my ticket, I shook his hand, we took a photo together, and I went home.

On Sunday I went to the gym. When I cycle down Diagonal on a Sunday morning, the cycle path is jammers with families on bikes and scooters and rollerblades and skateboards - apparently you're nobody if you don't have three adorable children on wheels trailing after you. When I was cycling home, I stopped at the Law Department of the UB, where I used to take my politics classes, and I took my earphones out. Nothing. All the kids and the parents had gone home. There was no traffic on a six-lane road incorporating two tram lines that cuts through L'Eixample diagonally from the motorway out of Barcelona right down to the sea. The sun had come out after a drizzly morning. After I dropped back my bici, I had a think about the week I had. By any standards it was mediocre - nobody had died, I hadn't failed anything, I hadn't had any arguments with friends or boyfriend or family, I had a roof over my head and food in the house and a bit of money in my pocket, yet something had made that week different and important to me. And as I walked through the deserted streets of Sant Gervasi, with the afternoon sun shining dusty on the balconies of the apartments and the red bricks of the Mercat Galvany, and glinting off the lizard atop its weathervane, I realised that there is always going to be people to compare myself to, but that doesn't mean I should do it. Yes there are people who are also on Erasmus who might have mastered the language more than me, or made more friends than I have, but I couldn't help but feel that I wasn't wasting my time. I am content with my wanderings and my wonderings, my rambles and my ramblings.

I went home.

There was nobody on the couch.

There's a first time for everything

Today was definitely a day of firsts, and what more apt day than the first of a month and a season?

After a week of cloud and rain and thunder and cold, Barcelona finally cheered up on the first day of February and the first day of spring and decided to be sunny. As I cycled to the gym (more on that later), I remembered what it is that's so wonderful about Barcelona in the sunshine. The sky is incredibly blue, and all the buildings seem to look even more grand and imposing with blazing sun shining on them. Not only was this the first sunny day in a long time, it was also the first day the sun was actually hot, which was a really welcome change.

So, to the gym. Today was my first day at the University of Barcelona gym. And it was awesome. Not only is seriously cheap, it's also got great facilities and everyone there is unbelievably helpful and friendly. Every security guard, receptionist and instructor we met seemed to genuinely want to help us - whether it was helping us sign up, or telling us how to get through a door or turnstile (that one happened a little too often), or giving us a hand with equipment, every member of staff was amazingly nice. My first day at the gym also marked my first time ever going to a gym class. Now, I had my eye on yoga and tai chi, but we arrived too late for yoga and a friend wanted some moral support for another class. So instead of my nice relaxing afternoon, I ended up at Body Pump. This was an hour of lifting weights to target different muscles in your body, and man did I feel it afterwards. I was quaking in my boots beforehand at the prospect of weightlifting, but I actually found myself pleasantly surprised by how it was quite easygoing and meticulously organised. I don't think I'll be returning, but kudos to Body Pump nonetheless!

Which brings me to fencing. I had been telling myself and anyone who asked for the last five months that I fully intended to join the UB fencing club, but this was something I was genuinely scared to do. My own fencing club at home is such a welcoming, eccentric place that I thought I had just got lucky, and that I could never get that lucky elsewhere, let alone through either a language I had a relatively good grasp of or a language I don't understand at all. So I pushed myself. Tonight I sat on the tram to the gym and steeled myself for the worst - that they would tell me they weren't accepting newcomers, that they would only speak in Catalán, that they would laugh at me because I'm a foilist in an epée club - the list was endless. Needless to say, I was delighted to discover that the eccentricity and welcoming atmosphere of a fencing club extended all the way to Barcelona. I was one of three newcomers that night, and I think they got a bit of a novelty factor out of my being a) foreign, b) a foilist and c) a girl (seriously, it was all dudes, except one other girl newcomer). The moral of the story is that I had a brilliant time, I'm learning a new weapon, I'm meeting new people, I'm improving my Spanish, I'm getting out of the house in the evening, I'm getting some exercise, and it's all just from fencing. It's remarkable what one thing can do for you if you let it.

(There were more firsts today, involving my first time cleaning up dog puke from a white couch, but you don't want to hear about that)

My classes this term don't start until this Monday, the 7th. Whereas last term I was doing quite airy-fairy things like Political Theory and Contemporary Spanish Theatre, this term I'll be studying Translation, Teaching English as a Foreign Language and Linguistics. If I'm honest it'll actually be my first foray into the world of more practical language-learning, seeing as in my last two and a half years (where does the time go?) of university, I've mostly covered things like Art and Literature in Golden Age Spain and Cinema and Identity in the Spanish-Speaking World. I'm looking forward to something a bit different and I'm hoping it'll expand my academic horizons a bit and give me some insight into what I would like to study after UCC. Currently looking at my academic future is like looking around when you're drunk - you can make out vague things that you're interested in, but you're not sure can you reach them, or even if you want to, and the rest is just a haze!

I think I've made good use of my time off after exams, not only in light of my million first times today, but also because I went to Madrid to visit a friend from school who's on Erasmus in Alcalá de Henares (about 40 minutes by commuter train from Madrid, a medieval university city and the home of Miguel de Cervantes, Spain's most celebrated author in its history) (oh and there were storks everywhere. Mad). Madrid is a city I've loved ever since I went on a school trip there with my Spanish class when I was in fifth year. It was my first time there and my first time in Spain, and we had a brilliant few days. The next time I went to Madrid was a year and a half later when I was inter-railing, which was a different experience but still awesome. This time was different again, but I still know a few areas of the city and I still really like it. The Museo Nacional del Arte de Reina Sofía remains one of my all-time favourite

museums, ranking just behind the Tate Modern. All the other great things Madrid has to offer, like the Museo del Prado and the Parque del Retiro, are all still great. What was best about the trip was seeing my friend, with whom I haven't been able to spend much time since August, so obviously the three days were completely jam-packed full of catching up. It was also interesting to see Erasmus through her eyes - in a big town near a capital city, instead of just in a huge city, and it seemed like a great position to be in. Everybody knows everybody in Alcalá, but then Madrid is less than an hour away. We drank cava, we ate the best pizza in Madrid, we got cupcakes from an American shop, we saw Guernica and Las Meninas - what can I say, it was a very memorable and fun few days!

Just to touch on something else, I saw the King's Speech the other night - it was really brilliant. Everything from the acting to the costumes to the really beautiful cinematography really caught me, and it definitely deserves one of the many Oscars it's nominated for.

The next few weeks hold a lot of exciting prospects - new classes, a little tripín to Dublin, a visit from the boy - all sorts of fun things. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention - today being the start of February means that it's my halfway point. I've been here five months and I'll only be here five more months. I could see it that my time is ticking down until I go home from here on in, but instead I choose to see that the weather will soon get consistently hot and sunny, and I still have plenty to discover in Barcelona, Cataluña, Spain and Europe and plenty of time in which to do it. I remain, as ever, positive of enjoying my time here :)

New Year, New Term, New Post

One would hope that after a lovely Christmas at home, I would be full of vim, vigour and vitality and want to hit the streets of Barcelona on this beautiful, warm January Saturday morning. If I wasn't doing that, one would think I would be studying for my impending university exams. what one would not presume is that I would still be in my bed, in my pyjamas, having watched four episodes of How I Met Your Mother. I would have to be struck down by the flu in my first week back on Erasmus, wouldn't I?

But enough of the melancholy, and to the important things: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, and homes away from homes.

As I had an American roommate, and as I have been imbued with my mother's appreciation and enthusiasm for holidays Irish people don't celebrate, I was all on to throw a Thanksgiving party this year. It wasn't big, just a few of my friends and a few of her friends, but around the table we represented Ireland, England, America and Germany. Now, I am a relatively alright cook, in that I rarely burn things or undercook things, and while my cooking isn't extravagant or elaborate or even very good, I felt confident enough to roast a bird for the celebration. Just not a turkey. I have no idea how to cook a turkey, and besides, I'm not sure my oven here could fit a turkey, and furthermore, we really didn't have enough people there to eat an entire turkey. So I bought a chicken, and we Christened it Turkey.

What I did know about Turkey was that he was free-range, and a good size, and corn-fed. What I didn't know about Turkey was that he still had a head. Yes, that's right, he still had a head. He not only had a head, but he was perfectly anatomically correct on the inside as well, which I only discovered after cutting off his head, telling my roommate somewhat squeamishly that I could see down its windpipe, and then taking a good look inside him. Said roommate deigned to stop laughing at me and taking pictures of the decapitated Turkey for enough time to cut him open and try to take out the guts. We got so close, we really did, but there's only so much chicken guts two girls can take, so off we went to the supermarket butcher, who cleaned him out within seconds, and looked quite amused while she did it.

That grisly ordeal out of the way, the chicken got put in the oven, and became part of a truly lovely Thanksgiving feast, which included roast potatoes and mashed potatoes, gravy, green bean casserole, carrots, pecan pie, lemon pie, banoffee pie and would have included a cheesecake if it hadn't been dropped on the floor moments before serving. We gave our thanks, and then we watched a few Christmas movies, and went our separate ways and went to bed. So I must say, my first Spanish-American-English-Irish-German Thanksgiving chicken dinner really was a huge success.

It took a while to get into the Christmas spirit after that because unlike Ireland, Barcelona doesn't go into Christmas hyper mode the second Hallowe'en is over. It wasn't until early December that the lights were turned on in the city, and that was when things really got crazy. The Feria de Santa Llucia is set up in front of the cathedral for the month of December, and is essentially a huge Christmas market specialising solely in figures to put in cribs. Big figures, little figures, crib shrubbery, all the animals you could imagine (I bought a tiny black and white cat for one of our cribs at home), and most bizarre of all, the caganers and the Caga Tiós. The former are figures, mostly of famous people (the entire Barcelona football team, the British royal family and Barack Obama featuring heavily), squatting down and taking a poop. The latter are logs that you draw smiley faces on and hit with sticks until they poop little gifts like turrón. I don't know why Catalán culture has such an obsession with poop, but to each their own!

I went home for Christmas on the morning of Friday the 17th of December. By the evening of Friday the 17th of December the entire country was covered in a thick layer of snow, so I really think I made the right decision as to when to get my flights. After spending the day in Dublin, I arrived at my house around 8pm, completely covered in snow, and my mum said it was the most typical cinematic clichè, but trust me, it actually happened! The next few days the rest of my family wasn't so lucky. With two siblings, three cousins and an uncle trying to descend on Cork from Edinburgh, Dublin, Lisbon, Geneva, New York and Malaga, and airports shutting down across Europe, it was a tad up in the air who would be home for Christmas at all. Fortunately everyone got home with delays here and there, with the exception of the cousin from Lisbon, who was sorely missed! Christmas itself was lovely, and involved much cheer of the Flynn persuasion - chocolate mousse, pyjamas, movies, penguins bearing Hershey's kisses, Christmas tree biscuits, and let's not forget the cat bringing in a live bird on Christmas morning, only to cover the entire hall with feathers and bird poop.

(Maybe poop is just inherent to Christmas everywhere, I just hadn't noticed it before)

I'm not usually a fan of New Year's Eve, but my friends and I made the very bright decision to count down the last seconds of 2010 in Galway. One friend who studies in NUIG very kindly put us up in his house, and despite being the only girl at a party of boys who all inexplicably decided to wear suits, it was a really great night. I had never got the chance to really explore Galway city before, having only ever been there once when I was but a 12 year old Girl Guide, and I was really glad I was able to - Galway is a seriously cool city, and one I hope to go back to.

My return to Barcelona was difficult after three weeks of being loved and looked after and surrounded by family. Thankfully, the boyfriend came with me to settle me back in. It was great to have him here, because I could stall my efforts of studying for a while and instead do fun things, like go for tapas, watch the Godfather Part II, sit in the Parque de la Ciudadela while the sun sets, and drink beer in the square of eternal flame. A good highlight was also getting to see the World Cup, for which we got a photo in the paper La Razón (according to Wikipedia, Spain's fifth-highest circulation general-interest daily newspaper based in Madrid), which can be seen in the third picture here. Now he's gone back to Dublin, and I've been hit with the flu, I have to face the gruelling task of studying for exams in contemporary Spanish theatre and political theory. Or at least, I have to sit in my bed and watch tv with a small guilty part of my brain telling me to do so.

My exams end on the 21st of January, and I have about two weeks free before I start classes again. The current plan is to work more on the Spanish language that I learned in the first term, and to go to Madrid for a few days to visit a friend who is on Erasmus just outside, in Alcalá de Henares. After that, I start a new semester and new classes. Being home gave me good perspective for the year, and time to reflect on what I wanted out of this experience. According to my first post to this blog, I wanted "a better understanding of the Spanish language and culture, some interesting and fun friends, and the opportunity to travel around Europe to visit other Erasmus friends". By and large, I'm halfway through the year, and by and large I'm halfway to those goals. Let's hope Madrid will be my first stop, followed by Lyon and Strasbourg, and maybe elsewhere. A belated happy new year to all, and I'll catch you up again when my life involves fewer tissues and study timetables.

Autumn Summer

I knew that coming to Barcelona would be a shock to the system in many ways, one of them being weatherwise. In the back of my mind I knew that I would be living in a place much much warmer than Cork, but I don't think it ever really sank in, because once it hit November I was fully prepared to dig out my boots and my coat and my biggest jumpers and hats and scarves and gloves, only to find that Barcelona in November can hit 20 degrees, easy peasy. Heck, this time last year it was so cold in Cork that I used to layer up at least as well as Mr. Shackleton himself. But in recent times I've found myself eating ice-cream on the Ramblas, and walking down Avinguda Diagonal into the brightest, clearest sunset I've ever seen, listening to Jape (from whom I've stolen the title of this post) and watching the people coming towards me with the sun behind them, like glowing orange ghosts, features hidden by shade.

That said, it gets bloody freezing too, like when you're sitting for an hour and a half in the highest tier possible of the Camp Nou watching Barça beat the crap out of AD Ceuta below, while overhead lightning strikes the rest of the city a little further away. Going to my first football match was an overwhelmingly positive experience, made better by two main factors - i) the presence of Donnacha and Julian, whose enthusiasm for everything to do with the match - from the scarves to the stadium to the players to the opening anthem - made it all the more exciting; and ii) the fact that Messi came on to the pitch late in the game. Now I'm no football expert at all, but I know who Messi is ("we are in the presence of God" Donnacha said to me when he came on to a standing ovation), and I now know he's a pretty good footballer, having seen him set up a goal and score another within a ridiculously short space of time. 5-1 to Barça, olé!

So I understand now why Barcelona is so proud of its football team, but another thing I got an insight into this week was pride in history. I take a class in political theory here, and the course up to now has been your standard Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau-Kant-Hume affair, with overviews of Liberal Conservatism and the Social Contract and all the standard topics that I've covered in UCC. Yesterday, we moved on to Fascism. The lecturer is interesting and engaging, and the material was as well, but what I found particularly interesting was his focus on Hitler and Mussolini. Every point he dealt with - mass mobilisation, the eradication of negative liberty, the lack of pluralism - was explained with detail given about Germany and Italy, and only very occasionally would he mention Spain. This didn't surprise me hugely, but what I noted was that if revolution is mentioned in any class in Ireland, our own example is quickly given, because we're encouraged from a young age to be proud of the War of Independence and the transition to a Republic. But Spain definitely differs in this respect, and oddly enough just today I read a perfect summation of this attitude in Colm Tóibín's excellent Homage to Barcelona:

"In Barcelona, no one talks about the war: it is not romantic or heroic: it is a trauma that everybody went through, everybody fears, and nobody wants to go through again"

So just as there are two sides to every Civil War, there are two ways of reflecting on your own country's Civil War.

Right now I'm waiting for my room-mate and my friends to wake up so I can make pancakes for them, and this weekend is looking pretty sweet, between the possibility of lying in instead of getting up at 8.30 to go to college and study, the likelihood of going out somewhere and having fun, and the definite Arcade Fire gig that I'm going to on Sunday night - my first time seeing them in the 5 years I've liked them, so to say I'm looking forward to it is a little bit of an understatement!

And it's just two weeks until I put my paws back on Irish soil, for the Belle and Sebastian-Donnacha's 21st Birthday Party-Arcade Fire Part II extravaganza, featuring a visit from my Mum, a film with my sister, and hanging out with all my friends.. Again, excitement is an understatement!

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!