French Word of the Day: Barcelone (bar-say-lone)- Barcelona

My facebook account has been steadily gaining friends.  As Dustin (one of the only guys in our program who is traveling with us for break) put it, “This is perfect.  We’re making friends with people I probably won’t see again.  That’s a much easier friendship to maintain.”

We booked a really great hostel here.  I told the others that they’re completely spoiled because normally hostels aren’t this nice.  This one is clean and spacious and well-run.  Other hostels are… not.

Everyone’s been really friendly.  We’ve been going out with new people every night.  English-speakers mostly.  We still manage to have a wide range.  It’s normally several Australians, Englanders (I don’t know if that’s a word), and South Africans.  For some reason, the three other people I’m traveling with and I are the only Americans.  Maybe we scare other Americans away?  We know they’re here.

One of the English guys is in the British Air Force.  He’s going to meet us in London at the end of November.  He’s got some good restaurants for us to go to.  I think Dustin just might be wrong about never seeing everyone again…

The English guys have just made everyone an English breakfast which has been Spanish-ified because the Spanish don’t do baked beans well or have “proper English sausage.”  I suppose the Spanish aren’t in the habit of having English breakfasts.  I’m actually not really sure what a Spanish breakfast looks like.  We don’t normally wake up early enough to go out for breakfast.

We have seen several gorgeous parks.  I really enjoyed the park designed by Gaudi.  His designs remind me of the elves in the Lord of the Rings.  We also saw the Picasso Museum.  I was impressed by his earlier work and (I’m totally going to offend the art history majors here) unimpressed by his later work.  Mainly because most of the later works were comparable to art pieces I created in grammar school.  One of the paintings was almost identical to something I made in kindergarten.  Perhaps he was trying to make a statement about youth or something.  I’m not really sure.  Of course, maybe I was just a very prolific artist at age 6 and it just took Picasso longer to catch up.

I’ve been able to use French here!  I gave directions to a Spanish guy in French (he didn’t speak English) and last night I made friends with two Belgian girls.  They were a bit tipsy and kept insisting that I get in all their photos.  Let’s hope they were sober enough to remember me or they’re going to be confused by the random girl in their pictures.

Off to Lisbon today!  Wish us luck!

Pain au chocolat count: 23