A week with real classes (ish)

Classes start this week, but only in certain locations and only for part of the week. If the disorganization baffles you, just remember that we're in Spain.

For the semester, I take three university classes and one class made up of only CASB students. For my university classes, I get to pick from the bulk of the offerings at UPF and UAB. A la Brown, we are allowed to shop our classes before deciding what we want. UPF started today, but I'm not taking any classes there on Tuesdays. UAB allows each department to pick its own start date. The courses I'm shopping are in Periodisme (Journalism) and Ciencias Politiques (that one I think you can figure out), both of which start after this Thursday's festival of Mercè. (More details on that soon)

I had my first CASB class yesterday though. I'm taking La Guerra Civil y Memoria Historica (The Civil War and Historical Memory), which is taught by Juanjo, our program director. As I mentioned once before, I know very little about the Spanish Civil War, and it's a topic that is somewhat all-consuming for the Spanish people, so I'm really excited to learn about it.

Yesterday I also had my first episode in actual Spanish cooking. Two of the dishes you see most often in Barcelona are tortilla española and pan con tomate. Tortilla is basically a potato omelette, and the typically Catalan pan is simply baguette rubbed with tomato. Both are incredibly easy to make, and extremely delicious.

There are no leftovers, but we do now have a three kilo bag of potatoes sitting on our kitchen counter. (At the little fruit stand by our building, it cost 65 cents for the giant sack. I figured why not.) I sent an email to all of the CASB kids advertising free potatoes, but no one has come to claim them yet...

We also had the exciting adventure of losing power last night. Instead of just leaving and going out to dinner, we went and bought candles and made an adventure out of it. Someone had the brilliant idea of making s'mores, but the man at Mercadona wasn't feeling my Spanish translation of "marshmallow," and I learned that trying to describe what a marshmallow is in Spanish is not that easy.

Since I had no class today, I went to a cafe this morning to finish off my final paper for the orientation classes, which is due tomorrow. Something I have now noticed throughout Barca is that all of the cafes and coffee shops play American pop music — the kind we would play at a party. It's a far cry from the indie alternative of Blue State and Coffee Exchange...