I can’t believe I’m still going right now. I hardly slept on the plane ride to Barcelona on top of not getting much sleep the night before. We landed at about 10 AM and now it’s almost 10 PM. Somehow I’m still awake. But already, I’m having so much fun.
It was kind of weird at first. We were all waiting forever in the airport waiting on a flight that got delayed five hours. We didn’t even get to Tarragona until about 3. The people who are staying in the dorm got dropped off first, then those of us staying with the host families went to meet up with them. Let me tell you , I can already say I’m so happy I picked the host family option.
My family is great. Both parents are doctors, which is awesome because both my roommate and I are both taking the medical Spanish courses here. There are three children, Xavi, Pau, and Ana. Xavi is my age, but he’s studying at a university in Barcelona right now, Pau is 18 and super nice, and Ana is 15 and loves to play tennis. Their house is amazing. It has four stories to it and they have a patio that opens out into a common area-type thing that even has a pool in it. Plus, we are very close to the beach and the Mediterranean Sea!
I tried a new food today! I don’t remember the exact name, but it was essentially pasta with meat in the middle and drenched in cheese. I hope I don’t gain too much weight here … they are always pressuring more food on you!
Tonight we walked around the old city of Tarragona. It’s really cool because around the perimeter is a wall that was put up by the Romans when it used to be its capitol. There was also a grand cathedral … it was so beautiful. There was so much detail in all the sculptures and painted glass windows. The buildings are so old but so gorgeous at the same time.
Everything is so much smaller here: stairways, cars, streets. It’s incredible how narrow the streets are, but somehow the cars still manage to drive through them. The people here are also parallel parking champs. Just last week at UVA, it took two honor students about five minutes to try to badly parallel park. These cars have just inches of room between the next car, but somehow they manage.
At the end of our walk through the old city, we went to two tapas places. Yay! My first tapas experience. Apparently it’s natural for people to go from one tapas place to another. Each place serves a special tapas of the day and you also get a drink. The first place we went to had a piece of ham wrapped around cheese and placed on a cracker type thing; I enjoyed a nice Fanta Lemonade with it. The second place we went to had a seafood dish that had shrimp and some sort of fish. I tried it! It wasn’t bad, but a little weird in the texture. I had some white wine with it, but it was pretty strong so I didn’t drink much of it.
So, to close up, here are some observations so far.
The Good: the families here are super nice, their house is gorgeous, my roommate is awesome, and they tell us that we talk really well in Spanish (or castellano)
The Bad: nothing so far! except I don’t really know my way around the city; or if you do want a bad, my semi-break down when I thought I lost my passport. Oops.
The Strange: the cars here are all really small (I saw one SUV) and they look really strange and kind of cheapy (needless to say they are all European cars), everyone parallel parks, they mix up their languages between Spanish and Catalan all the time!