The Fórum and 30,000 people

This is the best picture that I have of the concert, showing how many people there were. Thats my friend Tony's head on the right side.

Day 26 – September 23rd – Tuesday
Today was our last day of intensive Spanish and we ended it in true American teaching style with a movie. It was completely in Spanish, so that was fun. I actually didn't really have trouble understanding anything, especially because we went over a lot of the vocabulary, including the vulgar words, before we watched it. It is called “Tapas” and I am sure you could find it in the States. I had actually seen part of it already. It takes place in a Bronx-like neighborhood of Barcelona and the streets that you see in the movie are very similar to the ones I see every day. After class, I finally got to change my traveler's checks! Yay! $1000 USD gets you about 650 Euro, so that part wasn't so nice, but hopefully this will last me until my birthday trip to Holland. After lunch at Burger King, probably the most plentiful fast-food restaurant, I went home and took a three hour nap before a dinner of salad and Spanish tortilla. I think I've mentioned it before, but it is egg with potatoes and onions, and it is delicious. After dinner, we went to El Gato Negro to meet up with everyone and then headed out to the Forum, which is definitely the hot spot for Barcelona youth. It was a free concert, thanks to Mercè. We had been there before and been impressed with how many people were there, but apparently, we never found the main stage. When we walked to the back of the pavilion, our jaws dropped. There was a huge amphitheater there with at least 15,000 people packed in. We thought about wading through, but there were just too many people and we knew we would get separated so we were content to stand at the top, which was probably the best view anyway. It was definitely one of the craziest experiences of my life. We hopped back on the metro at around 4:00 and everything calmed down. That is until Matt and I switched to another train. Right as the train was pulling up, someone let of a smoke bomb or tear gas or something, but all I saw was smoke as I jumped on the train. Then once on the train, some little Spanish kid thought it would be fun to break out the fire extinguisher. Thanks to my vocabulary lesson on vulgar phrases, I was able to understand all the things the other people with more sense were yelling at him. Basically, they were telling him he was stupid, but in a much meaner way. That didn't stop him though and he shot it off right before the next station, which, luckily, was mine. I'm not really sure why they have security cameras on the trains if they can't tell who does things like that because the kid and his friend, who was taping the whole thing on his video phone, ran right past all the security guards who were rushing to see what had happened. I consider myself lucky that I was getting on a train when something happened outside and I was getting off when something happened inside, but I was never really scared I was going to get hurt. We made it home without further incident and my bed was a welcome resting point. Tomorrow, Teresa is making another paella, this time with meat instead of seafood, so I have that to look forward to in the morning.