The Mercè begins

Day 21 – September 18th – Thursday
I have to admit I haven't really been enjoying myself the past few days. It seems that I have settled into a schedule, but that doesn't really equate to much. I could always go walk around, up and down the streets of Barcelona, but that gets old after a while. I don't have a whole lot of friends here and a few of the friends I do have go to another school, which is close by, but they still have a completely different schedule. Today, as my 21st day here, leaves 92 days left. Right now, that seems like a eternity. Tonight I am going to an ISA function, which I have been avoiding for the most part because they are usually filled with people I don't think are worth making friends. However, I am not going alone, so if it is as lame as it could be, we'll just leave. I have a feeling I might have to suck it up and befriend a few of these kids. Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised. After tomorrow, we are basically finished with our intensive language course. We have an exam on Monday and then on Tuesday, we are going to see “los gigantes.” You may have seen something similar to this. It is a part of Mercè, which is the annual festival of Barcelona. “Los gigantes” and giant human-like structures that are part of a parade. I'm not sure how many of them there will be, but it is one of the main attractions of the festival. There are people below each one that make them dance to the music as they move down the street. It would be a good way to end the course and start of another long weekend, this time, five days.

Day 22 – September 19th – Friday
We had a nice little review session in class today for our test on Monday. I don't really know why, but I was in the mood to talk. Maybe it was because class was going slow, or maybe because I actually wanted to review, but either way, my teacher said that she has noticed improvement in my speaking skills, which is definitely true. Sitting at the dinner table is a lesson in itself. After dinner, Matt and I met up with Nicolas to go to a few concerts. The Mercè festival has started, so there's really no reason not to have something to do at night. First we went to see some Spanish rock band, who was actually not to bad. They seemed to be pretty popular too. Then we hopped over to another nearby stage where we watched a woman from Portugal perform. She, like most of the Portugese I've met, did not speak Spanish that well, but her English was very good. She definitely had rhythm and I really enjoyed her show. Then we hopped back over to the first stage to see who was there. It was actually an American band and I don't think the guy even knew how to say thank you in Spanish, but it was pretty good music. I reminded me of Coldplay a lot and I was surprised to see so many Spanish feeling it too, even if they couldn't understand it. Then came the band that Nicolas had been waiting for. They turned out to be a cover band of bad American music from the late 80s to early 90s, so we left pretty quick. They were, unfortunately, very popular with all the Spaniards. Oh well, they'll catch up with music in a decade or so after its all changed again. After that, we caught the last metro home and went to bed.

Day 23 – September 20th – Saturday
I was hoping to go to the bank today, but apparently, banker's hours are even more restrictive in Spain. The tobacco store was open though so I was able to buy stamps. After waking up at noon, I took a nap after a lunch of whitefish, sausage and salad. I sleep a lot here, but so do all Spaniards. If we didn't take a siesta, we couldn't stay out until five in the morning. As I mentioned before, the Mercè festival has started at tonight was a very unique spectical. My teacher had told me to go because it is something that they would never let happen in the states. It is called Correfoc and is kind of like a cross between the running of the bulls and a Chinese fire dragon. Basically, there are people dressed up as devils and dragons have pitchforks with fireworks attached that shoot sparks out until they burn out and explode. The idea is when the devils come toward you with the sparking pitchforks, you run away. Some people, however, choose to stay with the devils and dance while getting showered in sparks. Of course they are pretty much completely covered in clothing to prevent burns. We were told not to wear anything we cared about in case we got hit with some sparks. It was pretty impressive. I took a video to try and give you a feeling as to how it was and how close we were. There were definitely so barriers anyway and it seemed like the police preferred to stand far back. After this, we decided to walk up to Plaça Catalunya, the center of the city, and see what was going on up there. When we got there, I got a call from my Spanish friend, Jordi, who also happened to be in the same plaza. We met up with him and his girlfriend after minimal language barrier issues (I couldn't figure out how to say, “where should we meet?” so i just told him where I was and he came to me) and went to El Gato Negro to wait for a few friends. After that, Jordi had told us about a concert that was kind of far away, but it was supposed to be good and the Metro ran all night so we went. The metro was packed and everyone was going to the same place as us. I'd say there were about 10,000 people there when we arrived, all young Spaniards. Except from my friends, I didn't hear English the rest of the night. It was an electronic concert, so not my favorite genre, but it was a pretty crazy environment. We jumped around to sound for an hour or so, but there were a few other stages so we went to check them out too. The music wasn't bad and we were surrounded by Spaniards, so it was a good time. We left around 4:00 and there were still people showing up. I got home dead tired. I'm definitely going to have to take a siesta tomorrow, no matter what time I wake up.

Day 24 – September 21st – Sunday
I literally did nothing today. I didn't even leave the house. Not even to walk out on my balcony. I slept until 1:00, or 13:00 as it would be here, and then ate lunch at 15:00 and went to sleep til 19:00. I have had a great discovery though. I can pirate some sort of signal in my room from the hotel across the street. So now I can use Skype a lot more and hopefully keep my phone bill down a little bit. I have a test tomorrow in Spanish, so what time I have spent awake, has been studying, though I'm not really doing much. I'm not that worried about the test. It seems pretty straight forward. I do have to get up earlier tomorrow than usual though, as my test is at 10:00 am instead of normal class time of 12:30. Wish me luck, even though luck has nothing to do with it.