Thursday Feb 7

I know this doesn't seem that great, but it's a sight for sore eyes and tired feet.
Also, you can buy books from a vending machine in the Barcelona Metro. The sign basically says, "All your books are here."

After my CIEE class today I left for Barcelona. I took a bus from the Prado (nearby bus station) to the airport in Seville for a 7 pm flight, which ended up leaving about an hour late. The flight was only about an hour and 20 minutes, and then there I was, at Prat airport in Barcelona. Right away I started to notice how different Catalan is, both spoken and written, from Castilian Spanish. Beth knows WAY more about this than Sarah or I do, but Catalan looks and sounds like it has a heavy French influence, which makes sense given its proximity to France. Overall it was really confusing to read and listen to Catalan this weekend, right after being launched into an experience where one of the most important things we can do to assimilate in Seville is to speak Spanish. Fortunately for me (but a major point of contention for residents of Catalonia), everyone seems to speak very good Spanish, or at the very least they will understand Spanish and respond in a mix of Catalan and Spanish. From the Prat I took a Renfe train to the nearest Metro station and then took the Metro to Liceu, a stop on Las Ramblas (a.k.a. La Rambla and Les Rambles; official name Rambla dels Caputxins), the street where our hostel was. It was SOOO good to be on a Metro again, moving efficiently through a city of 1.6 million people. Barcelona’s public transportation – for that matter, its Metro alone, which has over 20 different lines – is light years ahead of Seville, where your best bet is walking or maybe getting a SEVici (public bike subscription) unless you really like taking buses in big looping circles. Barcelona’s Metro is HUGE and always expanding, the avenues are huge and wide and many of them are strictly for pedestrian use, whereas in Seville we regularly have to jump out of the way of motorcycles and cars that go zooming down streets where the sidewalks are about 8 inches wide. And Las Ramblas is a huge open street with sidewalks down both sides and a big wide pedestrian walkway in the middle, with 2 lanes of car traffic going down the sides, so everybody’s happy. On the weekends there’s a market held on Las Ramblas, and as we discovered, the first week of February features lots of children’s parades down the big avenue. So cool. We went to dinner (it was almost 11 pm when I arrived) and went out for drinks later.