6-6 Home Sweet Casa

Location: My room in Barcelona

Listening to: Robert Randolph & the Family Band - Deliver Me

Well, I’m running on about 5 hours of sleep after that 3-hour nap - what a night.  The DeutscheBahn and myself were getting along pretty well until the last 36 hours set in.

---(I fall asleep)

6-6

Location: My room

Listening to: Paco Peña - Herencia Latina

I’m trying desperately to find an internet signal up here but so far it’s been impossible - sorry to those of you hoping I’m still alive.  I managed to steal a few minutes in the city today with my iPod, but it’s kind of awkward to just whip out your laptop on a busy sidewalk, especially in the rain.  My room’s up on the fifth floor of an apartment complex up in the Northern part of Barcelona.  If you Google Vall D’Hebron you’ll be pretty close.  If you’re saying to yourself, “but Jake, that’s not Spanish,” cookie points for you.  All of the signs here (Streets, Metro stops, etc...) are in Catalan, which is about as similar to Spanish as French is to Latin.  Barcelona is at the heart of Catalonia, but that’s a long story I don’t have the time or desire to teach whoever may be reading this.  I’ll just say Catalonia doesn’t quite fit the Spanish mold (if there is one).

I’m extremely excited to meet someone under 60 tomorrow - my host mom, Roser, is an adorable elderly Catalonian woman who speaks exactly zero English.  It’s been a steep learning curve, and to be honest I’m not doing nearly as well as I had hoped.  I’m a long shot from where I was even in high school - I can remember how to conjugate some tenses that I no longer know how to use and I have no concept of irregulars anymore - plus the whole issue of vocabulary.  I feel like I can read pretty well, write in a decent manner, speak poorly, and hear very little.  I’ve heard from several people that fluency starts to occur when you dream in another language.  I experienced this last night, but in my dreams everyone else was speaking Spanish and I was just extremely confused.  I guess we’ll see what the placement test says tomorrow.

Aside from the language issue, I’ve had very mixed feelings so far.  Roser is a nice woman, but she’s clearly frustrated with my lack of faculty for the language.  The city’s beautiful, but I don’t think I’ll have a good grasp on it even by the time I finish.  Maybe most of all, I feel very alone.  There was something about searching for my family history that made me feel connected to something bigger than myself while I was on my own in Germany, and before that I was traveling with 50 or so of my favorite people.  Here I don’t know a soul.  I’m also concerned because I’m not sure I realized how diverse this program really is in terms of age: the other two students who will be joining me here with Roser on the 26th are 16 and 28.  These both seem a pretty good jump from 21 to me - I just really hope I can connect with some people tomorrow.

Yesterday, I arrived at around 2, napped, walked down to the school with Roser, ate, and went to bed.  It’s about a 30 minute trip, including the bus ride.  I was so exhausted yesterday - I slept for a solid 8 hours and I still don’t feel like I’ve caught up.  Today I played tourist.  I started with an audio-guided bus tour through some of the important place in Western Barcelona, then hopped out and explored for a while.  The Picasso Museum was free today (and the bus tour was not), so I decided to check that out.  Unfortunately the line to get in was probably a kilometer or longer so I just checked out the special exhibitions that didn’t require a ticket and moved on.  I needed to buy a few things, but nearly everything was closed since it’s Sunday.  After I’d walked for a few hours I hopped on another loop of the same bus tour to see the main points of Eastern Barcelona, including the beautiful beaches, then hopped off and walked another hour or so back to Roser’s house.  It rained off and on all day.  I’m excited for tomorrow but more than a little bit nervous - we’ll see what happens.