Monday & Tuesday June 14/15

Monday morning I took a placement test for Spanish. Apparently, I'm "advanced"! Woot! We had some boring meetings for ISA about conduct and academics and then we had our orientation for UPF. At orientation they gave us a whole bunch of free stuff like translation books, maps around the city, and books about fun things to do while we're here. It was worth it to go just for those things. :)

Tuesday classes finally started. I'm taking two classes here : Arte y Artistas and Barcelona: the city and its history. The art one is in Spanish and my teacher talks waaaaay too fast. It's nearly impossible to understand her, even for the two girls who are fluent. We've learned about some pretty cool stuff though, including Modernism and all about the works of Gaudi. The class is going to focus on Catalunyan artists, which should be fascinating because we can actually see their work while we're here! Monday we're taking a tour of the Sagrada Familia (Gaudi's church which is very close to my house), and later next week we're going to the Picasso Museum in the Gothic quarter.

The other class is very laid back. Our teacher is awesome. She speaks Catalan as her first language, so her English isn't great, but the translations are hilarious sometimes. She made us all stand up and talk about where we're from and that was literally our entire class period.

After class we went on a tour of the Gothic quarter with ISA. We walked around for a long time and saw some stuff that I never would have explored if someone hadn't been there pointing them out to me. Some cool things that were there: columns from an ancient roman temple that have been preserved, the castle where Ferdinand and Isabella commissioned Columbus to go explore and where he later returned to them, old Jewish synagogues from before the Jewish people were expelled from Spain, the old cathedral, and much more. The tour was awesome and the people from ISA know so much, so it's nice to have them there to explain everything to us.