class & passeig de grácia

today we had placement exams for spanish language. i was placed into intermediate 2, which is honestly higher than i expected... i think i'm one of the lowest in our group though. that's fine though because everyone else is good at spanish and can help me out.

a few of us went out to lunch at a little take-away place, but it was rather expensive. manisha and i bought spaghetti and sauce, but the sauce broke on the way home. so now we just have spaghetti. we'll buy more sauce tomorrow. a pineapple, 2 peaches, pasta, paper towels, and the sauce only set us back 7 euros, which is pretty cheap. it's a small indian market a few blocks away. so we are going to learn to cook.

we also had our first history of barcelona class. our teacher is cool, and we meet 4x a week, typically taking the 4th day as a field trip day and visiting parts of the city that we are learning about. this thursday we're visiting the roman part of the city, which basically consists of some walls-- and las ramblas. i'm becoming a frequenter.

after class, we had orientation to UPF. they basically tried to sell the university to us, which didn't make sense since we're already here. i guess now we can tell our parents all the stats about how awesome UPF is. i really want to be a dork and join the UPF network on facebook.

after orientation, Patsy, Manisha, and I dropped off our lovely new course packets and hopped on the metro to Passieg de Grácia, where we did a little Spanish pre-rebajas shopping. The sales are next month, but that's a ways away, so i bought a few small things and so did the others.

on the way back we stopped at the fruit market. now we're just hanging out. i finally have internet in my own room, which is a huge deal... yayyy.

okay so last night we went to dinner and i tried paella. it was super. there were flies jumping into it. and into my water. and my limon fanta. and everywhere. so i'm not sure i'll be hitting up that restaurant again... it was an okay price at least. then we went to the beach, where we were offered all sorts of substances (and politely declined most, cerveza being the exception). it was chill, but i got cold and had to head home.

we had tapas while shopping, so the three of us are going to try a typical spanish midnight dinner this evening. we'll see if we can wait that long...