Moved In and Attempting to Fit In

So we finally moved into the apartment on Wednesday morning!  I learned the hard way how to figure out the alarm on mi telefono but managed to finally make it and see the place! It's so cute and I love it although the thin walls are somewhat of an aggravation.  I'll post up pictures soon once we clean the place!  Our apartment is technically the second floor but it's up three flights of stairs, carrying my suitcases up was definitely an adventure.  We got a tour of the area around our apartment from two of our program leaders and it was super cool.  I live in the neighborhood Gracia and it's one of the nicest and safest in all of Barcelona!  There's a cute plaza right down the street and lots of shops and stores and restaurants all around!  There's a nice pizza place right across from our apartment as well which we went to the first day :) A piece of pizza cut into four and an empanada and soda is only 4.10 euro. It's so cheap!!!!! Later in the day we got a tour of the API (my program) office and had a few meetings on health, safety, culture, etc which was helpful.  They have a room for us to study in, use the computers, print, etc and it's very nice!  All of the advisors are sooooooo cool.  I was very surprised, I didn't think that they would be so approachable and awesome but they're so easy to talk to and helpful.  Wednesday night we attempted to catch up on some sleep but of course I couldn't fall asleep till late!


Thursday morning, my roommate Micaela and I took the metro for the first time (!) to our campus at UPF.  We had an orientation session with lots of other international students, mostly from the US and Canada.  The session was very helpful, introducing us to the university, resources, available clubs and sports, what to expect in classes, cultural differences and all sorts of stuff! The school has about 10,000 undergrads which I didn't realize it was that big.  We got a tour of the campus and it is SOOO nice.  There are three different campuses but the one I'm at is Ciutadella.  It's practically a block from the beach! There are three buildings and they are ridiculously nice and clean and very modern and the third is a bigger library that used to be a water reservoir and is gorgeous.  The library looks pretty cool and I think I'll use it!  The place is 10x nicer than Clemson, it's incredible you would think that it's a private school.  It's in a good location too, I love it!  After orientation, we went to go see our friends dorm in the Melon District and it is RIDICULOUSLY nice.  It's a few years old and very, very pretty.  There's four different buildings attached to each other and each one has a rooftop pool and "refreshing lounge" to overlook the city!!!!! We're gonna' watch the sunset on it one night! After that, we met up with some other kids in our group and watched the parade para El Día de los Reyes Magos.  It's basically their big holiday that they celebrate in addition to Christmas but this is when all of the kids get tons of presents.  The parade was soooo cool! We walked around Las Ramblas for a bit while we waited for it to come by but it finally came at 7:30 and was over 45 minutes long! It was soooo cool to see, I cannot believe how much effort, time and money they put into it.  It was very cool to see the kids get all excited, they sit close and get candy thrown at them throughout the whole parade.  They even had little catapults to throw candy everywhere! Everyone would fight over catching candy and scrambling around! It was an amazing experience though to see the traditions and how involved everyone is.  Each float and group of people had a story but I'm not quite sure I understood it all haha.

Today is El Día de los Reyes Magos so most of the city is closed and we had nothing planned so I finally had time to catch up on sleep.  My roommate Anna who was here last semester had some of her friends over and they cooked us a lunch for the holiday.  It was very cool and homey!  We had a salad, tortilla (potatoes and eggs), pan con tomate, chorizo and bread and mushrooms and then had roscon de reyes for dessert.  That's the traditional cake for the holiday and it has a bean and Jesus cooked into the cake.  So we all cut randomly into the cake and Micaela got the bean which is bad luck and you're supposed to pay for the next get together and Anna got Jesus (it was actually Santa which was kinda funny) and that's good luck and she got to wear the crown that was on top of the cake.  It was pretty cool to do that tradition but we didn't put our shoes out for presents in the morning which all the kids do haha.  Tonight we actually cooked our first meal together-- pasta and peppers, onions, tomatoes, garlic in a tomato sauce.  Everything is so fresh and good! The peppers here are HUGE, I likeeee!  Tonight we're going to have girls night because we're all still exhausted and watch movies and paint our nails :) So far everyone is verrryyyyy nice and welcoming!! Our fourth roommate Jillian returns from traveling on Monday so we'll finally be able to meet her!

So I definitely have the metro down and like it a lot, tomorrow I'm going to get the 3 month pass that's 140 euro but it's unlimited so it'll definitely be put to good use!  It's cool because everyone in our group has been speaking Spanish and trying to practice it so we've been using it a lot but sometimes I get lazy.  A lot of people mumble and don't enunciate and I'm already deaf so I can't understand sometimes but I'm getting used to it.  I haven't had much of a culture shock or anything but it's very different that everyone keeps to themselves.  People will push you and not say excuse me which is kinda weird.  The people walk really slow which will take some getting used to because I get impatient.  Oh, and the food! At restaurants, they're such bad servers and so slow it KILLS me!  Yesterday we went to lunch with 12 people from our group and everyone got their food at once but me and Le and we didn't get it for over 10 minutes.  It was just so weird and she didn't say anything about it at all, very different!  But the food was good! 4 euro for a big chicken and pepper sandwich!  Also, having to buy bottled water is so annoying.  Lately I've been carrying around my water bottle and somehow finding water to put into it (there's not many fountains) because they don't give you tap water anywhere.  I had the water somewhere and it was really weird tasting but at the apartment so far it tastes really good/normal.

Adios!