Week Five

Sitting with my back to the window of a third floor piso, listening to fountains and fans, the kids and grans. Starlings and satellite receivers interrupt the post-sunset pastels and the breeze brings fresh baked bread to my altitude.

Enough with amateur poetry. Here's what I've been up to. On Friday I said goodbye to nearly everyone I'd met over the last four weeks out here. We spent the day at the beach in the company of my €45 guitar, had some authentic but cheap food in a tiny Italian restaurant and headed for the back to the beach armed with cheap bottles of beer to finish the night before each going our separate ways the next morning. Aside from a brief interruption in the form of a rude, threatening immigrant who referred to himself as 'The Shark', I ended my stay in Barcelona on a high. Waking early the next morning, I packed my clothes, guitar and laptop back up and made my way to the bus station. On a side note my upset tummy returned with a vengeance, which wasn't helped by a Northern Irish kid a few rows behind; who chundered, evvvveryyywhere. After two hours on the bus, Nadine (a girl from the same program who's also working in the same place as me) and I made our way to the estate agents to pick up our keys before siesta time kicked off. So, our place is great. It's a family-sized flat with one spare bedroom and loads of space. I'm currently sat on the balcony writing this (no steal-able wifi, so I'll copy and paste later), which has a great view over the North-East side of the town. You can almost make out the sea in the distance...but its a long way off; more on that later! I had a wander around the town on Saturday afternoon, making mental notes of where all the supermarkets and cheap-looking bars are, but went to bed nice and early on Sunday, as I had to be up to catch the first 6.30 bus to Girona, to fly back for my graduation in Bangor the following day.

Shame I missed out on the Sunday evening over here though. As much as the Catalan people seem to hate the country they're in, I bet Spain winning the World Cup final would have made for a good night out.

Sparing you the details of my short stay back in the UK, I flew back even earlier on Wednesday morning, leaving me enough time for a nice long siesta before going to work at 5pm that evening. The place I'm working in and what I'm actually doing as work are notoriously difficult to describe. Its a government-funded company that tries its best to entertain kids during the summer months. In the main building itself there are classrooms, a climbing wall, a recording studio (which is where I come in) and various other entertainingment infrastructures. For this week though, the company's main task is sorting out the four-day festival down the road. So I've been on with that today and yesterday... putting up signs, moving tables, chairs, bins etc. The festival runs Friday through to Monday, so I'll be working every night, doing similar things and by the sounds of it, they'll let me get involved a bit more with the lights/sound stuff too, which'd be grand. With me just working evenings then, I got up nice and early this morning and made my way to the beach on foot. There's a bus every 45 minutes, but I was too stubborn; it looked such a short distance on Google Maps. After my massive walk and seeing that my belongings were safe under the watchful eye of a shirtless 40-something tourist reading the sun and sporting 'Yorkshire' and 'Sheffield' tattoos on his respective left and right arms, I donned my snorkel and mask and did, well, snorkelling, for the first time in a good few years. The water is incredibly clear up here and there's literally shoals of fish just swimming about. You'd think they did it everyday or something. I'm hoping to get hold of my mum's waterproof camera in the next few weeks so I photograph a few beneath the blue. Well that brings you about up to speed. More soon. x

What's New? What's Old?

What's new? Well, I've been sick as a parrot this week. What's old? England are out of the world cup and Spain are still in. En fin.

Aside from feeling awful for most of the week, I have still managed to get quite a bit in. I've been swimming in the sea a few times, and I've even found the strength to throw myself off one or two of the artificial concrete, yet razor sharp breakwater rocks at Barceloneta beach. On Wednesday I was driven up to Palafrugell, a small seaside town about an hour and a half north of Barcelona where I'll be spending the remaining nine weeks of the exchange program. I was looking forward to going, as I'd get to see where I'd be working, the sort of facilities they'd let me be in control of and the folk I'd be attempting to start conversations with. I should explain. I'll be working thirty-five hour weeks in this company, helping out and doing, well, whatever needs doing. Although I was feeling gosh-awful and the sun up to one of its old 'let's see how hot I can make it today' tricks, and the 'Catalan or English, but never Spanish' philosophy was unfortunately even more pronounced that I had expected, I really liked the whole set-up. I switched to Permanent Grin Mode when they showed me the recording studio they wanted me to be in charge of during August; imagine an evil genius in a room full of WMDs type situation...

On the drive back, things turned from Guatamala to Guatapeor (phrase of the week, meaning 'going from bad to worse'). I'd not eaten in two days, and I thought I could just about get one of those cereal-type smoothie yoghurts just to get some nutrients inside me. It wasn't staying down. I endured the rest of the journey without chundering but suffered a 'both-ends-at-once' (forgive the explicit detail) explosion as soon as I made it to the bathroom at home. 

I made it out to the pub on Thursday, which was a great little spot as reccommended by my teacher from the language school. Despite the great surroundings I was still a bit on the haggard side, and the atmosphere was somewhat ruined by a drunk, jealous and rude French girl. Let's forget about though, just look at the nice picture.

By Friday, I'd made a full recovery, thanks to a few heavy doses of Sulfintestin Neomicina and Ibuprofen, and thanks to the people that were sick of me moaning, who told me to stop being so stubborn and actually sort myself out.

Saturday saw the second out-of-the-sity excursssion. Poblet:

And Tarragona.

So that's that. Oh, and I went to this last night too. The bands were good, the crew controlling the sound weren't as good, and the local people, as usual, were great... more than anything I wanted to start up conversations with all the umpteen-thousand of them. One step at a time I suppose.