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
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