Busy life in Barcelona!

Hola Chicos y Chicas

It´s been a busy couple of days for my orientation in Barcelona, but im loving the city and student life so far! ive been doing a TON of walking, so im going to have calves of steel when I get back to Canada in 4 months haha. Everything is very close in Barcelona, normally nothing takes more than 20 minutes to walk to. That´s sort of the running joke. If anything is farther than that then we take the metro, or a bus, or a taxi. Im thinking about getting a monthly metro pass for the metro, but for now just bought a ticket for 10 rides, called a T-10 which was 7 euros, and im going to see how often i use the metro and then decide if i want to buy a monthly pass or a 50/30 pass which means you have 50 rides you can use in 30 days, and that is 30 euros, and a monthly pass is 48 euros which of course is unlimited and can be used on the metro, buses or night buses. The metro closes at 12midnight Sunday-Thurs, 2am on Fridays, and it runs 24 hours on Saturday! Its not that difficult to use, it was sort of overwhelming at first but now it´s pretty easy to get the hang of!

Yesterday and today we had tours of our university .... my university is La Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona or UAB for short! Yesterday we went to the Sant Pau campus which was BEAUTIFUL, and looked like an old fashion castle or mansion, it had mosaic tiles everywhere, and stained glass windows. We had an academic and cultural meeting there, found out our schedules for class (i dont start class until 11am every day yayyy), and were able to have some time to tour that campus. Then today we went to Sarriá which is in the posh neighbourhood of Barcelona, and is a more modern campus. This is the campus I will be taking my business classes at where Sant Pau is where I take my spanish class. Then after we visited Sarriá we went to the main campus in the suburbs of Barcelona which is 30 mins away from the city center by train and is called Bellaterra. It is HUGEEEE and is the campus for the local students, where Sant Pau and Sarriá is for exchange students. So we ate lunch and had a tour at Bella Terra, and I was able to try Spanish Paella for the first time! It was ok because it was from the university café, so I still need to go to an official Paella restaurant, but it was still tastey.

The eating habits of Spainards are very different. We have small breakfasts at around 8 or 9am in the morning, then they take 2 hours for lunch whihc is the biggest meal of the day at around 2pm, and then we dont have dinner until 9 or 10, sometimes even 11 pm at night! Then the night life doesnt really start until 1am, and can go until 6am in the morning!! So it´s similar to NYC, being that its a city that never really sleeps, theres always something going on!

This weekend is going to be a big exploration weekend, my friends and I and my friend Paul (who went to Laurier with me, and has been travelling around Europe for the past 5 months, and will be in Barcelona this weekend!) are going to go to Parc Güell, Casa Milá and of course La Sagrada Familia, which are all things that were designed and built by Gaudí, a famous Spanish architect. Ive been able to see a little bit of La Sagrada Familia, and I live 2 blocks away from Casa Milá, both are amazing structures, and are in the modernistic style!

I dont start school until tuesday the 19th, so I have a nice 3 day weekend! Tomorrow (friday) we have a bike tour of the city, so i hope the weather is nice tomorrow as well. Today it was sunny and 16 degrees C !!!! Im loving that! No snow! woooo

anyways i will post more pictures to facebook soon, when i upload them to my laptop.

bye for now.
katie