PERI: The Start of Fall

Sorry I have been a little delinquent in my blog writing, I cannot believe how fast time is passing here!  The weather has really changed in the past week or so;  we are no longer able to lounge on the beach (pout!!) and a jacket is definitely necessary when leaving the house in the morning.  I have midterms in the upcoming week and the Monday after;  I am a little unsure about how those will go... the structure of classes here is very different from the States, things are not as straight forward.  However, I feel like I am one of the most prepared students in both of my classes, so I am not worried.  Spanish class is going well, I feel like my Spanish is improving everyday.  It is still a bit difficult to speak with my host mom because of her accent and her strong tendency to mix Catalan words in with Spanish.  One thing that really helps me though is listening to the news.  Every night at dinner the TV is turned on to the news, and although that would be an odd dinner behavior in my house back home, I enjoy listening to the newscasters because they have a nice pace and little accent.

Last weekend Elizabeth and I went to Tarragona, a province about an hour by train south of Barcelona.  Tarragona is famous for its Roman ruins.  It was great to see the ancient amphitheater, palaces, and prison (and even more great because it only cost 5 Euro for students to see all the cites!).  I am really trying to be frugal these days, the worth of the American dollar seems to keep going down compared to the Euro, it seems like the conversion rate is getting consistently worse unfortunately for us American students.

Roman Amphitheater (notice the LC shirt) ;)

This week I learned something VERY cool about where I live.  In my History of Barcelona class, we are learning about the Gothic Quarter, and more specifically, the Jewish Quarter of Barcelona.  In one of our class readings discussing the remaining buildings from this period, MY ADDRESS was mentioned several times!  "Other notable features are part of the [Roman] wall with the walkway across the top and a tower at [my address]... , excavated in 1996... The remaining part of this defensive construction must be partly hidden inside the buildings".  The article also says that that origins of my building were built in the 14th or 15th century.  COOL!  My profesora was very impressed that I get to live here (and I feel very lucky too!).

The part of my street that the article is referring to (my house on the left)

Time passes very strangely here: the days seem to go by too slow (a 16+ hour day here is very normal... hence the siestas), the nights go by too fast, and it seems like the weeks are just disappearing!  This weekend we are traveling to Valencia with our ISA group.  I am so excited I can hardly contain myself for next week.... Andrew, my fiance, is coming to visit for a week!!! :)  After he leaves I have two free weekends then an ISA trip to Girona, Spain, then for Thanksgiving and my birthday I am going to visit Mitzi in Sevilla, then we have our Rome trip, finals week, and then one final trip to Geneva, Switzerland that we booked this week!  It is going to be pretty hectic, but very exciting. All these trips are helping this time fly by until I go home to see my loved ones again!  As much as I love it here, I have to admit that Christmas time is going to be a very very happy time for me :).