We made it!

After flying from LA, Madeline and I met up in NY for our fight to Barcelona. It’s always great to have someone to fly with, and it certainly made the 7 hour of weird airplane food, and even weirder in flight movies, more enjoyable.  We landed in Barcelona around 7am, and the sun didn’t rise until 8am! Very different from the California life I’m used to.  After meeting up with a few other girls form our program Madeline and I took a taxi to our hotel for the night, which ended up being only about 5 blocks from the university.

Deciding that we must fight the deep urge to sleep the day away, we headed off to explore the area and buy some new necessities.  Our extremely friendly concierge Albert sent us on our way with an extremely large map of the city, mostly importantly marking how to find our way back.  On our way to El Corte Inglés (more explanation to follow) we found our beautiful new university! University of Barcelona was established in 1450 and is absolutely gorgeous.  We looked around the campus to find where our orientation would be tomorrow, and even contemplated visiting the student store to buy some UB gear, but we decided we could hold off on it for a few days at least. After looking through the campus we had our true first Spanish interaction: ordering coffee and croissants at a bakery.  My Spanish is still very rusty but I’m hoping it will get better soon!

After coffee Madeline and I arrived at the gigantic El Corte Inglés: Target on steroids.  The store is essentially a 9 story pharmacy, supermarket, electronic shop, department store, and cell phone provider all in one.  It’s packed with people and we obviously had no idea how to navigate it, so we spent about an hour roaming around, eventually buying hair dryers and a straightener that will work here. 

The final mission of day one was to purchase Spanish cell phones.  First Madeline and I tried Movistar, which quickly because very complicated.  We headed down the street to Vodafone which we had heard would be cheaper and got phones! This place was equally confusing, but the salesmen showed us a real pamphlet and we were sold. We now have hilarious matching red flip phones that weigh about as much as a paper clip, and have a 1 square inch screen.  While it does feel a little bit like a come down from the iphone, I’m really looking forward to re-mastering my T9 skills from middle school. 

After observing our first very necessary siesta it’s time 

to go out for some tapas…. and then to bed to hopefully sleep off some jet-lag.  Tomorrow we’re planning on exploring more of the city, and then we have our orientation at 4. From there we go home with our new homestay families!