So many things to blog about, parte uno: la playa, la comida

Oh mansies, so much to blog about. I ran out of memory space on my camera in a span of 4 days. Welcome to Europe. I'll make things brief, mostly because I'm actually in classes/working/planning trips/in a routine right now. Busy is good!

We had one week that was sunny and 60s/65 all week long, which was absolutely wonderful. The beach is about a 30 minute walk from the program study center, so my friend and I packed our peanut butter and nutella sandwiches and had a picnic lunch on the beach. It is gorgeous...too cold for bathing suits yet, but nice enough to sit and people watch. Note: this picture was taken in the first few days of February, and it was snowing in Nashville at the time. Just one of the reasons why I love Barca.

Making tortilla, outshining all the others
with my knife skills...thanks, dad!

Then this past Thursday, the program took us to a cooking class. We learned how to make pan con tomate (exactly what it says it is...bread rubbed with tomato, and a little bit of garlic and oil), tortilla española (kind of like an omelet, but with potatoes and onions baked into it on a stove top), paella valenciana, and crema catalana (a dessert in between creme brulee and flan). Everything was pretty amazing, and very, very typical catalonian food (excluding the paella, which in Catalonia is more sold only in places which seem to be the Spanish version of cheap side street barbecue places).

Here's the catch: typical me, I lost the recipes. However, my host mom makes better tortilla than this place did, and it is by far the best thing I have eaten since I've been here, so no worries...tortilla is coming to Houston/Vanderbilt soon enough.





Coming up next (mostly so that I can remember what I need to right about :P): Paris--getting lost in the subway, absolutely not learning French, and Haley adds a new number one to the bucket list.

Classes--um...say what? Again! (Where do you buy text books, anyways?)

Internship--Spanish "work ethic" versus American work ethic, aka "why are they shocked that I did exactly what they asked me to do?"

And finally, trip to Sevilla and Cadíz (two towns in southern Spain) this weekend!

<3 Barça!