AH GAHT MAH CHURROS

Yes, I did, and they were delicious.  They're like buttery doughnuts... like a crueller or something.  And the chocolate is thick and dark, and when you put them together it is the happiest feeling on earth.

Mmmm.

Vocab:
fichas = legos
sumo = amount
granada = pomegranate (either the whole thing or an individual seed… not sure which)
nueces = walnuts
aliño = (salad) dressing
imán = magnet
mareado/a = dizzy

I think I'm giving up on word-of-the-day.  I'm not posting every day, and each time I post, I have more than just one word I want to share.

The granadas, the nueces, and the aliño, along with lechuga (lettuce) and sal (salt), are the ingredients of a very delicious salad that my host mom makes fairly often.  That's all there is to it.  The aliño is olive oil and (I think balsamic) vinegar.  It's yummy, and there's nothing bad in it, which makes me twice as happy to eat it.

We had some kind of salmon-and-potato stew for lunch today.  It was yummy.

As part of this whole study-abroad thing, they kind of made me sign up for some classes.  I haven't talked about them much (at all?!) yet, so, here goes.

I'm taking five classes: Cervantes' Works, Spanish Art History, Contemporary Spain, Spanish Woman Writers, and Advanced Grammar.  They're all about Spanish things, and they're all entirely conducted in Spanish.  In fact, none of my professors knows more than a few key phrases in English.  This can make things difficult at times, but they know we're not fluent, and I'm keeping up.

Woman Writers is my favorite, closely followed by Art History.  I like both the subject matter and the professors in both classes.

Cervantes is a little disappointing so far—we're reading select passages from Don Quijote (I've been spelling it with an X, but they spell it with a J here), as well as a bunch of his other stuff.  The format of the class thus far has been: 1) be assigned a reading for homework, 2) read the reading and look up vocab at home, 3) answer questions about the reading at home, 4) go to class and listen to professor read the reading, 5) be given time to answer the questions in class with a partner or two, 6) want to kill self.  Wednesdays are better than Mondays because we read the Quijote in class and are not assigned anything, but she still has a tortuously slow way of reading… and speaking… and moving… … …

Contemporary Spain started slow, and it's a history class, so it's not terribly exciting.  Also, the professor of this class is probably the worst at empathizing with us non-native speakers, so I don't always know what's going on.  Fortunately, all of her notes are online, and she's supposed to be an easy grader.

Grammar is by far the worst.  It's the one class CIEE (the study-abroad program) requires us to take, and the professor is also the program director, Cristina.  She is a very organized individual, and she takes her job very seriously, which is very very good.  We all feel very secure knowing that she's there to take care of us, and she's approachable with any qualm or conundrum a study-abroad student might encounter.

Her class is just awful.

This is sad because, as many of you may know, grammar is kind of one of my most favorite things in the world.  It is my guilty dork-pleasure.  Sometimes, I diagram sentences just for fun, deriving great amusement from Googling particular parts of speech to see how they should fit into my structure… Okay, not great amusement.  But still.  It's bad.

What's frustrating about this class is that I've already learned the majority of what we're doing right now.  We'll spend an hour-and-a-half class period on the preterito perfecto (I have done such and such a thing), and I will learn one or two uses for the tense that I did not previously know.  This comprises the five interesting minutes of class.  Then we will practice it.  Then we will practice it some more.  Then we will practice it standing on our heads.  Then we will take home three pages of practice and practice it some more, and correct the practice the next day in class.  Now I have spent three hours practicing something I already knew how to do, except for the one small part that took me five minutes to understand.

It's as if someone told you, "Turn the screw to the right, and the screw goes in.  Turn it left, and the screw comes out.  Now, practice putting in and taking out the following three hundred screws."  Only you're screwing the screws into my skull.

Practice is good, yes, right, practice makes perfect, okay fine.  It's just that I already learned all of this stuff in high school, and I don't appreciate being talked down to.

A lot of the other students haven't learned all of what we're learning now, which surprises me since it's supposedly a very advanced program.  And so I understand why there is the need for repetition and practice and driving screws into skulls and all this stuff.

It's just a pain.  Gr.

Hm, okay, I'll talk about something happy now.

This weekend, seven or eight of us are going to BARCELONA, whooooo!

The perceptive (or Mom) among you will say, "But, Nicole—you've already been to Barcelona."

Yes.  Yes I have.  And I'm going back this weekend, whooooo!

I'd be more than happy to revisit anything by Gaudí, and there is at least one structure of his that I didn't get the chance to see in June.  I'd also like to spend some time in the Boquería, a big outdoor market open on weekend mornings.

We'll be staying in a hostel just off of Las Ramblas (a very large, popular street section), a stone's throw away from the Boquería and Gaudí's Palacio Güell.  I suspect we'll visit the Sagrada Familia, and outside of that I don't know what our plans are.

 

(This is a picture of the trippy rooftop of Gaudí's Casa Milà, from my

last venture to Barcelona.  I would not mind going back.)