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Yesterday I went to Sagrada Familia with some friends and we spent several hours wandering the inside and the outside before taking the elevator to the top of one of the bell towers. The views from the top were incredible. Mountains on one side, sea on the other with a beautiful city sprawling in between. Words still cannot express the magnitude of detail on this structure. Luckily my new camera can withstand taking more than a few pictures so I was happily snapping away and came away with a LOT of pictures. There are currently 4 towers completed and they are working on the foundations for four more. In all, there will be 18 towers. One for each of the apostles, one for each of the gospels, one for Mary and one for Jesus. The existing towers dwarf the city and stand staggeringly tall over Barcelona but the tallest two towers (dedicated to Mary and Jesus) will ultimately make the existing towers miniscule. The goal is to be completed by 2026, in time for the centennial of Gaudi’s death. They have a long long way to go in order to make that deadline. I took pictures of some of the architectural plans and scale models and you can see from the other pictures that there is a lot left to be done. 

Today marks the beginning of my first vacation. Today is being spent in Barcelona getting ready but tonight at 3 AM (yeah, you read that right), 5 of us are hopping a flight to Milan. We are staying in Milan until Sunday night and then we are off to Venice. The rest of the group is heading to Florence on Wednesday and then to Rome but I am coming back to Barcelona to hit some museums and hopefully the beach! I’m going to take my laptop with my through Italy but I’m not sure about internet availability so you might not get any updates until Wednesday. Expect some awesome pictures and some good stories from Italy when I get back.

A big group of us at Onix got together to cook on Wednesday night. Everyone brought a different random ingredient and a bottle of wine and we got creative. It was incredibly delicious. A very successful dinner that will have to be repeated.

My professor moved the bucket out from under a drip in the ceiling because he didn’t like the drip drip drip noise that it was causing. Now it is going drip drip drip on the floor. So much better.

A lot of people are worried about the international strength of the American economy with respect to the rest of the world. Lately, the Dollar has been doing particularly bad against the Euro and even more so, the Pound. I made a realization today. Our kids will have nothing to worry about. Because in 40 years, the majority of people in Europe will be dying of emphysema or lung cancer. I’m kidding I’m kidding…… but only kinda.

Well, I went on a shopping spree this morning. I thought it was about time to become just a little more Catalan so I bought an FC Barca jersey and some cheapo soccer shoes this morning. And by cheapo, I mean I bought them at the grocery store. Now pair those with my fohawk and I look like a decent European. I still don’t exactly look Spanish but maybe by the end of summer I’ll have that Mediterranean tan… yeah… right. I’m not sure how much sun it would take to overcome my Scottish-Welch pigmentation but I can promise that it would take more time than I have this summer. I have, however, been mistaken for being French several times now. 

Oh, I also bought a new camera too. I added up the cost of buying new batteries every time I wanted to take more than 20 pictures and realized pretty quickly that it would be cheaper to just buy a new camera at this point. I got a Panasonic Lumix. It is a little point-and-shoot and I found a decent deal on it. The closest thing I could find online is this Lumix. The main difference is that mine is 8MP, not 10. The biggest plus is that it has a rechargeable Li-Ion battery. No more AAs! When a set of 4 AAs was running ~5 euros and I went through 2 AAs for every 30 pictures I took, the new camera was a steal. It is rated at 320 pictures per charge so we’ll put that to the test in my upcoming trip next week. Oh, and this one will fit in my pocket, as opposed to my old Canon. Yay! As soon as the battery finishes charging, I will head out the Ciutat Vella or the Barri Gotic to test it out. 

The past few days have been pretty uneventful. I’ve done some exploring, gone to dinner with friends and worked for my classes. Yeah, they actually make us do work! It’s ridiculous. Oh, there was one exciting thing that happened yesterday. The drain on our kitchen sink dropped off the bottom of the sink while Gaby was doing dishes yesterday essentially flooding our room. Of course, the maintenance guy had yesterday off so hopefully we will have a working sink by tonight. Today is going to be more classes. Bleh. Our first vacation is next week. Milan, Venice, Barca and ??? here I come.

I did find out yesterday that bullfights are held two blocks from Onix every Sunday night. I am undecided about whether I want to go or not. Apparently they are fairly gruesome. I walked by the arena last night and got some good pictures of the protestors though. I’ll post them soon.

P.S. This made me laugh my tail off. Enjoy.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y1e0skfJts]

Wow. I have seen a lot of great stuff in the past two days. On Friday morning, I woke up and went to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) with Cazzie. We saw an exhibit called Post-It City. I’m not sure where the name comes from but the entire exhibit was about how people use their city in unintended ways. Anything from communities of homeless people, to the ways kids form pickup games of soccer to graffiti artists or street vendors. The great thing was that the exhibit focused on cities all over the world on every continent. American cities, South American cities, European cities and Asian cities were looked at. It took us several hours to look at it all and it was incredibly cool to see the different ways that cultures use public space.

Anyways, after that, I got back to the room and joined some people for a pickup game of soccer under a bridge near Onix. We played for about 2 hours until we were exhausted and came back to get cleaned up because after that, we went to go see Indiana Jones! Have any of y’all seen it yet? We found a theater not too far from Onix that had it in the original English with Spanish subtitles. It was hard to not watch the subtitles and try to translate. 

Yesterday afternoon I was in the mood to go exploring. I set out with one destination in mind but by the time I started walking I changed my mind and decided to walk around the Arc de Triomf, which is a large monument just down the street from Onix. There is a huge walkway behind the Arc which leads back to Parc Ciutadella, a great city park that puts Piedmont to shame. There were so many people just milling about, enjoying the day. There were certainly some tourists present, but the locals outnumbered the tourists many times over. There were groups of teenagers just killing time, there were old men playing bocci ball, skateboarders trying out new tricks on the park benches, jugglers practicing, unicyclists showing off, people playing fetch with their dog, a group of people practicing Capoeira. The pictures I took don’t do justice to the sheer volume of people in the park. Although, one of my pictures does capture a “No walking on the grass” sign, with a ton of people all over the grass in the background. It made me chuckle. All in all, it was just a lot of people simply enjoying a Saturday. They weren’t going anyplace in specific, they didn’t have an agenda, a to-do list, or a mission. They were enjoying the company of their friends and they were loving life. Some of them were loving life a little too… ahem, publicly. But anyways, I know that I am boring you, so check out the rest of the pictures. I need to get my copy of photoshop back so I can do a little editing work on these photos. I can’t stand iPhoto and almost all of those pictures need adjustments of some sort.

Untitled from michael orr on Vimeo.

I haven’t given y’all a legitimate update in a few days so here ya go…

In Spanish class today, we took a tour of the Barri Gotic, or the Gothic Quarter. I expected it to be interesting, I just didn’t know how cool it would be. We got to hear a lot about the history of the oldest parts of the city. The Barri Gotic is the part of the city that was originally an old Roman colony 2000 years ago. We got to see plazas where they committed executions during the Spanish Inquisition, the site of the old Roman Forum, old columns that were originals from a Roman temple to Augustus (the caesar at the time Barcelona was founded). It was really cool getting to walk the narrow winding roads that people walked millennia ago. We also saw the palace that is (according to legend) the place where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella received Christopher Columbus after he returned from discovering the new world. It is a shame that I didn’t have my camera with me but rest assured that I will be going back to take pictures. There were a lot of old palaces and churches that easily date to the 1300s when Barcelona was a center for international trade and one of the powerhouses of industry.

Also, today was the beginning of a celebration that goes until Sunday. It is the festival of Corpus Christi, which celebrates the Eucharist and obviously the Body of Christ (Corpus Christi). Part of the celebration included covering fountains with flowers and something called the “dancing egg” which is something you will just need to see for yourself…..

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=-F3zJgbTE1I]

If you can’t tell, that is an egg that is suspended in the stream of water. And there is nothing holding it up besides the stream of water. Pretty cool. This video was taken 2 years ago in the courtyard of the Barcelona Cathedral. Getting a feel for the heart of the old city and seeing where the city got its roots from was a really cool way to understand its heritage a little better. 

Oh, and P.S. I tried absinthe last night. After the soccer game, we went to a bar named Marsella which is supposedly the oldest bar in Barcelona. Trust me, it looks like it. This is apparently the same bar that Hemingway and Picasso would go to to become “inspired.” Now I know what you are thinking…. “absinthe? he must be crazy!!!” But the absinthe of today is much tamer than in centuries past. The reputed hallucinogen is no longer a part of the drink. It is basically just a very very strong liquor. You drink it by suspending a sugar cube on a fork over the drink and pouring water over the sugar essentially sweetening and diluting the drink at the same time. If anybody is wondering, it basically tastes like black licorice and is about 160 proof, so its best to drink slowly. This is a fairly accurate representation of what it is like to drink absinthe for the first time. Much scarier in theory than in practice. 

Tomorrow I am waking up early and going to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona which I have heard is very interesting. I honestly am not quite sure what they have there but you can expect to hear about it tomorrow night.

Morr

I don’t care who you are, this is funny… Things Younger Than McCain

Also, tonight is the Chelsea v Man U soccer game. I think we are going to an English pub to watch. Should be pretty intense. Any of y’all planning on watching?