The City That Never Sleeps

My first two days here were great. I settled into my apartment which is gorgeous and overly spacious with a balcony overlooking carrer de entenca, which isn't too congested of a street. The rooms are pretty small and barren, and my room (given my stellar luck in these situations) is eerily similar to a prison holding cell - i.e. small bed that barely fits my whopping 5'2'' frame, and then one other bed for my roommate Gabby, who sleeps an adorable two feet from my face. Luckily we get along really well so it isn't as creepy as it should be. Our closets were too small for the plethora of clothing each of us brought, so I turned the computer room into the walk in closet of my dreams, although I think they will get tired of me changing in a communal area after a few weeks. Allegedly our apartment is wireless but it hasn't been working, so we have long cords running through the hallway, which I have failed to step over and fallen to my doom a few times already. My other roommate Hilary was gone the first two days b/c her parents were in Barcelona too, and we also live with an RA named Sara who is awesome and so much fun. She is the same age as me, which is a rarity on this trip where I am like the middle-aged college student abroad during their quarter-life-crisis. The first night I went out with Gabby and two of her friends to walk around the city, then we went to a restaurant on the port where we took in more than our fair share of wine and even convinced the owner of the restaurant that he should bring us four complimentary double-shots. Knowing the word for "free" accompanied by an onslaught of "por favor"s is coming quite in handy. We got back to the house around 10 and proceeded to go out to "La Oveja Negra" a local Spanish bar which we found after several near death experiences meandering through the shady alleys of las ramblas. We definitely stood out as the loud and hedonistic Americans, fulfilling all the glorious stereotypes that come along with that. Our presence definitely caught the locals off guard but they were happy to talk with us and humor us by pretending that the drunk noises we were making resembled anything Spanish.

After four hours of sleep we woke up and found our way to school, although in my delirious state I misread my schedule and went to the wrong orientation, and as luck would have it, this one was for "Heritage" speakers, which is most certainly not me or anyone I know. So I sat there under-slept and over-imbibed trying to understand the slightest bit of what they were saying, as the instructor rambled on in mile-a-minute Spanish and all the bilingual students participated. To add insult to injury, this orientation was three hours before mine, which sacrificed much needed sleep and recovery time. After orientation we went to lunch, bought cell phones, etc and finally made it home for a quick nap before yet another orientation activity, which we slept mostly through and arrived just in time for wrap-up appetizer time. We made plans for the night and left for "Carpe Diem" where there was a no cover open bar for all study abroad students. Of course this attracted way too many people for way too small of a space so a group of us left for the next bar on the beach where we stayed until 4:30 or so, only to get back to our apartment and fall asleep an hour later. After a refreshing four hours of sleep, we woke up and realized we were all late to the Spanish placement exam which was all the way across town.

Moral of the story: I need an alarm clock and sleep.