It's 10:45, Saturday morning. Montse is cleaning and her normal Catalán music is wailing in the background. Outside my door I hear her banging around, knocking things over. [CRASH] "Ay madre mía, joder." Joder is the F bomb in Spanish and it's Montse's favorite word. "I only use it seldomly," Montse justifies to me in Catañol (the term used to describe mixed use of Catalán and Spanish). Right. Montse abstains from using "joder" just as much as she abstains from eating fatty food (remember her eggs, potatoes, and steak lunch I described earlier?). In reality, swearwords gush out of her mouth like vomit. Swearwords and food seem to form the essence of Montse's existence and, perhaps, are the results of an oral fixation that she's had since birth.
After hearing the crash, I look through my window to see that Montse is outside cleaning the terrace in her underwear and has knocked over the laundry drying stand. The wet laundry now resides on the ground in scattered piles and Cuca is meowing furiously. Maybe it's time to start looking for another place to live.
Last night I had an intercambio with Rob. Intercambios are where you meet with someone who wants to learn English and you trade off speaking both Spanish and English so that each of you can learn the other language. It is a fun way to meet people and you can "pasear" through the city, go to bars, have dinner, and do whatever you like while talking about whatever you want. Anywho, Rob and I had dinner at some Middle Eastern place in Raval outside on the terrace. The food was surprsingly tastey and a good value. I had Falafel wrapped in a tortilla, one of my personal favorites. After dinner he showed me a street in Barrio Gótico with some really chic bars. We sat inside one of them for an hour or so and talked. He had beer, and I had red wine, of course. Then we moved to the next bar, a bohemian style joint also in Barrio Gótico. The bar had really colorful walls with various paintings for sale by the same artist. Part of me wants to go back there and ask how much the paintings were going for. I had to jet out of there around 2am because that's when the metro stops running. There was no way that I wanted to walk 45 minutes back to Gracia without a jacket in the midst of the madrugada.
Other than that, there is not much to talk about. I am starting to get more homework now and I have to finish reading my novel, Nada, by Carmen Laforet. I only have about 100 more pages. It's stomachable. Next weekend I am going to Madrid with Adam! Yay! Very much looking forward to that, but I need to buy a jacket or something because I hear it has already reached freezing temperatures there. How... Illinois. I also planned a trip to go to Sevilla in December with a few people from the program, so that should be nice. Right now I have to go buy groceries, possibly buy a a jacket (Fall has finally decided to come to Barcelona and it is a bit nippy here too), and I have to restart the apartment hunt. I won't move until I find the right place which will be with younger people.
There is never a dull moment being a vagabond in Barcelona.
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