Vacation and First Day of Class

Pre-stage is over! It actually finished like a week ago, and this past week I've been travelling thanks in part to my good friends at Ryanair.com, the airline where, if you book early enough, you get one-cent tickets to various places across Europe. Unfortunately, you can't always get exactly what you want and not only that, Ryanair only flies to obscure, out-of-the-way airports.

So I left Montpellier by TGV ("train à grande vitesse" or "really fast train" for those not in the know) on last Monday morning to catch a plane out of Marseille which went to London. Well ... not really London, since it was Ryanair, we ended up landing in Stansted, a good hour and a half bus ride from the city.

London is a pretty cool place, I guess, but the weather was a little chilly and it's so expensive there. Well ... I should revise that. Shopping is cheaper in London than in Montpellier, but things like eating, drinking, and sleeping are WAY more expensive. For example, a cup of coffee ... nothing fancy only about 12 oz., cost me two and a half pounds, which roughly translates to five dollars. Now imagine the cost of getting a whole meal.

A couple things in London that are really really cool and absolutely free are, number one, St. Paul's Cathedral, which is incredibly gorgeous on the inside and I'd show you pictures but they don't let you take them there; and number two, the British Museum. What an incredible collection of stolen treasure from around the British Empire! I spent a couple hours one day there and three or four the next day and took way too many pictures of stuff but I kinda like that sort of thing and it's better than walking around London getting almost run over.

Which is another thing. London is a very unfriendly city for pedestrians. If you're in a crosswalk and the light turns yellow (the light turns yellow there before it turns green ... like it's a race track or something), you have to run to the other side because even if you're right in front of a car, the drivers still slam on the gas as if you weren't even there. And if you ever ask anyone for directions, if you're not going just down the block, they'll think you're out of your mind to walk so far.

The architecture in London is cool, though. Everything is all Victorian and Industrial Revolution so there are all these big, heavy-looking brick buildings painted up in deep shades of blues and greens or just left bare red brick.

The best time I had in London was actually the night of our flight out. We went to this little nightclub and saw a few DJ sets at a CD release party. The first set was all early 1950s American soul music, like rock'n'roll precursor type stuff. The second set was salsa, and the third set was hip-hop and even featured an MC for a rap or two. Great stuff. The was also the only time I really met any British people because I was clumsy and knocked over my chair when I first got there and because later on my friend Liz and I were a dancing sensation.

We had a long night that night, though with tons of walking and carrying luggage around and getting on a 3:30 bus in London to Stansted, catching a 6:10 plane to Barcelona, taking a 10:00 bus from the obscure airport Ryanair flew us too (Reus, a converted RAF base) and finally getting to our hostel just off La Rambla (Barcelona's main drag) just after noon.

Barcelona was much more decently priced than London, and the cool thing there is art and architecture. I went to the Picasso Museum there which not only contained Picasso's private collection of art, but also a fair share of his works, especially a significant collection of his Blue Period works. Since Picasso was such an intellectual painter, I ended up learning a lot about art in general from the museum and about Picasso himself. Very interesting.

And then there's Gaudi, the most famous and extreme of Barcelona's home-grown architecture school Modernisme, which is filled with organic, fluid lines and shapes and bright colors. It's really extraordinary. I have a few pictures of a couple of examples and one picture (because I ran out of batteries) of the most famous: the Sagrada Familia. Maybe it was just a translation error, but I prefer to think that the literature in the Sagrada Familia referred to the building as a "Temple" and not a "Cathedral" to emphasize the immense vastness of this as yet incomplete construction project. "Cathedral" really would be an understatement. Right now there are only eight towers on the Sagrada Familia, and as huge as they are, there are still three more much larger towers planned with the one in the middle having a gigantic lit-up cross beacon thing on top.

In order to fully experience the famous Barcelona night-life, we ended up going to a club, which was not worth the trouble, it turned out. It was a good fifteen euros to get in (with one free drink) and drinks from there on out were nine euros a piece. It was a clean, large, and overall nice place in terms of decorations and furniture and whatnot, but the people and the music were just .......... gross. Sleazy yuppie gross. Broad-shoulder, square-chin, button-up-collared-vertical-striped-shirt gross. Awful-American-club-music gross.

The next day was a six hour bus ride back to Montpellier and then the Superbowl in the middle of the night in a local pub. I only stayed until somewhere in the third quarter and I apparently missed something important like the Giants making a big comeback or something or something, but seriously it was like 3:30 in the morning and game-time was encroaching a little too much on sleep-time.

Finally, yesterday I had my first French classes, which have been alright but tiring. I can't just space-out for a couple minutes like I can in an American class ... I have to pay full attention. French teachers are funny, though. They know more than you and they'll let you know that they know more than you purely through body language and lecture delivery. It makes them come off as really pretentious, and at least for the moment it's cute.

For those of you waiting for photos, I'm working on it. As a matter of fact, I've been trying to upload this whole time I've been writing this, but the internet is slower than slow right now. They'll come soon, though. I promise.