Visitallie

This week has been a wee bit rainy, but it's a welcome respite from four months of excessive heat and humidity. My dad and his assistant, Sharon are here this week for business--they're doing a bunch of presentations at universities in Catalunya for CU's exchange program. Sharon and I have a date to go to the Palau de Musica de Catalunya for a concert on Wednesday and my father refuses to come...so that'll be fun. We spent their first day here laying on the beach. Sharon was forbidden to take her top off. My dad and I spent a day/night in Tarragona, a beautiful formerly Roman city just south of Barcelona. I'd been there before, but had completely erased it from my memory until we walked up to the giant cathedral and everything flooded back. It rained pretty much the whole time, but that didn't stop us from swimming in the ocean. Also the sight of a dead rat (DEAD RAT) on the shore was similarly not enough to stop us from swimming in the ocean. I'm starting to think maybe I need to reevaluate my desperate need and goal for going in the water every time I go to the beach. Our friends Carme and Danny took us to dinner, and it was really interesting to learn how regulated education is at the university level by the government. Chemical engineers here for example have more than 60 percent of their curriculum specified by the government, rather unrelated to their field. Students learn to not only design a treatment process (chemical eng), but how to build an entire plant from electrical to structural. Super engineers. It made me feel both totally lazy and undereducated, and really blessed to live in a place where I elect what I want to study and am essentially guaranteed a focused and unhindered quality education. And to top it off the Spanish government keeps saying the upcoming November vote is illegal and they won't hear of it. SO THAT WILL BE FUN. I also brought Pa to church, which must have been a hilarious experience for him since it was entirely in Spanish, but he sang the songs anyways and managed to mostly stay awake. They're here until Friday.

Another highlight of the week included taking a page out of a chimpanzee's book and grooming my roommate. I'm not kidding. My Japanese roommate approaches near hysterics when she finds a stray white hair on her head. This week, she had the lovely opportunity of finding one at the nape of her neck, out of reach for self-plucking. So I was employed to tear the small white hair from her head and then ensure no other stragglers remained. I thought she was kidding for probably ten minutes. But then she wasn't, so that happened. Another great thing was upon meeting my dad, she got extremely flustered and told me she has so many things she wants to talk to him about but doesn't know English and is distraught.

I've also signed my self up for the Bicing program. Which is Barcelona's bike share program and one of the most wonderful things in the entire world. It's so convenient, and available only to people who are residents in Barcelona, so it's the latest part of my scheme to assimilate here. Speaking of which, both my local favorite bakery and corner cafe have finally recognized me as more than just a blond American, resulting in free gifts and great non-tourist conversation.

I spent my Friday night with eight of the most outrageous human beings I've ever met. For those of you who don't know what YoungLife is, it's a Christian ministry that befriends weird kids who don't normally get excited or even know what church is. I've sort of done it in the states, but historically my family has been all about supporting international YoungLife so that's kind of our thing instead. Anyways, Luis (the area director) called me to say they were having their leader meeting Friday night and wanted me to come to share all my experience (what experience? who knows). So I hopped on the metro and rode it farther than I thought possible to a random barrio that certainly was no longer real Barcelona. And then it was dark and kind of sketchy so I ran all the way to the church and arrived kind of hot and bothered for this meeting. It was exactly like walking into YoungLife in America, except they all spoke Spanish/Catalan. Got my first taste of singing in Catalan, which pretty much only convinced me that I need to take an intro to Catalan class since the pronunciations are
nothing like Spanish.

Anyways, it was really cool to get to go and share a teeny piece of life with some of the few Christians in Barcelona. Their desire to love on the jovenes (young people) here is just like some of the YLers I know back home, and their authentic sense of community is infectious. That was clearly conveyed by the fact that I was suddenly roped into attending a 2 am McDonald's run because what else would you do with eight of your new best friends? We planned the next club (youth meeting), and they kept asking for ideas for games. I real fast learned that America's version of ridiculous and hilarious doesn't really translate well. Apparently not everyone thinks swallowing live goldfish or blending up and chugging an entire happy meal is fun. But in all seriousness, it was really refreshing to spend some time in Christian community and learn about the manifestation of their faith in Barcelona. Churches are really small here, one of 250 people is considered a mega church, but 30-40 is much more common. And the interesting thing is none of the leaders is just bumming around with ample free time. One woman is a scientist in a laboratory that does something with something that eats oxygen, another is an engineer, a couple are in school...But these people volunteer their time to live out their faith and do it for free because no one else is and showing kids a piece of God is more important than anything else.

At one point Luis was talking about plans for the next week, and I asked a clarifying question and then accidentally heard myself volunteer to teach on 1 Thessalonians (a book of the bible). UM WHAT. No idea how that happened or even what 1 Thessalonians is about or how to even say anything about that in Spanish, so We've got a lot to do. Probably also committed myself to going to the YL Europe conference in Madrid in Novemb.

I have some homework to do from my roommates. They had a dinner party here last week, and one of the guys swears by the success of his system of annually answering 20 life questions. Basically they're all goal-oriented and involve things you want in your future like, where do I want to live or how much money do I want to make, etc, etc. We all made an agreement to answer the questions in secret notebooks and not tell anyone, and then we'll have a dinner party in a month where we can revel in the shock that all of these things are coming to fruition. He swears by it.

Lastly, I took three pictures this week. So thought I'd share all of them with you. Oops. 

La Sagrada Familia, right by my apartment.

Roman amphitheater in Tarragona

Cathedral in Tarragona

Lots of love.

xoxo.