And for those who were wondering, I did bring my laptop with me. I'm not wasting my time in Barcelona running to Internet cafés. I'm just wasting my study time.
March 03, 2009
The Start of Something
We went on a Picasso tour today. The museum was as cool as last time, but the guide was really annoying. Something funny happened, though: some really unsubtle noobish people started invading our tour, even standing in front of our guide and acquiescing to everything she said. My brother and I tried to make them feel bad by staring at them, but it didn't really work.
what I'm listening to at the moment 2
1) Leonard Cohen. What a poet. When you are in a certain mood, he is exactly what you need. Here is my list of Leonard Cohen songs:
"Suzanne"
"The Stranger Song"
"So Long, Marianne"
"Bird On a Wire"
"The Partisan"
"You Know Who I Am"
"Famous Blue Raincoat"
"Night Comes On"
"Take This Waltz"
"Dance Me To The End Of Love"
"Democracy"
"Anthem"
"A Thousand Kisses Deep"
2) Debut by Björk. Great stuff.
3) I have just heard The Sounds' Myspace. They are a Swedish group, not that recent, touring with No Doubt this summer. Unfortunately, we will not be getting them in Montreal. We will be getting Bedouin Soundclash instead. (...) They're kind of dancy. Maybe I'm just sold to them because the singer is female. It's my feminist side.
From now on, I will attempt to be Grey's Anatomy/One Tree Hill-like and give each of my posts a song name. Points are given to the reader if he/she guesses whose song it is, without cheating, if possible. Let's see how long I can keep this up.
March 02, 2009
Kids
I thought I wouldn't be able to write as often as before, but I find myself blogging more than ever. I really should study. This morning we went on a tour of the gothic quarter, and we found ourselves in the middle of an elementary school recess. I guess the school's location had a rich history. Anyway, it was really funny, because there was a little girl who started translating the guide's explanations to her friend.
I have finally figured out where our rented apartment is situated. There is a twenty-minute walk from our apartment to Plaça Catalunya, which is the commercial centre of Barcelona. There is also the University of Barcelona that is near to us. All in all, our apartment is located in a pretty quiet place, but it is still pretty central.
My pop culture two cents: I have watched the third episode of "Dollhouse" and found it pretty great. The moment when the singer says "I just want to be free" while she is ascending in a cage is good TV. Also, at the end (I won't spoil it for you), Eliza Dushku's character does something I would never have expected. This show seems like it will take a while before becoming interesting, because the main character cannot be awakened so soon (if you are interested at all in pop culture, you know what I mean, because the premise of this show has been everywhere over the web). I hope it doesn't get axed before things have a chance to get going on.
March 01, 2009
Restaurants
We have gone to two restaurants up until now. The first one was a typical tapas place. Pretty good, but I'm sure there are better restaurants out there. In Montreal, for example.
The other one was an Indian restaurant. My family has a knack for eating foods foreign to the countries we visit. It was really good, but also really expensive. It was called Namasté. We ate chicken vandaloo, mango lamb, butter chicken, tandoori chicken and masala prawns. The samosas were also really good, and we had two sorts of naans.
Barcelona is the laziest city I have ever been to. Nobody ever seems to do anything. On the other hand, the driving is crazy.
February 28, 2009
Laughable loves
I brought this book by Milan Kundera to Barcelona called Risibles amours. It can be translated as "laughable loves". I had already read the book before, and it is a pleasure to reread it. There are seven short stories in it. In the first one, there's a great moment where a couple comes into a factory of some sort in order to find a woman. (I'm sparing you the details.) The wife asks her husband to describe the woman to her, but the only thing he can remember is that she was beautiful. He is then pressured into giving out more details about the woman, and so he says she was blond and tall. But the woman, who is terrified to be found, is neither blond nor tall. The man had simply been so impressed by his beauty and so, to him, she was certainly blond and tall.
In another story, there's a great passage I will be attempting to translate:
"It was a situation that was never to be repeated in his life: he had confronted the unimaginable. He had just lived this brief period of his life (this heavenly period) when imagination is not yet saturated by experience, (...) when you know very few things, so that the unimaginable still exists; and if the unimaginable is about to become a reality (...), you start to panic. And he really did panic when, after a few more meetings where he remained irresolute, she started to interrogate him in great detail about his student room, almost begging him to invite her."
Besides that, today my taximan seemed like he was about to cough his lungs out. And the weather is not that great today in Barcelona, but I still hope to get some sun at one point!
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