Saturday, 7 July 2012

I fail at updating.

So I survived my first week in Geneva amidst classes, tons of readings, cooking, grocery shopping and socializing (I hope).

I have plenty of time to describe the daily routine back in Geneva, so I shall move on to Barcelona.

A group of us flew to Barcelona last evening, where we'll be spending our first weekend for the program. The 10 of us went to the airport together, flew on EasyJet and arrived safely at Barcelona with no trouble (apart from yoshi losing his wallet on the bus).

Reached Barcelona about 5.30pm and the bunch of us grabbed a taxi to the hostel HelloBCN.

It's a pretty nice hostel. Well actually I have no idea what a nice hostel is since I have no basis for comparison, but this one uh...has a bed and decent pillows. Everyone who stays here is about our age, so there's always tons of drinking going on at night and it gets a little noisy, but no matter.

We were split across 3 rooms and two of us eventually ended up in a 4-room dorm. Our roommates are pretty nice and friendly - a guy from Canada who is working for Lenovo, and a lady from Quebec who's just traveling around Europe.

After brief introductions the guy Kory started telling us stories about how bad pickpocketing in Barcelona is (number one city for pickpocketing). Apparently people can just bump into your and steal your wallet/ cut your pockets etc. Kids especially.

I've heard about the Spanish siesta (afternoon nap on a national level) but that night I fully understand why they need that.

Every night the hostel will organize a trip to a local club, and before that somewhere to get cheap drinks (so you get nicely wasted without having to waste money in the expensive club). And they leave the hostel at midnight. And the parties usually reach their peak at 3am.

Wtf.

The bunch of us never made it past the bar; by 1am we all gave up and came back to sleep.

This morning yoshi and I woke up at 11am, and unfortunately the rest of the group already left x.x Brian left a message saying to meet at 10.25am.

Anyway we decided to just check out Barcelona on foot.

It was a pretty awesome trip. Turns out our hostel is really close to the main tourist attractions - la rambla, the cathedral, a photography museum.

Shared a Kebab on our way there. Saw cute bunnies and little duckies!!

And we went to the Picasso museum, where we got to see not just the famous paintings but the paintings from Picasso's formative years. It cost 6 euros to go in and 3 euros for the audio guide, but it was worth it because it was quite a thing to watch his progress from academically rigorous drawings to his own creative flair (the Blue period) and cubism.

Then we went to the central park of barcelona (the one with l'arc de triomphe), which was one of the nicest parks I've been to. It's so full of energy and everyone's just chilling out there in their own ways. Including a guy who was juggling while walking across a suspended elastic band.

I came across orange trees for the first time in my life.

Had tapas for dinner (patates bravas and prawns with garlic). Wasn't full so we shared a seafood paella.

It's getting late. Shall sleep now so that I can get up earlier to finish the case study due on Monday.

Can't believe I'm one of the unfortunate few with work worth 25% of our grades due on Monday T.T