I'm not sure where to start, so I guess I'll just pick up where I left off. Last Friday we went out for tapas with our GAs, and that was  a lot of fun. Some of the tapas were a little bit to seafoody for my taste, but they were good for the most part. It was one of the girls' birthdays, so our GA brought some sort of traditional Catalan cake/pastry thing for us to share. After the tapas we met the other 3 groups of students and went to a huge bar called the Oveja Negra (Black Sheep). The majority of the students in my program were pretty intent on getting drunk to the point of blacking out, but there was a small group of us that just hung out and talked at one of the tables. The plan was to go to a discoteca around 2 am, and most of them did. I grabbed a taxi and went home, and judging by all the stories I heard the next day, I think I made a good choice.

I told you that we had plans to go to Montserrat the next day, but we decided to save that for another time. However, going inside La Sagrada Familia was free on Saturdays for the month of January, so after sleeping in for a while, a friend and I went to take advantage of that. There were tons of people there, and the weren't letting anyone go up the staircases inside, but it was still worth going. La Sagrada Familia is beautiful, but it's also kind of strange to me. Barcelona has all sorts of beautiful cathedrals like that, but they are just pretty buildings for people to see. They are like skeletons of the church, or like some sort of shrine. Christianity is in a strange state here. The citizens pay taxes to the church, stores are closed on Sundays by law, and very few people actually believe the gospel. Our GA explained to us a traditional Catalan addition to the nativity scene. It's called a Caganer, and it's a little elf-like character defecating on a toilet. Apparently the story is that he was so "moved" by the birth of Christ that he couldn't help himself. People just laugh at it, but I think it kind of sums up the general attitude toward the gospel here, and I find it really sad.

The next day, I went with some people to see Parc Güell, which is another place that is full of Gaudi architecture. I'm taking a class on Catalan art, so I'll be able to tell you something about Gaudi by the end of the semester, but for now I can just tell you that I think his stuff is super cool, and that's good because it is all over Barcelona. Park Güell is up on another one of the hills that surround Barcelona, so once again we had an incredible view of the city. Here are a couple of pictures of our trip to Parc Güell.

Nothing too interesting happened during the week, so I'll just skip to the next weekend. On Saturday, we had an excursion with the whole group. We met at the base of Tibidabo, and hiked part of the way up it to a Calcotada to eat. A Calcotada is a restaurant that serves Calcots, a traditional Catalan food that is really tasty and messy and fun to eat. They're a type of onion that they cook on a grill, and then you dip them in sauce and then eat them like this:

The bibs they gave us were also very useful for drinking the wine, since they served in in a special pitcher called a parrón, which you drank like this:

After the Calcots, they just kept bringing more and more food, and I think I probably ate more than I usually do at Thanksgiving. I think I counted 8 different types of food, plus dessert and cafe con leche at the end. We must have been at it for two and a half hours.

Later that night, we went looking for a festival that we heard about. It was supposed to have fire and music and meat, which seemed like a good combination. We found it, but I'm still not sure exactly what it was. It might have been celebrating a holiday or been some sort of rally for independence for Catalunya. There was a big banner that said "Independence and Socialism," and there was lots of music and traditional Catalan dancing, which was really cool to watch. There were a couple of bonfires and people grilling meat in the fires and sitting on the ground in circles with food. Here are a couple of videos from the festival:

  

Well I think I might have overloaded this blog post, so I better stop. Love you all and I hope you're doing well!