It made it worth it when the fountain turned red

Barcelona was, in short, cold and rainy. Kinda miserable weather for a visit that involves "Walking Tour of the Gothic Neighborhood" and touring the yet-unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral (which means it's still open-air). The Museo Nacional de Arte was decent, mostly because it was inside. Walking in, there were a ton of fountains, but none of them were running. Very disappointing. But, as we walked out of the museum that evening, the fountain right in front of us was spewing water like a geyser. We took pictures. As we went down the (hundreds) of stairs, we saw that all the fountains were running. And then, the crowning jewel: the huge circular fountain at the bottom of the stairs was "performing" an intricate combination of changing lights, moving sprays of water, and best of all, 90s American songs. It was fabulous. And we rejoiced with dancing (really).

Motos aren’t cool here (okay, they’re really vespa-type motoscooters)

Motos are just cheap ways to get around. Many are driven by 17-year-old girls, perched way up on the seat in their tight jeans and pointy boots, with a fuzzy scarf wrapped around their neck. Not exactly your typical North American motorcyclist.

I'm going to Barcelona this weekend. I cannot wait to see Parque Güell. From the pictures I've seen every year of high school in my Spanish class, it pretty much looks like a fairy tale come to life. And soon, I'm sure I will have dozens of pictures of it myself. The only difficulty this weekend will be limiting myself to approximately 600 pictures over 4 days. Mission Impossible...

Valencia was fun

A picture's worth a thousand words, right? And since I took a bunch of pictures of Valencia, I'm not going to write very much about it. And I don't have anything clever to say.

Some more observations…

- The size of pets (dogs, mostly) roughly corresponds to the size of their homes. Therefore, most dogs here are approximately the size of my foot.
- Window shopping just isn't as much fun here. As inviting as the clothes in store windows look, tempting you to enter the store, don't fall for it. The clothes in the window rarely if ever are for sale in the store. And if you want, for examle, the purse that the mannequin is holding in the window, I'm sorry, but there aren't any like it in the rest of the store. And of course you can't buy the one from the window display.
- Spanish TV shows don't have laughtracks or live audiences. So I have to use my mamá as my laughtrack, so I know when to laugh, so I can pretend that I understand what's going on and why it's funny.
- All I can see from my window is my underwear hanging from the drying rack outside the kitchen window; however, I can see about 3 inches of the Mediterranean from the roof. Although it smells a little funny, it's sunny and clean, and I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time up there.

Lejía means bleach

Today I learned a new word: lejía. It means bleach. And if you ever see a large bottle of lej�a fall onto the ground while you're sitting very near it, hurry, run, scramble, or dive away from it as fast as humanly possible. Should you fail to do so, your pair of khakis that you got just last month will almost immediately become covered with pinkish spots, thereby rendering them unwearable for anything besides painting. Which you don't plan on doing anytime soon.

In other news, I climbed Montg� on Saturday. And I took a lot of pictures, as you may have guessed by now.