On tunafish, yelling, durums, and bomb shelters.

In my last post I promised info about college and living experience so far her in Spain. So here it is.
I now share a four-bedroom flat with two children, Carla (11) and Joffre (10), their mom, Teresa, and another exchange student, Pauline, who is 16 and French, sweet as a buttercup and infinitely more intelligent. Carla likes to wear Lacoste and waxes melancholy whenever we have meat products for dinner, and Joffre likes video games, teasing his mother, and getting up way earlier than actually necessary. I've stolen Carla's room at the back of the apartment. They both crack me up.

Every weekday I take the magical mystery metro to my intensive Spanish course at the main university building, about 25 minutes away. There are always musicians in the tunnels because the acoustics are excellent. Every so often one will play on the train. I've heard several guitars and accordians, a recorder, keyboards, even a one-stringed Asian instrument I couldn't identify but reminded me of Chinese restaurant ambiance music.
My new neighborhood is called Sarría; it consists of mostly upper middle-class apartment buildings with zigzaggy balconies that make them look almost pixelated. Also, bakeries, nose-bleedingly expensive boutiques, little plazas, and newsstands where I've been buying postcards. I found a great lunch-item today--finding a meal under 10 euro has become a kind of daily quest--in one of the bakeries on my block. It consisted of a large slice of francese-style bread, a tomato spread, a thick layer of tunafish, and green olives dotting melted cheese. Toasted.  For only £1.35. They have an unfortunate habit of YELLING! A LOT! ALL THE TIME! but I'll say one thing for Catalans--they know how to handle canned tuna. And tomato. And bread, and croissants. Though I'll never, ever understand the shelf-safe milk thing (it's been 70 years since WW2 you guys!), even if I am getting used to it.

Speaking of WW2, today we had a field trip to a bomb shelter in a part of town called Poble Sec (though the shelter is actually from the civil war in 1936). It was a lot like a human-sized rabbit warren, made of tunnels burrowed into the side of the mountain. We were told the architects of the tunnels where improvising, no one having ever dealt with warfare that included air-raids and attacks specifically on civilians before. The bomb shelters in Barcelona were community efforts, with many people contributing large amounts of their own money and time for their construction. If you hadn't donated or helped out in some way, it was unlikely that you'd be allowed to take shelter, in order to be fair to those who had and account for limited space. The tunnels were barely taller than my head, reinforced with brick and cement, and some of them were actually completed during Franco's regime for strategic purposes. The unfinished tunnels reveal hundreds of gouges from picks and shovels in the yellowish rock of the mountain.

But back to food! Another cheap delicious thing I've been recently introduced to is the durum. I guess you could call it the Middle-Eastern version of the burrito, though I don't know which particular nationality I got my first one from. They slice meat that's been sort of caked onto a metal pole and roasted and stick it in a flatbread like a tortilla, and if you order the works you also get lettuce, tomato, corn, red cabbage, goat cheese, shaved carrot, and yoghurt dressing. The whole thing is then swaddled up and toasted on the outside a little bit, turning into something the taco-bell crunch wrap only dreams of becoming. I'm not going to reveal what time of night I consumed this thing, but I hope I can find a place near the university that sells them for lunch as well.

Very soon I'll be done with the intensive-get-used-to-using-Spanish course, by the end of the week in fact, and then next week I'll start real UB classes. I'll be taking a human figure-drawing class, a digital photography class, a program-run class called Masterworks in Catalan Art (required), and a class called Reality and Space that also has something to do with art. Wish me luck!