Hola. Soy Diana, su profesora de inglés.

Today was my first day of internship.  I work 16 hours a week: 2 hours Monday and Wednesday at Casal Uruguay teaching English; 1.5 hours Tuesday Thursday at Centro Peruano teaching English; 3 hours on Monday doing administrative work with my boss María Elena and 2 hours on Tuesday; 2 hours at some undetermined time during the week to follow-up with my other boss and prepare lesson plans; 1 hour independent prep.  This is in addition to the eleven hours I spend in class.  I end work every day between 7:30 and 8:00 PM so my Monday to Thursday work week is pretty packed.  In preparation for the next two months of this glimpse into real life, I spent yesterday doing this:

Honey Badger Don't Care...

...that it's 6:45 AM and sleep has still yet to come.

It's pretty badass.


I'm currently waiting for my roommate to get back.  We had to split up because the cab couldn't take more than 4 passengers and we were 5 so two of us stayed back at the Port Olímpic.  But we'll get to that.


To pick up where I left off, I went to dinner with the girls after my nap and finally got over my fear of squid ink.  I'm almost afraid to post the picture because it looks so unappetizing but it was in fact delicious, even if it looked like dementor vomit.  What got me over my fear actually was some wise words from my dear vegetarian friend Monica Landy: "I drink milk and eat cheese and eggs so I figure I can eat squid ink" (paraphrased)  So if I just think of the ink as squid milk instead of the stuff that jets out of their bodies as a defense mechanism that makes me think of poop...

As American as Apple Pie and as Spanish as Sangria

Building bonds of friendship over 3.5 liters of Sangria takes a lot of work.  Especially when it involves racing with the kids at the next table.  If you know me, you'll know that my food baby gives me little room to develop a beer gut.  So I wasn't carrying the team but I was that jerk peer pressuring the two kids that were smart enough to back out of the race from the beginning.  Nonetheless, drinking just a few glasses of cheap and sweet red wine sangria like Moses out of the desert would drink water isn't good for anybody.  Which is why when I got back past midnight last night, the first thing on my mind wasn't this blog but my toothbrush and my bed, in that order.  But we'll get back to that.

The Mediterranean: it calls to me

10:45 AM Advanced Spanish Writing Seminar
12:45 PM Massive stomach ache and meet and old business associate and friend of my mother's simultaneously
1:30 - 3:00 PM Buy a black skirt and sunglasses for 10 euro at H&M while walking home from class and bum indoors before...
wait for it...
bumming OUTDOORS!

How to overachieve in a scavenger hunt

Today was orientation.  29 of us students participating in the 8-week intensive internship program here met at the IES Abroad Barcelona center just off the Plaza Catalunya this morning.  It was a typical orientation except for our safety activity.  We were given case studies derived from true stories from prior IES students and the one my group had to mull over was about Kate.  This is Kate's story:
Kate was really drunk but her friends were really tired.  Kate's friends wanted Kate to come back home with them but Kate met a guy she liked at the club and wanted to go back to "listen to music" (my quotation marks) with him back at his place.  So Kate's friends left Kate to go home with mystery man while mystery man's friend also professed that he was too tired to listen to music and got in his own cab to go to his own home.  Kate and her mystery man made it back to his apartment and then...PLOT TWIST!  He held a knife to her throat and forced her to do cocaine and made her have sex with her.  When she woke up, she was disoriented, hung over, and a rape victim.  "Kate was very, very upset" (quote taken from original case study).  Oh, Kate...
Moral of the story: Barcelona has knife-wielding, cocaine-toting, dancing and club-going rapists. So does the rest of the world.  So listen up lady-folk: don't go home with creepy strangers.  The stranger danger assembly from the first grade applies NOW.  Let's put that to good use and make our parents proud.

Por ti seré la gaviota de tu bella mar...

"Baaaaaaarcelooooooona"
Freddie Mercury belts it like the only way the name of a city this beautiful should be sung.  And yes, the only way to do this city justice when uttering it's name is by singing it like the late, self-proclaimed "gay-as-a-daffodil" diva Freddie Mercury.  Montserrat Caballé provides her operatic complements, my favorite line being por ti seré la gaviota de tu bella mar (I will be the seagull to your beautiful sea).  What it would be like to fall in love in Barcelona, to want to be la gaviota to your amante's bella mar...

Home.

It's been a full day since I've been back and I'm already indulging in the comforts of home: the marble tiles and my silk bedspread, silverware and those new sharp-ass knives my mom just got for Mother's Day.  If you didn't know me, you would assume from the previous sentence that I was some sort of real housewife of ________ (anywhere because every variation of that show is essentially the same i.e. they all suck).  But that's not really what's important here.  What's important is the relative heaven-like quality this place has in comparison to the dorm I just moved out of. Bathrooms smelling of the sin of shit and alcoholism, littered with little trimmings of ironic moustache/beard (screw you hipsters!) and the stench of rotting beer at the bottoms of PBR cans wafting out of the garbage disposal as you step out of one hell and into the next.  Don't even get me started on the kitchen.  The kitchen in my building was to ants, cockroaches, fruit flies (and whatever little creature dearest Dalí would have incorporated into his works of art if he weren't already so taken with his hormigas) as this apartment is to me; heaven on earth in other words.  So it's been like reaching safe haven after fighting through a zombie apocalypse for 3/4 of a year.  I can sleep when it's still dark now and my skin's cleared up in just one night.  I can't blame me for wanting to soak it all in.  Neither should you.