When you think Barcelona, you think beaches.

Last Friday I got to experience two of Barcelona's (and Spain's) finest: paella and beaches!  In the morning my group met up to go to the Museu d'Històrica de Catalunya (History of Catalunya Museum).  To start our tour, we got to go out onto a terrace that overlooks the marina.

Where all the rich people keep their boats.

As you can tell from the picture, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous here.  Most days I start out wearing my pea coat, but more often than not I end up taking it off and carrying it.  They say that February will get a little colder, but I really can't complain when it is currently fifty degrees warmer here than it is in Appleton!  On the other hand, our apartment is freezing.  We don't have any heat and even though it's warm outside, it is definitely cold in here! We have little space heaters in our rooms, but they're serious about conservation here and we can't leave them on all the time.  We're not even supposed to leave them on overnight.  A lot of the other people in the group have been complaining that their water doesn't even get very hot, so they've had to take some lukewarm showers.  Luckily, ours seems to get fairly hot, as long as you don't take a shower right after someone just got out.  The hot water heater doesn't hold very much water so we need to space ours out.  

Anyways, after the tour of the museum, we took a short walk to a restaurant to have a delicious meal of mussels and paella!  For anyone that doesn't know, paella is a regional dish that the east coast of Spain is famous for.  It consists of rice, LOTS of seafood, saffron and other spices. Anyone that knows me well knows that I always order water at restaurants.  However, in Spain, you can't get tap water anywhere. If you ask for a water, they give you a bottle.  I'm not exactly sure why this is, the water that comes out of the tap in our apartment tastes fine to me!  

Everything at the restaurant was served family style, with a gigantic bowl in the middle of the table that we all ate out of.  

This is one of four bowls of mussels we were given. The best mussels I've ever had!

This gigantic bowl was only for three people! We had sooo many leftovers!

The paella we had had mussels, lobster, octopus, shrimp, fish, clams, and probably even more in it!  It was a little difficult to eat because everything still had the shell on it.  They cook it all whole (with the head still on it and everything) and then you have to use your hands to get the meat out.  But even though it was a lot of work, it was still absolutely delicious!

After our two and a half hour lunch, we got to walk around the Barceloneta neighborhood a bit more.  Like the rest of Barcelona it is gorgeous, but unlike the rest of Barcelona, it has BEACHES!

Even though it's not actually warm enough to go swimming, I'm definitely going to come out here to sit during my free time!

There were a bunch of people making elaborate sand sculptures right by the boardwalk.

One thing in Barcelona that I'm not a big fan of is the location of their street signs.  They're posted on the corners of buildings, making it nearly impossible to see unless you're standing right on that corner.  For someone who is new to the city, it makes it very hard to get around!

An example of the street signs.

On Saturday Teresa (my roommate) and I went grocery shopping together for the first time here.  Luckily there's a little grocery store about a block away from us, right next to the metro, so it's pretty easy for us to get there. It's one of the bigger grocery stores I've seen, but it's probably still only about a quarter of the size of any grocery store in the United States.  Everything here is smaller than it is in America.  I think it's the combination of having limited space for buildings and the lack of personal space that people seem to need. During orientation on our first day we had to do an exercise where we stood toe-to-toe with someone and had to ask each other questions.  In America it would be absurd to stand that close with someone, but here it is completely normal!  When I first saw the elevator in my apartment building, I thought they were crazy to think that two people plus all of my luggage was going to fit in there.  I have never seen an elevator so small but the sign in it says it's meant for four people!

So far we've been just cooking for ourselves in our apartment, but I'm hoping that we'll be able to have a nicer dinner here one of these nights.  They don't have any spicy food in Spain so I'm hoping our Venezuelan roommate, Nestor, will be able to cook us some food from his country so we get a little spice!