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Published: February 21st 2011
I'm beginning to realize traveling is nothing but a chain of disasters that miraculously spit you out in your final destination - whether that place was your original intention or not. This Saturday my roommates and I got up dreadfully early for any day of the week, but particularly early for a Saturday - 8:45 - and journeyed to the Montserrat monastery to hike for the day. The disasters began early: after our 20 minute metro ride to the train station we missed the hourly train to Montserrat by just 2 minutes. We spent the next hour in a cafe down in the metro feeling quite grumpy with each other and eating strange sugar muffins to try and satiate our appetite. The train finally came, and with no seats left we took the uncomfortable handicap seats downstairs that are used to strap wheelchairs in. We were happy enough just to sit down. But before the train even left, six people needing the handicapped section got on, and so the five of us were left standing and hanging onto the same pole for the next hour. We managed to strategically stand next to a couple who shared the same haircut - a
mullet, with dreads in the back. Cute. They were also very fond of each other and their matching mullet-dreads, and they chose to express this with very loud kissing and grooming. I'm talking constant smacking and sucking noises interspersed with inspections of each other's noses, scalps, arm hair, and pimples. PDA is commonly a lot more showy here - some of it is cute, and some of it is NOT.
We got off the train, took a gondola about halfway up the mountain to the monastery, filled our water bottles and began the hike. The first half-hour of the trail was literally staircase after staircase... I mean that trail was really gaining some elevation. As we said, it made the eight flights of stairs up to our apartment look like a piece of cake. My roommates and I are all very different, which often makes for a pretty interesting dynamic between us that frequently fluctuates from comedy to anger. Mix that in with varying degrees of experience in hiking (this was the first time one of my roommates had ever been on a hike) and maybe you can imagine the differences in enthusiasm and determination to reach the top.
The trail soon flattened out to a reasonable incline, and about two hours later we all reached the top. At one point we could see the Pyrenees Mountains behind us and the Mediterranean below us - unfortunately the day was a little too hazy to get great pictures. (My pictures from this day don't do Montserrat justice in general. It was so beautiful. The rock formations on the mountains are truly unbelievable). Our destination happened to also be reachable by a train that literally goes straight up the mountain, so there was a visitor's center with vending machines, which I think may have saved us - in a great feat of short-sightedness we failed to bring food for the trail. All morning we kept saying, "Oh, we'll buy sandwiches when we get here, or when we get there..." but by the time we were at the monastery we were still foodless, and monasteries aren't exactly the best place to stock up on snacks. I was kicking myself the whole way up, I know better than that... but I fed my change to the vending machine and ate olive oil chips and corn nuts. My stomach whines if I don't put
something in it at least every two hours, but the olive oil chips quieted it enough to survive the descent. About 20 minutes down we came to the consensus that we had definitely not seen this trail on the way up. We turned around and made it back to a trail marker; it still didn't show the trail we thought we were on, but too discouraged to go all the way back ot the top, we chose the trail with a downhill slope and stuck with it. Within what seemed like only a few moments we had somehow crossed the canyon/crevace that we had hiked all the up and around on the ascent - we were back at the top of the stairs and had cut about an hour off the hike! Surely our chain of bad luck and ridiculous situations had ended? I still don't know how or where we took a 'wrong' turn to end up on this trail.
At the bottom we found decent sandwiches, caught the last gondola down to the train station at 6, made it to the station with only 5 minutes before the next hourly train arrived, and somehow got to the
train tracks without having to buy tickets. A free train ride back, great! We got 5 seats right next to each other, all happily put on our iPods and sat back to close our eyes. The train stopped for a bit at teach station and people got on and off at each stop, so when the train stopped for a little bit longer than usual and almost everyone got off, I just assumed it happened to be a busy stop and closed my eyes again. After ten minutes I was feeling impatient so I took my headphones out to figure out why we were still stopped and began to realize that the last few stragglers on our train were leaping off and running across the tracks to the train stopped next to us. It slowly dawned on me that perhaps it would be a good idea for us to also get on that train. I started tapping my roommates legs and pointing at the train across the tracks, but right at that moment the doors slammed shut and it pulled away. A man came through the train, asked "Barcelona?" pointed across the tracks at the absent train, shrugged, said "Lo
siento" and sympathetically shooed us off the train. How were we supposed to know we had to switch trains in the middle of the ride home?! That certainly didn't happen on the trip there. With an hour to wait for the next train, no idea where we were, and the wind and rain brewing up outside, we sat inside the station and stared glumly at the sign that lit up with the train that was arriving and its destination. After half an hour a train that said Barcelona pulled up, but it was a different line so we were pretty skeptical. At the last moment we decided we had nothing to lose and began tearing down the huge flight of stairs and across the wet station to the awaiting train. Three-quarters of the way there we hear the ominous beeping of the doors about to close and my roommate Carolyn started yelling "No, no, nooooo!" The doors got about halfway shut before the driver must have seen us sprinting and sliding all over the place in the rain and taken pity on us. The doors actually stopped closing and opened back up for us. I've never seen that happen on
the metro or train system here; when the doors beep there's almost no hope of making it. 45 mintues later we arrived in the station in Barcelona and happy to be almost home, made our way towards the metro. Pretty soon we realized why we had thought we didn't have to pay for the train - if you hadn't bought a ticket, you had to buy one to get out of the train station, and everyone had to swipe theirs to exit. We were in the middle of a huge crowd when we realized this, and we all did not feel like buying a ticket just to get out of that darned station. To get in or out of a train or metro station here, one steps up to a gate, swipes their pass, and then the little doors swing open for about 3 seconds. There's no time to dilly-dally. There's a little trick a lot of local kids, gypsies, and pick-pocketers use to ride the metro - they stand in line behind someone and act like they're going to swipe their pass, but after the person in front of them swipes theirs, they scoot up uncomfortably close behind them
and squeeze through the gate at the same time as them. I've had people scoot up behind me and get through on my ticket quite a few times, but at the train station we decided to be the 'scooters'. It's really quite awkward, because the person you scoot up behind always turns around with a look saying "Who is this rubbing up behind me?" It's easiest to just keep your eyes on the floor. We all got through before we realized Michelle wasn't with us, and we turned around to see her on the other side of the gates hesitating about which of the remaining people to get cozy with. We watched with dismay as she came through the gate behind someone because there was now a metro official in a red suit watching her cheat the system. I adore Michelle, but she often is stereotypically blonde and we always refer to her as our 'baby'. We watched nervously as she was questioned by the guy. A few minutes later she came over to us and when we asked her what happened she said he began talking to her in spanish, she held up her ticket from the morning and responded in her Boston accent "no hablo espanol." Then he asked where she had come from, but she didn't know which train station we had just been so she answered "I don't know..." At that point he just rolled his eyes and waved her along. We had a good laugh about her 'I don't know' response. Somehow we all made it home in one piece. At least we have plenty of things to laugh about later.
School here is mostly similar to home, but it's different too. I think if I was at a main university here and taking classes with other Spanish students it would feel a lot more foreign than my situation does. One of my professor's has explained the schooling system here: after high school almost everyone goes to college because it's so cheap. Based on the grades you received in high school you can choose different subjects to study. They use a scale of 1 - 10 for their grading system and getting a 5 is considered 'good'. However, if you want to study engineering in college, you'd have to have average grades of 9.5. Students choose their subject, history or engineering or business, and then they are stuck with that until they receive a degree.
The school I go to is the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona. Its main campus is about 40 minutes outside of Barcelona, it has about 50,000 students, and I've never been there. I go to a tiny branch in the center of Barcelona - the school building literally looks like an apartment building from the outside and is indistinguishable from the street. There are probably about 300 students that attend school there, all are international students and the great majority are Americans in study abroad programs like mine. Every class is 1 hour and 40 minutes long twice a week. In general, professors are supposed to be "respected as God" in their classroom - you're not allowed to get up and go to the bathroom, eat or drink except water, or wear a hat. However, my professors aren't that strict. As they say, they're used to teaching American students.
Classes here are a let less interactive and a lot more lecture. It's almost always the case that I sit there for an hour and 40 minutes and listen to their lecture. My professor who teaches my Culture Without State: the Case of Catalonia class might be the best professor I've ever had. He's right up there with the journalism professor I had last year who had been nominated for the Nobel prize multiple times. He's one the strangest people I've ever encountered, very intelligent, and very fashionable, too. His English isn't perfect, none of my professors' are, and he has some of the most eccentric ideas and theories I've ever heard. He constantly rambles about nationalism and identity and how we can't identify ourselves as "Americans" because "America" doesn't actually exist. According to him if you can't show him "America" then America doesn't exist. A piece of apple pie, or the Constitution, or Obama, or a Ford truck isn't "America." And since all of us have our own, different, ideas of what America is, it can never be defined, and therefore doesn't exist. His class makes me think at least.
My Spanish class is 4 hours long but luckily it's not boring. My professor is so goofy and he makes it easy to learn; he keeps our class laughing for nearly the entire 4 hours. The first couple weeks of class I had to concentrate very hard on everything he said so I could try and grasp what he wanted or to figure out how to respond. Lately, I've realized that it's become easy for me to understand about 90% of everything he says. I feel like I can read spanish pretty well and understand my professor pretty well, but it's still a bit of a struggle to understand the random person on the street.
My other class is a bit dry, but my professor means well. Her english cracks me up and she tends to combine and make up words; her english is still hundreds of times better than my spanish. She teaches my Urban Approach to Spain and Europe class. We learn a lot about cities; their GDP, globalization and how that affects cities, the hierarchy of cities on a global scale, the percentage of workers in every city working in the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate), how cities spread out in the suburbanization process and now are re-centralizing again, the differences between European and US cities, etc... It's interesting enough, but not something I'm particularly fond of.
I'm headed to Morocco this Friday with Connor, my rooommates, and some other friends. We fly to Seville on Thursday morning, spend the day and night there, and then meet the guide company we're going with on Friday. They drive us to the coast, we get on a ferry, and arrive in Morocco on Friday. I'm really excited to go, but I happened to look at the news a few hours ago and it seems that Morocco has finally been hit with this wave of anti-government fervor that's pushing across Northern Africa. From what I've read, and the fact that we're with a tour guide/company and staying in a nice hotel, I'm not too worried, but we shall see how this adventure turns out...
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non-member comment
Great story
I'm somewhat dismayed that you've become a 'scooter'. What next?