Font Magicál

I apologize in advance for typos and confusion – I can barely keep my eyes open. It’s 3 AM and I just got home. Those Europeans love to stay out late.

Well apparently nobody shows up to school on Fridays. My third period class had only two other students today, and in my noon conversation class, I was completely alone. Yes, completely alone with the peculiar little substitute named Hernán. This very odd stand-in for Señor Romero couldn’t sit still for more than seven seconds at a time (I eventually just counted), so I didn’t get much out of the lesson. I got a chance to practice, though, when my family and I took the nightly bus tour of the city (I know, how… touristy, right?) and we stood in line next to a Spanish-speaking couple from Italy and I held a conversation – and pretty well if I do say so myself. On my way there I saw one of my fellow classmates in the streets and he took me by surprise with those European cheek kisses, which I totally forgot about.

My brain can’t put into words right now how I felt when I saw the city, the architecture, some of which was constructed when Christopher Columbus was young. The unusually designed and shaped buildings were designed by artists who many consider geniouses, the most famous being Antoni Gaudi. His work can be found all over Barcelona, but the city’s most famous attraction, the Sagrada Familia, is a church that is famous for its incompletion. The expiatory church, started in 1882 and expected to finish in 2030, has three facades – the Nativity, the Passion, and the Glory. Gaudi uses Christian symbology to tell the history of Jesus Christ through art. Gaudi left a design of what he hoped the finished church would look like when it was done. When the construction is finished, it will have four facades in total.

Towards the end of our tour, we got out in order to view Font Màgica de Montjuï. Font màgica is Catalán for Magic Fountain. Montjuï is the highest point in the city that used to be a Jewish settlement (the name means mountain of the Jews). For those of you that don’t know, Catalán is the official language of the region of Catalunya, which the city of Barcelona is a part of – but I don’t think there is one person that lives here and speaks only Catalán. It sounds to most like a mixture between French and Spanish, and that makes sense considering the location. Anyways, the “lame tour” turned out to be a really awesome experience. I could talk about it longer, but I’ll just spare you all and go to bed. I need to have some energy left to explore more of Barcelona tomorrow – it’s my first weekend here and I don’t want to sleep through it!