UPF, Microbio Lab and Girona

HEADS UP: My Flickr Pro account officially expired today, so I am now putting all of my pictures up on Picasa, through Google. They are public, so here is the address that you need to go to in order to view the pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ToriKSpain

This past week my classes at Universitat Pompeu Fabra started, as did my internship at the Microbiology Clinic of Dr. Echevarne labs.

The two UPF classes look relatively promising. The Barcelona History and City class will be useful I guess because I know where everything is in the city, so when the professor talks about the history of certain parts of Barcelona, I'll be able to piece it together in my head. So it looks like it'll be ok and not too hard. The teacher is younger and Catalan, so she's really easy to understand (she teaches in Spanish). The only downside with the class is that it's huuuuge- there's like 35 kids in it, and I don't know anyone there.

The other class I have there is Nationalism in Contemporary Europe, and it looks like it's going to be really interesting, but more on the challenging side. The professor is Gallego, which means that he speaks Spanish really really really fast. But the class has about 8 kids in it, so it'll be a lot of discussion and we'll hopefully all get to know each other.

Mondays and Wednesdays for four hours each afternoon I go to a microbiology lab up Passeig de Gracia- I actually have to walk right by Gaudi's La Pedrera to get there. I've only been there twice so I don't know what else they're going to have me do, but so far I've just been doing some bacterial cultures. Pretty much, doctors from all over Spain and Portugal send swabs of all sorts of disgusting things from people's bodies to the lab, where I grow bacteria on a bunch of different agar mediums.

The other day I had to grow E.Coli, Salmonella and a bunch of other ones that honestly make me sort of nervous to be working with. And contrary to popular belief, Salmonella is not Salmon colored, but black. At least on whatever the heck medium I was using. I also make slides of the bacteria once it's grown and add some different dyes that show whether or not it's gram negative or positive and whatnot under a microscope. So far it's been ok, and I have a lot of questions, but sometimes it's hard to get them answered since i don't really have spanish laboratory vocabulary. We'll see how it goes.

So yesterday (Saturday), I went to Girona with Jenn, Michelle and Amy. Girona is about an hour and half up the coast and inland from Barcelona. Unfortunately, it was raining all day so I came back with a really bad cold and no voice. I sound like a cross between a chain smoker and a 14 year old boy going through puberty. Awesome.

Anyways the town itself is worth an afternoon, it's got some pretty churches and monasteries from the 12th century, and also a really nice Jewish quarter. El Call, the Jewish Quarter, has some narrow winding streets and arches and is just pretty in general. There also some Arab style baths and a wall that encircles the city which you can walk on top of. It would be really fun to walk around when it's nice out, but Saturday was just not the day.

Recently I bought tickets to go to Morocco at the end of February with Jenn and her sister- I'm so excited! I'm still trying to figure out travel this semester, but I'm aiming for a weekend in Madrid, Granada with the family when they come, a weekend in London, and spring break as Istanbul-Budapest-Berlin. Also I'm hoping to do day trips to Sitges and Costa Brava which are near Barcelona.

My friends from high school actually want to do a trip the summer after we're supposed to graduate, going to Athens-Santorini-Prague-Vienna-Venice-Florence-Pompeii-Rome, so I'm going to save those cities to do with them (I might skip out on the last week or so, since I did those last semester though). So much saving up to do...

That's all for now...