BUM BUM BUM!

SO
This past week or so has been…interesting. Not the good type of interesting. After the last time I wrote, whatever I had got worse with a little bit of a fever and I lost my voice completely, so most of my time not in class was spent sleeping. We’ve got this really strict attendance policy here where you can’t miss more than 3 classes without your grade being automatically lowered 10%, so I couldn’t really take a full day off to recover.

Even before I got my voice back, something else happened. Michelle, one of my floormates, noticed that she was getting this weird rash, and thought that it was a bad reaction to some antibiotics. Well, so she thought until she noticed some tiny insect crawling on her pillow. Uh oh. Upon further discovery, she found more, and realized they were bedbugs. BUM BUM BUM

Anyways she threw the ones she found into a water bottle and brought them to the program center, where they set up an appointment with an exterminator the next day. Although the rest of us hadn’t noticed any bites- even the girl’s roommate- the program put us up in a hotel for the night. A hotel sans internet, I may add, which did not make catching up on all of this stuff that I have been putting off since I’ve been sick for a week and a half at all possible.

The exterminator came the next day on Wednesday and checked all of our beds, couches and everything, and it turns out that the bugs really were just in Michelle’s room. It was really weird though, because none of us had even traveled anywhere or stayed in a hostel yet, so there was no possible way that we brought them with us. Also the mattress and pillow were brand new, so we think they must have gotten in through the walls or something.

The exterminator could not come to actually take care of the problem until Friday morning, but I was actually really happy with the timing, this being Spain and all, and at least it was before the weekend. Of course just as a precaution we are in the hotel through Friday night, so that they could fumigate the Michelle and Maggie’s room and leave time for the chemicals to disperse. On Saturday morning we get to got back and clean everything. Yay.

Also the program had us bag up all of our clothes to be taken to get washed and dried in super hot water to kill any bugs or eggs that might be in there. Urrg. So at the present moment I am without kitchen, apartment, clothes, and internet. Awesome. If you guys see pictures of me wearing too small clothes in strange colors, it’s probably because my clothes got shrunk and bled into one another this weekend.

I know I shouldn’t really complain, since I didn’t get bitten and didn’t run into any problems, but it’s all be annoying to have to live like a gypsy and get behind on thing even more and all this whatnot. Also, since they only fumigated that one room, the other flatmate and I are worried about the bugs being pushed into our rooms to run away. I guess we’ll just have to keep an eye out. Blah.

Other than that, not a lot is going on. Today, since I wasn’t allowed in the apartment, and I didn’t want to sit in a depressing hotel room all day, I wandered around outside a lot. I still hadn’t come to see my Spanish and Catalan professor from last semester, so I went over to where he was teaching class in the early afternoon.

I guess I showed up on the right day, because his class had a field study scavenger hunt thing, and the two of us went to a café to chat while the class figured it out. I need to remember where this café was- it was really cute, and the front was a book store. You walk down la Rambla and take the first right, and when the street starts being called Elisabet, turn right again to the back entrance of the café on the left. I remember it had an elephant as part of its logo…. Also there was a good Filipino place down there to (sigue my professor).

Later I met up with Jenn and Michelle and we grabbed lunch at another small café that I want to remember. It was to the right on a side street off of Passeig de Gracia in between Ronda St Pere and Gran Via. It was a really authentic little place with pretty good prices and nice people, which is unusual for so close to Plaza Catalunya. I need to start writing down the names of places, since there was this other neighborhood bar I went to on Sepulveda that I would like to go to again.
Anyways, the rest of the afternoon I took the roommates up Passeig de Gracia to see Gaudi’s Casa Mila and Casa Batlló, which I’ve walked past multiple times, but just never taken pictures of. I’ve been trying to take more pictures of Barcelona because for some reason I don’t have a lot of the city I actually live in. Remember, for pictures check: http://picasaweb.google.com/ToriKSpain