We left our dear little apartment yesterday. I had some separation anxiety--with my room, my neighborhood, the metro system I knew, and El Retiro Park. Everyone was so pumped about Barcelona, electrified by the romantic visage they associate with it.
On Friday I sent a box home of things I've bought here. It weighed 5 kg and cost almost seventy dollars priority, but it contained much more than that in value, and I wanted it home safe and fast. It took me a long time to find the Oficina de Correos--the main post office on the Paseo del Prado. I walked there in about twenty minutes and then walked back and forth in front of it a few times before giving up and getting in a taxi to take me case I was lost. When the driver told me it was just around the roundabout, I found it under construction, and accidentally went in the wrong entrance and wandered around a deserted undeveloped corridor until a construction-worker redirected me to the post office entrance. Despite the hassle (including having to find an ATM later after finding out I couldn't pay with a car,) it was a good adventure for our last day in Madrid.
Now we're in a hotel in Barcelona. Yesterday I checked off two of my to-do's here: I went to the beach and drank a freshly-mulled strawberry daiquiri while wading in the waves. I truly am not as excited about Barcelona as I was about Madrid. If I could, I would live in Madrid and have a summer-home in Barcelona--for the ocean. I do not feel as at home here though, instinctively. I feel the language-barrier that my classmates have been feeling all along, as they speak French, Catalonian and Portuguese here, though I can get around with my Spanish pretty well.
At the beach we met some Colombian guys, who all spoke English perfectly and were doing a euro-trip together. Vendors on the beach walk around with beers for two euro each, but you can barter down to a euro or a euro fifty. Some guys around our age were in a circle in the water playing with a fútbol (a soccer ball) and seeing if they could break their record on how many times they could head it to each other without letting it drop to the waves.
Today we took a two-hour bus ride to the museum of Salvador Dalí. It really blows my mind how genius he was; the longer you looked at each room, the more you saw in it. Paintings, installations, jewelry,tapestries--Dalí really did it all. In his lifetime he was invited to join Surrealism, by the Surrealists themselves, then tried and kicked out in 1939. The main reason was his commercialization of Surrealism, along with his Enigma of Hitler painting and his support of Franco after the Spanish Civil War.
He arrived at André Bretón's apartment for the trial in layer after layer of sweaters, with a thermometer in his mouth; he had a cold. Periodically throughout the trial he removed his sweaters, and could not be understood with the thermometer in his mouth--turning it into quite a comical event. Despite being ex-communicated by the Surrealists, his sense of humor was appreciated.
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