man, its good to be the king

so, another amazing weekend in barca. friday i had a nice little adventure at the post office with christina. i can safely say i've never had to go through such an ordeal to mail a letter, and it wasn't even my letter! first, you have to go up to this machine and choose if you want a or b. well, we weren't sure what each option meant, so i suggested taking one of both until a nice spanish guy helped us out and told us to take a, which is if you need help mailing a letter. then, they have these televisions set up that tell you which number they're on and what line to go to when it is your turn. i actually found that to be quite cool and made life a little easier when it was christina's turn.

after our post office adventure, i went to a friend's dorm for some ping pong and "the office" which is always a good time. i then met up with some other friends for dinner and a big group of us went out to a couple of the local bars.

saturday was pretty chill, i just hung out and did some homework.

yesterday, however, was spectacular. one of my spanish friends, artur, has a mountain house in a town called el bruc. it was beautiful. the town had one street and was so quaint and cute i could have stayed there forever. although it was funny when artur, sergi, christina and i were going around town picking some stuff up for lunch and we could understand artur telling the people that "he was helping some americans and we were at his place for lunch". we definitely stuck out and it was entertaining to me how all of the spanish people looked at us like we were aliens. i mean, i know its a small town and most likely they don't get a lot of american tourists, but they're only 45 minutes from barcelona...its not like they havent seen other people before! well, maybe they haven't i dunno.

so after picking everything up for lunch and breakfast, we headed further up the mountain to a place called montserrat. at monserrat there is a monistary that has the best boys choir in spain (or so i was told). we didnt get to hear any singing, but the church there was by far the prettiest and my favorite of the churches i've seen so far. after checking the monistary out, we headed up up the mountain on a hike. it is safe to say the views were prety extraordinary and enjoyable.

after our hike we went back to artur's and the boys made us dinner and we sat around and drank good wine and talked for hours. it was a true authentic spanish meal and i thoroughly enjoyed it. especially because artur's family is extremely musical. both of his parents play in different philharmonics and apparently his younger brother was just accepted into the jacobs school of music at IU i believe for piano. so obviously, i am hoping his brother will go there so artur can come visit me!

also, artur is pretty much a genius. he wanted to buy a new violin and was informed it cost 10,000 euros, so he decided that instead he would learn how to make his own. so now, he makes violins (on top of school) and sells them for 4,000 euros. he is also in the process of transforming part of the third floor of his mountain house into a workshop to make his violins...impressive? i think so. it was also quite enjoyable after dinner, when he wanted to show sergi his new keyboard he bought when he was last in the states and he was like "yeah, ive just been messing around with this thing" but seriously, his version of messing around and mine are two extremely different things. he actually knows what he is doing and his messing around were songs that you could hear at a club or on the radio. it is ridiculous, but awesome.

so now, it is monday and that means back to the grind. however, this should be a good week because on wed. night i have a wine tasting class and then thursday night i leave for london for the weekend. i did put up some new pics on my other website, so please, go check them out!