Hola!

Well, Barcelona is pretty swell. Actually, let me rephrase that, its pretty much the bomb and then some, I like almost everything about it.
The weather is amazing, not too hot, cools off in the evenings and the mornings, rained once for like 10 minutes.
The subway is infinitely better than Chicago's El: there are monitors that count down the minutes and seconds until the train arrives (which is never more than five min), the train is almost soundless compared to the el, everything is underground, they have sweet seats, and it doesn't smell like piss everywhere!
Icecream, omfg, the icecream is soooooo good!!!! There is an icecream store on every block, its what my life has been lacking so far, mmmmmmmm.
Olives!!! So many olives...its beautiful.
People are generally pretty cool, we obviously don't know spanish despite what we thought, and they are okay with that. We know enough to ask questions, but not enough to understand the answers very well...signing up for classes tomorrow!
The atmosphere is what I like the best: everyone is chill, even the dogs are chill. No one is in a hurry, except to get home for a siesta, which I am not sure how I lived w/ out so far in life. Everyone hangs around outside in the squares between streets, just chillin, havin a drink, some olives, maybe some icecream. You can walk around the streets at 12 at night and EVERYONE is just walkin around outside with their kids, visiting, eating, drinking, whatev, having a good time, enjoying life. It is really amazing, totally different from anywhere in the US, but I think I enjoy it much better. Especially the siesta part, because there isn't much else to do but take a nap, everything shuts down...and forget doing anything on Sunday, everything was shut, it was really hard to find a place to eat.
Okay things that I miss:
Salads/lots of vegetables/meaty things...most dishes here are smaller portions, some bread/ham slices/cheese...thats cool and all, but I get hungry, I want to eat, not snack!!!
Big stores, everything is little, little fruit stores, little paper stores, little cell phone stores...the one life saver is the corte ingles, which is similar to a department store with a grocery in the bottom.
English, frankly there is way too much stuff in catalanfor me to really understand what is going on when I talk to people or read stuff. Hand signals seem to work well, sound effects help even more. Going for the general idea rather than specific sentence comprehension is what i'm about. God help me when classes begin...
Having a place to live...haha almost forgot this one, I'm still looking for a place to live right now, we should probably be set by the end of the week or so, but until then I'm just crashing where ever, I've been doing this for the past two or three weeks though and uh, getting a little old living out of suitcases.
Overall, I'm having a blast, I don't feel uncomfortable or anything, I love the city and the atmosphere and I'm excited for classes, but like they told us at orientation "you didn't come here because we are the best school, you came here because we are the best people, and for the parties." This is a true story. I'm going to go get some icecream now. Love to all.