Having the time of my life.

(Have I mentioned that yet?)

Being in a long-distance relationship is hard no matter where you are. Being in a long-distance relationship while you're spending a semester abroad adds a special difficulty, because one out of maybe every fifty people who were in a relationship before they came abroad won't be by the time they get there - everyone, and I mean everyone, is "on a break." That means the friends you're abroad with are looking for any and all opportunities to hook up, while you're just looking to meet some people you've got something in common with. And it seems like only one in fifty people are looking to do the same thing.

I've got a great thing with Gene, my boyfriend of two years, so I've been a good girl since I've gotten here. That means I've made absolutely no friends of the opposite sex short of the ones who suddenly become my long-lost buddies when we're at a bar and they're trying to sleep with one of my roommates. Depressing, yes, but I have to remember that I didn't come to Barcelona to make nice with sexual predators. It's been a wierd few weeks, though, going to bars and clubs with a handful of girlfriends and ending up alone by the end of the night as they proceed to couple off. It's aggravating, and taking cabs home by yourself can get expensive.

Things took a turn for the wierd this weekend. Somehow, I became the Third Wheel Master of the Universe.

I was at some La Merce festivities (a holiday for the patron saint of Barcelona, which I will describe in detail once I download my pictures) with one of my roommates, when we ran into this guy she's, shall we say, had some relations with over the past couple weeks. But when it turned out they had a class together and had to acknowledge one another in the light of day, she told me their relationship simmered into something like a friendship. So he asks us if we want to go to a bar. Figuring that this is a guy I've gotten along with in the past, and I can duck out if things get awkward, I agree to go along with the two of them. The night proceeds, I ask them individually several times if maybe I ought to go, and they both assure me there's no reason I should.

A few drinks, some dancing in the streets and some wandering around Barcelona later, we ended up watching the movie "Wet Hot American Summer" in his apartment, during which I fall asleep on his couch. I wake up to the sound of my roommate and her "friend" making out furiously on the couch next to me.

I snuck out of the apartment at daylight, feeling like I couldn't possibly have two brain cells to rub together. Why I didn't leave the minute he asked us to go to a bar, I don't know - I'm sure I was blinded by hope that maybe I wasn't surrounded by a slew of walking hormones who decided to travel abroad. I called Gene as I wandered around this guy's neighborhood looking for a Metro station. Funny thing was, his roommate had done something similar that same night. That made me feel a little less mortified.

So, after something like that, you think, never again - right? Learn from your mistakes, try not to end up in groups of three when two of the people in question have a history, etcetera etcetera.

Somehow, it ended up that, after I booked my flight to Amsterdam tonight, a handful of people who said they were coming, too, backed out for financial reasons. The only other person I'm going with now is a friend who lives down the hall. I'm staying with her in Amsterdam...at her "on a break" boyfriend's apartment.

I need earplugs.

Ladies and gentlemen, the jetsetting component of my European adventure has officially begun. I've booked trips to Madrid and Geneva, am awaiting word on other people's schedules for Paris and Amsterdam, and am all set for Morocco and Grenada. If I were any more excited, my heart would stop.

First stop is Madrid, next weekend. I'll be traveling by myself for the first time. I'll be going to different cities with people for the rest of the time, working around their schedules and their plans and partying in general. Next weekend, I want to be an old person. I want to take bus tours. I want to go to museums. I want to practice my Spanish with strangers. And for god's sake, I want to go back to my hostel and watch BBC.

I'd also like to go by myself to be totally immersed in Spanish culture, with no one with me to speak English. Being surrounded by other Americans in my classes and my apartment building hasn't been the best way to acclimate. Or maybe I've just soured on my fellow study abroad students. I spent last weekend with 300 of them on our program's orientation trip to the northern regions of Catalonia, the Costa Brava and Coillure, France. It could have been the bus throttling us awake as it drove over unpaved road after unpaved road. It could have been the spoiled little sorority girls complaining about how stupid and boring it was that we were spending the afternoon in France. But it inspired me to travel alone.

But the Costa Brava made up for it - I had no idea we'd be spending two nights somewhere so gorgeous. When I heard our program was putting us up in a hotel for two nights, I imagined we'd be in the Spanish countryside, two to a bed in a room with bad lighting, milling around the hotel lobby all night looking for something to do. But when we got to the hotel (a triple room for three people, which was nice), I looked out the window and saw...the beach!

I ended up spending the evening there with some friends drinking cava, splashing around in the Mediterranean and chatting with some Catalan fishermen who had planted their poles in the sand so they could hold their plastic cups of whisky and hash cigarettes.

My Spanish, after knocking back a little of that cava, was flawless. The fishermen told me I spoke better than my friends, then started talking about me in Catalan after I told them I had no idea how to speak it.

Now, that was cute in Miami, because when people started speaking Spanish to razz me, I knew what they were saying. Not so cute when I don't actually know the language.

On Sunday, the roommates and I took our long-anticipated trip to Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi's unfinished behemoth of a church that's been under construction since 1908. If it's not the most famous attraction in Barcelona, it's at least the most talked-about amongst students abroad when classes are about to start and you feel like you have to see everything in the city, all in a week and a half.

According to the guide books, local opinion is that the church is the most beautiful structure in Barcelona, a city where even the hardware stores look like works of art. Then you've got George Orwell, who said "I think the anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance."

When I told Mireia, our Catalan R.A., we were going to see the Sagrada Familia, she said "Oh. It's not finished."

Funny. That turned out to be my sentiments, exactly.

The Sagrada Familia's value as a tourist attraction may be its sheer size. Get off at the Sagrada Familia metro stop and the enormity of the church as it appears while walking up the stairs knocks the wind out of you. The detail as you approach makes it obvious why the church is taking so long to complete: there's not an inch of that hulking facade wasted. There are faces and words and trees and patterns carved into every last inch. The detail is remarkable.

But I was expecting something more colorful, more...Gaudi, with his mosaics and his ostentatious shows of color and shape. The stained glass windows were few and far between, and there was a handful of mosaic-style embellishments on some of the spires at the top of the church. But mostly, the church was stone. The genius is in the detail, but the detail is in stone.

I know I'm a neanderthal for being disappointed by Barcelona's most stunning work of architecture because it didn't have pretty colors. But stone bores me. I like color. That there were more cranes and scaffolding at Sagrada Familia than there was color made me a little depressed that I'd spent eight euro just to go inside. I can see stone and scaffolding out on the street, for free.

Since I didn't think my status as a neanderthal was quite in the bag, I joined my roommates at the Sagrada Familia McDonald's for lunch. I thought they only did this in Germany, but apparently, you can get beer at McDonald's in Spain, too. I'm lovin' it.

Time to tweak my theory: Spanish women stay so thin because they salsa like nobody's business.

Went to a club in L'Eixample last night called Mojito's to go salsa dancing with a couple of my roommates. It had a live band, a full house and the best mojito I've ever tasted. [The secret seems to be a splash of bitters.] Everyone there was tearing up the dance floor like they came shimmying out of the womb. That's pretty standard at Cuban weddings and parties in Miami, so I'm used to feeling like a silly white girl in situations involving salsa. But I was on the dance floor after a few mojitos, feeling pretty expert. It probably looked like I was having a seizure, but it's okay - what happens at Mojito's, stays at Mojito's.

I only danced with one Spanish guy, and only for a minute. When he took my hand and led me out to the floor, I told him in disgraceful Spanish that yo no sabes nada de salsa. I don't think he heard me. So I'm doing the basic steps that my roommate Kelly taught me, and things are going well...until he started spinning me around.

In salsa, that involves twirling in several directions, with your arms behind him and behind you and in the air and to the side and it's not something easy to improvise. I started cracking up - I was doing it all wrong, but it was hilarious. I thought he might see the humor in the situation, too. Instead, he walked away looking sort of disgusted.

I spent the rest of the evening dancing with Jamaicans and Italians, who, as the cultures they represented on the dance floor at Mojito's, are far more laid back about dancing salsa with a gringa. It was a blast.

That was the first time we'd gone out to a club or a bar that wasn't full of other American students from our program. It's about time - I'm tired of drinking beer and talking about Facebook.

This is my next-door neighbor on La Gran Via de los Cortes Catalanas. She doesn't seem to speak any English. But if you hang around long enough and coo just the right way, she says "Hola! Hola!"

Look closely to the right of her head, and you can see the green macaw who lives in the next cage. He says "Que tal?" to the bird in the neighboring cage, who responds in kind. It's both adorable and unsettling that the birds at the pet store downstairs speak better Spanish than I do.

I've been in Barcelona almost a week now and have only just begun to want to write about it. The first couple days were exhausting and embarassingly full of phone calls to my parents and my boyfriend where I'd burst into tears immediately after they picked up. Being surrounded by strangers in a foreign country you're stuck in for the next four months is a lot to handle on three hours of sleep a night.

Two nights of sound sleep did wonders, though, and adjusting to life in Barcelona finally became something to look forward to.

I live in a to-die-for apartment with three other American students: Kelly from University of Illinois-Chicago, Anne from Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota and Emily from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Our R.A., who lives here too, is a Spanish master's student named Mireia. Our apartment on Gran Via is on the third floor. In America, it would be the fifth floor, but Europeans have a different system of floor-naming where the first couple floors are called...something else, I'll have to check. My roommates and I found this out while hauling groceries up several more flights of stairs than we'd anticipated.

But look at this view from our balcony and tell me the hike isn't worth it:

I think Spanish women stay so thin because they have nine flights of stairs between the street and their apartments. I plan to test this hypothesis for myself.

Of my first impressions of Spain - besides that the women here stay remarkably svelte despite a culture that serves three-course lunches - two stand out:

1. I keep hearing about how time is perceived differently in Spain than it is in the US, and the best example of that I've seen yet is attitudes toward eating and drinking. You're showing your Yankee stripes if you order coffee to go in Barcelona. Spaniards drink their coffee the same way they eat their meals: slowly, over conversation with friends, with no particular desire to leave within the next couple hours.

That's going to take some getting used to. No rolling through Starbucks seven minutes before class for the next four months. Not sure how I feel about that.

2. People here love their American music - their godawful, nails-on-a-blackboard American music. Walk through a grocery store or the metro station and you're likely to hear Cher, Kenny G, old-school Britney Spears ballads, and more songs scraped off the bottom of the barrel of American pop music. I'm dying to hear some local music, but it's been hard to find since I've spent most of the past week in the tourist trap that is Placa Catalunya and haven't gone out looking for it yet.

Thought I was all set yesterday when I got on the train and there was a man with a guitar and a man with a violin playing and singing. Finally, I thought - some Spanish music! It took me a while to realize they weren't singing Spanish songs, but American songs in heavily accented English. I didn't recognize what they were singing until I heard "then I saw your face...now I'm a believer..." They followed it up with "Don't Worry, Be Happy." I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

There's an upside to the pop-love: We went to a discoteca last night that played hours and hours of American pop music I haven't heard in forever - Thriller, Hollaback Girl, some music I rocked out to back at middle school dances - and it was the most fun I've had at a club in a long time. I danced until I couldn't move anymore.

I'm promising myself I'll balance that out with something more local, a salsa club or something, later on this weekend. I don't feel too bad about it, since some friends and I spent the evening before we went out sipping sangria and chatting it up with our little old Catalan man of a waiter, Senor George. He told us we should find some nice Catalan boys to be our novios, since Catalan men are good, upstanding young men and the Castillian men are all conquistadores.

I'm off to the farmacia, which was closed for siesta when I went the first time today around 2. My head cold did not take a siesta, so I was a little peeved about that. I was walking back home from my pharmacy search when a man started following me. He was saying the minute he saw my face he knew he had to be with me, that I only needed to give him half an hour, all these pull-out-the-pepper-spray sort of things. After ten minutes of me telling him to please leave me alone and him following me anyway, I throw up my left hand and show him the garnet ring my mother gave me as a graduation present. "Yo soy casado!" I hissed. "I'm married!"

If I'd told him I had the bubonic plague he couldn't have backed off any faster. That may be my favorite Spain story so far.