I've been a bad blogger lately, I know. But I have an excuse! My classes at the Spanish university started, I've been getting home late, getting up early, and traveling every weekend.

So, a summary.

Two weekends ago: La Merce, a weekend-long festival for the patron saint of Barcelona, and my new favorite holiday. The only possible way it could be better is if you got presents.

We rode carnival rides, danced with drum circles on the street, saw a spectacular fireworks show over Montjuic in Placa Espanya cued up to jazz music, ran from fire-breathing dragons, and made a Catalan dinner in the apartment.

Seriously, this is a holiday that would never fly in the states. One burned cornea, one traumatic head injury and these events would shut down so fast you wouldn't know what hit you. Spain, not so much. One staple of the La Merce festivities is the correfoc, where huge dragon and devil floats go down the street spitting fire into the crowds. Everyone wears long sleeves, bandanas over their heads, sunglasses and whatever you need to protect yourself from catching on fire. The little children had bandanas tied over their noses and mouths, and it looked like the streets were filled with adorable little bank robbers. The other staple is Castellers, the human castles people make by standing on eachothers shoulders, where the team with the highest tower wins. Little children are usually the ones at the top, and little children are usually the ones who go tumbling a hundred feet to the ground. (They wear helmets, after a little girl got killed a few years back.)

I didn't make Castellers - I slept in, thinking they were going to happen later in the day - but the correfoc was such a rush. Running and screaming and trying not to catch on fire was probably the highlight of Barcelona so far.

I started my classes at Universitat Pompeu Fabra the next week. I'm taking Arte y Artistas, a class about avant-garde Spanish art, with a concentration on the work of Picasso, Dali, Tapies and Miro. We've got the prototypical art history professor: a wiry, overly emphatic man prone to oversized coats that make him look a lot younger than he probably is, who talks with his eyes closed and hands clenched in front of him and keeps switching into English just to make absolutely sure that we understand what he is trying to say. If I loved him any more, I would cry.

The other class is about cinema in post-Franco Spain, with a teacher who fires off Spanish like a machine gun. If I can leave a class understanding one out of every ten words she says, I'll consider myself fluent and just go home.

The walk from my morning classes to my Pompeu Fabra classes is spectuacular. Walk through Placa Catalunya to La Rambla, hang a right into the Gothic Quarter, walk past the cathedral and the galleries and the halal markets until you get to the Arc de Triomf (...the Catalan response to the one in Paris?), then hang a left until you get to Ciutadella, Barcelona's Central Park. Cut through the park toward Barceloneta beach until you get to campus. It may be the nicest walk in the world. I feel awful for the people who take the train to class.

Last weekend, I went to Madrid by myself for a couple days. There were times I was glad to be traveling alone, but at the end of the day, I think I have a better time traveling with people. Before sundown, I could do all the touristy things my little American heart desired. I spent an hour sitting on a bench in the park in front of the Prado Museum, listening to a guitarist playing the Pachebel Canon and Ave Maria and people-watching, blissfully digesting my chocolate y churros. I went looking for a better location for people-watching after I had to hurry away from my table at the cafe because a homeless man had decided to park himself on the other side of the sidewalk cafe where I was eating, perch his head on his fists and stare at me while I ate. He had this sinister little half-smile that made me feel more by the minute that he wanted to enjoy me with fava beans and a nice chianti, so after lunch felt like the right time to head toward the museum.

At night, it was a little wierd. There's not much Madrid nightlife can offer the solo traveler, except for street musicians in Plaza Mayor and some tourist-geared flamenco shows that I looked for and never found. That was when I wished I had someone along. Oh well - now I know how I feel about traveling alone. Great before the sun goes down, a little depressing after that.

I saw a bullfight! ...and if I never see another bullfight again it will be too soon! It was an apprentice show, so the tickets were half-priced and they went through several short rounds of what would usually be one long fight. Four times, I saw about six guys trying their best to anger one bull, tagging it with pins and stabbing it in the sides. The bull would eventually be stabbed in the skull until it stopped moving, get a hook buried in its back, and be dragged out of the ring by a team of horses.

I almost threw up the first time. The second time was pretty bad, too. The third and fourth time, I started to root for the bull killing the matador. Then I realized I was looking forward to people getting gored in front of me, so I left.

A few friends and I went to Geneva this weekend, and it was significantly less gruesome than that.

My friend Kim found plane tickets to Geneva for 38 Euro on clickair a couple months ago and asked if I'd be down for a trip to Switzerland. How do you say no to 38 Euro tickets? So we bought them, along with two of my roommates, and planned a trip to Switzerland for no more reason than it was cheap. It was the best hastily-made travel decision we could have made - the city is gorgeous. Geneva is clean, uptight, chilly and just the polar opposite of Barcelona. We could see the Alps from our hotel room, which was a huge rush since none of us really though through that we'd be in Switzerland until we actually got there.

I booked our hotel room with the intention of the four of us sharing a double room, two to one bed, just to keep costs down since the only hostel in Geneva was full. We got to the hotel, and the woman was appalled that we had come up with such a scandalous notion.

"It is just not allowed," she said. "It is not just a matter of cost, it is a matter of safety."

Now, I'd considered that before, so I scoured their website looking for anything that implied that there could only be one person per bed. There was a long list of rules and regulations regarding the rooms, but one person per bed wasn't one of them. Besides, don't couples share double beds on a regular basis? Why should broke collegiate travelers make conditions any more dangerous?

"It's just not done," she said. "Everyone knows that. It's like when you have four children. Each girl should have their own room, and each boy should have their room."

Cost, I understand. Safety, I understand. Please don't start with the logistics of rooming siblings.

After a little more arguing, we paid a little extra for a triple room with a cot. We were all on one hour of sleep since our plane took off at six in the morning (you make sacrifices for 38 Euro tickets) so we just dealt with it.

We went out in search of lunch. Geneva speaks French; we didn't. After much head-scratching and gesturing to the waitress, we realized the restaurant we'd sat down and ordered drinks at wasn't serving food until later in the day. We also realized that Geneva is an extremely expensive place to buy water, with four individual bottles setting us back 16 Swiss Francs. We were starving, so we paid for the water, picked up our bottles and got up to leave. A waiter leapt up off his barstool and said, "Non non non non non!" and gestured toward our bottles. Apparently, it is not acceptable in Geneva to carry out the bottles of water for which you have just paid 4 Swiss Francs.

At that point, hungry and tired, freezing because weather.com overestimated the weather in Geneva by fifteen degrees, out 16 Swiss Francs for bottles of water we couldn't take with us and 30 Swiss Francs apiece for the cost of the larger room, we were ready to go back to Barcelona. The four of us ate at McDonalds: it was open, it was cheap, and we were pretty sure we knew what was and wasn't allowed. Then we went to a bookstore and read cookbooks until we could finally go back to our hotel, check in, and take a nap. We checked in at noon; we didn't emerge again until 8.

From then on, Geneva was a gorgeous glimpse of nature and all that is pristine and European. We wandered around Lake Geneva, taking pictures and playing with swans and eating overpriced French food. I bought a cheap little Swiss army knife and a keychain with a stuffed hamster holding an accordion that yodels when you squeeze its belly.

We took a boat tour of the famous chateaus along Lake Geneva, but other than that didn't hit the touristy sights too hard. The Red Cross Museum, the League of Nations building and the old UN headquarters are all in the old part of the city. We sort of headed in that direction, but at that point in the late afternoon everyone had started to lose steam. So we snuck onto the back of this tour trolley, hoping the conductor wouldn't catch us and we could get a ride back to the city center. After a few minutes we thought we'd been spotted, so as soon as the trolley stopped Kim, who was sitting at the end, hopped off. Before the rest of us had scooted over to get off, too, the train started moving again. Everyone in our car turned around and watched Kim disappear into the distance, too shocked to know what to do.

It was the funniest thing that's ever happened. We ended up finding her shortly after, but still, that's what we get for stealing rides.

Next week is Fall Break, and a week-long study trip to Morocco. I'm ready for something mindblowing. And I really want to ride a camel.