Now A Word From Our Non-Sponsor: Smeg

General observations that I've made of Barcelona thus far include the following. People are very nice. If anyone has been rude, they haven't been to my face. Everyone is really polite, and it appears to be an everything and anything goes/we're all ok policy. I like that. There are lots of dogs of all sizes everywhere and some ride the metro. Speaking of, the metro really rocks, and I've gotten the hang of it (and that has nothing to do with the directional prowess that I do not possess and everything to do with a really well designed system). My favorite part of the metro is that you must press a button or lever to open the door to get in or out. I am always mildly disappointed when someone beats me to it.

The weather has been completely delightful despite the unpredictability of the month/season. The days have been warm and sunny enough, and while there has been a decent amount of rain at night and a huge wind storm that knocked over a bunch of trees in the park by my apartment, it has not been cold. My apartment mates are nice and speak spots of English. The girl who owns the apartment said that she went to school for cooking (I made sure to articulate how much I like to eat at this point in our conversation) and that she now teaches kids to skate. I didn't know what kind of skating she meant or if I'd just entirely misunderstood; then, I recalled the unusually large pile of rollerskates at the front door.

The food is excellent. Lunch has been my favorite time of day which I take around 3 or 4pm and am getting into the habit of making leisurely. I visited one of the open air markets, Mercat Josep off La Rambla, and was impressed with all of the goods, but I did stop for a pic of the mushroom stand as I didn't even realize so many kinds of mushrooms existed.

Catalan is the preferred language, although everyone speaks Catalan and Castillian, and everything that is written is in both languages, although Catalan is always printed first, in bold and bigger than Castillian; there is significant Catalan pride. Catalan varies from Castillian quite a bit. For example, "tancat" is not to be confused with a light brown cat, but instead means "closed" ("cerrado)". Taxis either boast that they are free with the word "libre" or "lliure".

I stopped into Casas Libres two days ago to peruse the books. I wanted to find my favorite book, Steinbeck's "Wayward Bus", but they didn't have that. No matter, the cover for "Of Mice and Men" was too amusing to pass up.