Barcelona

Just before Christmas, as a pre-Granada warm-up, I visited Barcelona, to see a friend doing her first Erasmus semester in the city. I really liked the city, and the weather was beautiful (albeit rather breezy!). Instead of writing out a very longwinded account of everything we did over the weekend, I thought I’d create a Google Map, showing some of my favourite spots in Barcelona.

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1. Platja de la Barceloneta, 2. Arc de Triomf, 3. Hot chocolate

Particular favourites were Gelaaati, with their incredible gelati and ice creams, and the Museu de la Xocolata with their divine cups of real hot chocolate. Non-food related favourites would have to be Parc Güell and Sagrada Família – both designed by Gaudí and both rather incredible. The museum underneath the Sagrada Família was fascinating, and well worth the trouble.

Anyway, I’d highly recommend a weekend in Barcelona – I managed to get return flights (Ryanair/Easyjet) for £50, and travel in the city itself is cheap – €8.25 for a 10 journey metro/bus/tram ticket, which is more than sufficient if you are prepared to walk; we must have walked 5-10 miles every day (although with all the churros we ate, this was no bad thing!)

x

Cross-posted at SmurfPop

Everything sort of went a bit catastrophically wrong after my last post, which culminated in me missing my entire first semester in Brussels due to illness. I discovered that when Erasmus goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. However, I am hoping to move to Granada (more or less) as planned at the end of this month. Fingers crossed…

The small matter of packing. And finding somewhere to live.

The Eurostar is booked. The B&B is (hopefully) booked. The insurance is paid for. This is GOING to happen.

The last couple of weeks have been… Well, quite frankly painful. There have been hysterics, there have been “I’m NOT going!”, there have been tears. Right now I’m feeling rather resigned to the fact that this is going to happen, and I’m just going with it. One thing I’ve learned these last few weeks:

NEVER LET ANYONE TELL YOU FINDING ACCOMMODATION IN BRUSSELS IS EASY

Seriously. I have been emailing people for MONTHS. The problem is that people don’t seem to like to actually respond to messages at all. I know other people have had a hard time, but they’ve now found places, and I’m still floundering desperately. There are a multitude of other issues, but the lack of responses altogether is just so frustrating.

In other news, I’ve been “packing” for the last two days. When I say “packing”, I mean “put the most useless thing that I have on my list of things to pack in my suitcase and spend the rest of the time faffing”. In case you were wondering, the most useless thing on my list of things to pack is my tripod.

It’s not even like I don’t know what to pack, I’m just inexplicably avoiding it. Fortunately I’m not restrained by an airline weight limit, but it’s still daunting.

I have one more full day at home, and I have a lot to do. Like actually putting clothes and books and other useful things in my bag…

Hello world

Bonjour tout le monde and hola a todos!

I’ve started this blog as a way of documenting my Erasmus exchange experiences – I will be spending a year split between Brussels, Belgium and Granada, Spain, and hope to post about my time living abroad to document what I get up to, to keep in touch with friends and family, and also to (hopefully) provide useful information to future Erasmus travellers.

I’m taking a year abroad as part of a BA Modern Languages (French and Spanish) from a London uni. People often ask me what I want to do once I’ve graduated. I say translation, but I don’t really know. I can’t for the life of me remember when or why I chose to take a languages degree, but there we go. I’m spending my first semester at the Haute Ecole de Bruxelles, followed by a semester at the Universidad de Granada.

So far, the year abroad has been a distant thought – it took a while to find out whether I’d passed my second year or not, but now it’s a matter of a couple of weeks away, I’m starting to panic…