Not gonna lie, I like it here a lot.

So things are pretty much going amazingly. Living in a place is so much different than just visiting it. You don't have time to get over the shock and get into the rhythms of living in the city when you're just vacationing. Actually living here makes a big difference, and I like it a lot.

Barcelona is a city that orients itself towards its citizens, which I think is awesome, coming from Atlanta, which totally orients itself towards its corporations, and more recently, conferences. Things here are actually designed and planned on a city level, taking into consideration a lot more than just the immediate engineering concerns of constructing a building. And the city government actually focuses on reviving poor parts of the city by integrating them and bringing them up as a whole, as opposed to Atlanta, where we just put up walls and ignore them until we knock down all their shit, run them off, and put up high rise condos.

Gentrification.

They actually avoid it here, which is really cool. There is an understanding, at the planning and design level, that a city should both cooperate and coordinate as a whole, while at the same time retaining the individual flavor and idiosyncracies of individual peoples and places.

So for example, the Maria Christina market, which is a really cool market with a crazy wavey roof and some cool architecture on the walls, was actually constructed in one of the poorer parts of town, among gov't housing even. And it was designed by a very famous architect, and was also intended to be a tourist attraction. And all this results in actually improving the quality of life in the these parts of the town, actually revitalizing them. How cool is that? We would never think of doing that in Atlanta.

And the market was built in the skeleton of an old convent, which is another cool thing. The architect manages to reuse the old building, and even blend it into the design in such a way as to pay homage to the past while creating a crazy modern structure that definitely looks towards the future.

Really enjoying these architecture classes (in case you couldn't tell), and am actually seriously considering doing a master's in city planning now. I'm going to go talk to my architecture professor about it soon.

But yeah, so life here is a lot of fun. You walk everywhere, or take the metro and then walk, and its so nice. Granted, plenty of people have cars and mopeds, but it's totally not necessary to get around. And there's so many things to see and do in this city. Even just out on the street, you could wander every street in the city and find something interesting to look at. It's really cool.

Ok, I'm getting distracted. I'm gonna go download the pictures from my camera, which I haven't done yet at all. Will post again later.

Love ya'll!