Procés de Bolonya

I've been debating starting a blog since I arrived in Spain (more appropriately, Catalunya), and evidently I've caved. I was good about keeping a travel diary in Buenos Aires, and it used to feel good to put the pencil to paper and talk about things that, in large part, probably wouldn't interest the public anyway. Today, however, sitting in my Organitzacions Internacionals class, I decided that there are some experiences that I never want to forget. When the students came into our class at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona to talk about occupying the Political Science department (again), I couldn't help but think of the University of Chicago, and how if a large group of students walked into any building on campus with sleeping bags, posters, megaphones, and other staples of a grassroots rebellion, they would be shut down immediately. And yet today, scrambling to move from UNESCO to regionalism, our professor started lecturing at a mile a minute, just in case the occupiers kicked us out of her classroom. I'm still in favor of the Bologna process. 

I guess that a lot of my gripes with Barcelona are starting to lose steam, and I'm beginning to feel a lot more settled. In the 3 months that I've been here, though, I feel like I understand Catalan culture less and less. The experience of living here is akin to mastering a tongue-twister: it takes a lot of practice to get the hang of it, and most of the time you end up sounding kind of stupid. Still, riding the Ferrocarrils home from class, the Beta Band streaming out of my earbuds, it felt pretty good to be here. 

I picked up this free newspaper at the Autònoma, recognizing it because a guy I met here told me that he wrote for it. (He stopped answering my emails, and I in turn drifted further toward female chauvinism.) I read something in it that I thought was eerily fitting:

"Whether it's a rich, uptight businessperson on the prowl, or your newfound kinship with a tubercular street rat, we're all rubbing elbows. A friendship between a Joe and a Ratso might not be that likely anywhere, but in a city, our forced interactions make it more so. In learning how to share space, we are given a crash course in who we are, how to tolerate differences, and the infinite possibilities offered by the world." 

And that's Barcelona in a nutshell.