Barcelona, Spain

Greetings from Barcelona!!! Time to play catch up from day one. Ok, where to start...The plane ride over was not half as bad as I imagined. My flight was at 12:30 PM on Tuesday afternoon and I arrived in Newark, New Jersey a little early around 5ish. Rewind to the day before. Forum Nexus (the greatest study abroad EVER) emailed me the day before I left to inform us that another student and I would be taking the flight from Newark to Barcelona together. So, when I arrived in Newark I met up with Mike. It was kind of cool to at least have someone to get off the plane with. The flight from Newark to Barcelona was about 8 hours, which wouldn't be so bad had my seat reclined! They had all kinds of free movies, tv shows, and music. Unfortunately, I could never fall asleep on the plane. We arrived in Barcelona around 9 AM (7 hours ahead of Houston) and had no difficulties passing through customs. We went to baggage claim and thankfully, our bags arrived shortly after us. The airport in Barcelona is amazing, very modern. We met up with the interns of the study abroad in front of a specific coffee shop, where Travis and Tiffany showed us to a cab. The cab ride to our hotel was only about 25 minutes, and honestly it kind of felt like we were in Arizona, haha. The streets are so narrow, many motorcycles, crazy drivers, and lots of one ways. We pulled up to our hotel and the program director, Hugo, was awaiting our arrival. My room was ready so I got all checked in. Probably like 20 other students had already arrived and were waiting and introducing ourselves in the lobby. They were about to go to lunch, so I ran up to my room, threw my bags in here, and met them downstairs. None of us had any clue where we were going so we randomly just started walking down the street. The weather is gorgeous, about 65, maybe 70. (who knows everything is celsius here) The group split into a few different groups and five of us wandered into a cafe. They didn't have many options, but I ended up splitting a Margarita pizza with one of the girls. It was almost like cheese baked onto pita. We went back to the hotel, Catalonia 505, and I came back and relaxed in my room until around 5. Then, the majority of us had arrived in Barcelona and we met in the conference room of the hotel for orientation. 4 hours later we had given briefs intros of ourselves, met our professors, got our schedules, and had a brief overview of Europe and the EU. After orientation, 9 of us girls hit the road in search of somewhere to eat for dinner. We ended up at "Vasi." I sat with 2 girls, ironically, who were both from Greece. Anyone that knows me knows my obsession :) It is very common in Spain to order tapas 'small plates kind of like appetizers.' Two of us had a local beer, I can't tell you the name, but it was pretty good, very light. We shared a liter of water. Everything is glass bottles here. If you order water, there are no free refills and the bottles are tiny. Hello dehydration haha. The three of us ordered random things and split everything. We had these chicken skewers which came with some kind of barbacoa sauce, tasted more like barbecue though. We had these things that were like a puff pastry stuffed with caramelized onions, and brie. DELICIOUS! Also we had this poached egg, potato, and prosciutto dish, also pretty good. Lastly, croquettes de jamon. All in all, great dinner, and pretty damn cheap. 29 Euro for the three of us. After that, some of the students were going out to the bar, but we were extremely exhausted and jet lagged so we wandered to a small dessert shop. I let the waiter pick mine, something with chocolate. It was like a chocolate moose pie. After that, we walked back to the hotel, I attempted to blog and upload pictures, but was unsuccessful. I finally went to sleep around 12:30 and woke up to jack hammering in the street outside of our window at 6 AM. haha Welcome to Barcelona. Ok, so today I got up around 7, took a shower, went down to the lobby for breakfast. It was pretty good, some normal  American stuff (toast, eggs, bacon) and some other things like ham, mozzarella, and tomato. Oh, I forgot to mention everything is ham here. Weird. Wait, Hugo taught us to say interesting, not weird. We got on a private bus at 8:30 and headed to school. The bus had free wifi, everything has free wifi, it's awesome! Our school is called IQS School of Management. Apparently, it started as a very prestigious chemical engineering program, and they recently added onto it. It's an amazing building. We had our first class, the  one that everyone must attend, called International IQ. It was super interesting and very informative. We learned about the European Union, what countries joined when, the capitals of the countries, and geographic location. We were also given a detailed schedule of the next month. After looking over the schedule, is when I really started to fall in love with Forum Nexus. I thought everyday we would have class from this time to this time, then the rest of the day would be free for exploring. Totally wrong. We will have two international guest speakers, take 7 professional visits, explore, travel, study and attend classes. I cannot express in words how intrigued I am!! I tried to keep an open mind
and have no expectations, but this program is a million times more awesome than I ever imagined. Everyone is so friendly, so enjoyable, so easy to get along with, and so cultured (I'm so jealous of all the places these kids have gone!) Yes, kids. I'm the grandma of the group! There are two other graduate students that might be my age. Ok running out of room, have to post this, and I'll finish...