My First Week in Spain

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I am officially one week into my Spanish experience!  So far, it is mostly what I expected although at work, I thought the communication would be more difficult (all of the engineers here speak English quite well so we can all work together easily).  I am living in a small city north of Barcelona called Granollers that shows me what I imagine is a very "normal" way of Catalan life.  Because the city is smaller and far less "international" than Barcelona, I have encountered more problems here communicating at restaurants and stores as they seem less used to Americans.  Complicating matters further, they actually speak Catalan here rather than Spanish, so even the words that I do know aren't always used!

My apartment is ~ 400 square feet with a nice sized bathroom (equipped with a bidet that I'll never use), a little kitchenette area with burners and a sink, a small living room, and a fair sized bedroom with two twin beds combining to form a "king" bed for me.  It's a very comfortable place to live with a basketball goal outside and plenty of markets, shops, restaurants, and bars  in walking distance.  It is also only about ten minutes from work, which is a great benefit for my commute.  Barcelona is probably 30 kilometers from my apartment; I've driven into the city once but can also take a local train if needed.  The area I live in is also great for running; I've done three miles several days already as there is a nice river area that always seems active.

Getting adjusted to my new surroundings has been the greatest challenge over the first week.  Things that we all take for granted (being able to find whatever you'd like on television, knowing what stores exist where, being able to read ingredients and items on a menu) are some of the things I struggle with most!  At the grocery store, for instance, I was unable to find simple table salt, failing on not one but TWO occasions.  I did, however, find that soda here is not as expensive as I expected, so I can continue to feed that habit which I honestly hoped to break when I came here (even my work vending machine sells Coke Light for less than I can find it at the office in Clayton!). 

Shopping at grocery stores has been helpful for standard items but I am really enjoying all of the specialty meat, cheese, and bread shops around.  Never before have I had such access to quality hams, chorizo, manchego cheese, and fresh baguettes.  My lunch or dinner each day is normally just a homemade sandwich of these fine ingredients (plenty of pictures are on Instagram) and I'm always hungry for more!  I hope this won't come back to bite me in the weight department, but so far so good I think.

Restaurants have been another issue as I've been forced to either let the waiter select what he thinks I'd want or guess items based on knowing a word or two.  In some cases, this has worked just great (I have taken advantage of knowing the word "croquette" and experienced them with ham, chicken, and fish to great results, as well as having the waiter choose a great octopus dish one night) and in others, it's been rough (highlighted by the squid head that I received on Thursday night).  I already have a running list of places to try in my little city that I scoped out during my walks through the streets.  Once I can conquer the language barrier, or at least mitigate it slightly, I am ready to take full advantage of the great cuisine of Spain!

Onto television... no surprise that my options are extremely limited.  I actually get MTV and can watch it in English, which probably is a good clue as to why Europeans have the opinion of Americans that they sometimes do!  Luckily for me, there is a golf channel that I was able to watch the Masters on (although it was in Spanish) and also there are soccer matches on almost non-stop.  I've taken much more to reading and walking around the city rather than watching television, but on the rainy or boring day (or in the case of today when my ankle is busted up), it suffices.  As a side note, it's incredible how many different soccer levels there are... I watched elementary school kids playing for Barcelona and AC Milan a few days ago!

I've made my way into Barcelona once and walked around, but I haven't done much sight-seeing yet.  I expect that I'll chip away at that before Jessica visits and then we'll really get the full treatment together.  The city is very pretty and has great architecture, even for random buildings.  At least for the part I was in, it seemed fairly similar to other big cities I've seen but I am looking very forward to knowing the different neighborhoods better and experiencing the culture and food of Catalonia.

I don't have much else to say now but I'll keep updating as I get more used to life on this side of the Atlantic!