first day of classes

so today was our first day of classes. we met the program coordinator outside our apartment at noon and she walked us to the place where our classes are. its cool because its not very far away...maybe a ten minute walk. its just a building a street off the main Las Ramblas, like right in town. the main university is on the outskirts of Barcelona and very far from where we live, so its nice to have a place so close. Basically we had like a little introduction where all the professors introduced themselves and talked about the program. I was really nervous, and kinda still am, because everyone says Juan Carlos, our studio professor is very hard. He already told us he is going to look at us like actual architects, not students and expect that level of work. he said its basically equivalent to a graduate level studio. After the informational we had an hour break to go get lunch or do whatever. I wasnt really that hungry so my roommate and i went and got gelado and sat on the ground in a plaza and ate it. it was beautiful and so relaxing. Then we had class again...our first actual real class. it was a seminar class we have once a week called the contemporary city, studying barcelona and some other european cities from the present backwards. it sounds very interesting, but the professor is kinda hard to follow, so we'll see. When class was over, we went walking around the area we live once again. i feel like everytime we go walking around i see stuff that i havent seen before even though ive been down the street 50 times. its cool. we went to this place called zara which is like an express in the states...i think they might actually have one in New York. its really cute clothes, but different. their fashion here is more extreme and would be called weird there. (Mullets are way in style) ha. I didnt buy anything yet, but most likely i will. the pricing is very similar to there too...like the gap pricing. Then we split and my roommate and I went exploring down some streets we hadnt been down and found like the whole shopping district. Its almost like an outdoor mall, but not really. there we found some cute stores with more reasonable pricing. We looked at stuff for quite a while and by the time we were done, we were starving so we stopped at this little resturant and got baguette sandwiches and these amazing pastries for 5 euro! during the evening we all met upstairs in someone elses room and discussed where we are going to go on our weekend trips and potential weekends to travel, so we can start looking up airline tickets and such. it was so exciting to be talking about it! i guess we were really loud because the night guard, a grumpy old guy who already hates us, came up there banging on the door yelling at us. it was really funny. but we had to be really quite from there on out and leave soon after.