Just the sky..

It's nice to have that every day! :-)

Harbour and weather of Barca!

I just went to Port Vell again today to check out some boats and stuff:


What a nice boulevard:


And even more boats appeared, including much bigger ones:


Some of them were just insanely huge. Enlarge this picture to see its name. The hell of a joke?!


At the beach called Barceloneta some space chimps told me it had 33 degrees. Not too bad! In fact, since I'm here now it never had less than 25.

First contact with Barca!

I went to Port Vell today to have my first contact with the sea. The following pictures show Torre Jaume I. It connects the harbour and the top of Mont Juic with a set of cablecars:



There is a huge shopping mall located directly at the sea:


The entrance of Las Ramblas:


All the taxis in Barcelona are styled like this. I like that!

First pictures from Barca!

I'm doing a Spanish language course for the next 4 weeks at UAB-Idiomes. Here are a view impressions of 'Casa Convalescéncia' where the course takes place:


The three windows of the upper right section of the picture belong to my classroom. Courses are from 9:30 in the morning until 2 pm in the afternoon:


That's the entrance of the building:


I got myself into level 2.5 or something of a total of 5 levels which is actually really good because when I arrived to Barcelona I have been fairly new to the language. My group consists of 9 people more or less, Shervin, a guy from Iran who lives in Luxembourg, Andrea from Switzerland (Olden), Stephen from the UK (London), Lisa from Austria (Graz), Polina from Russia (Moscow), Alex from Austria (he's from Vienna as well), Lauren from Scotland (she is living in Edinburgh next to a film location of Trainspotting :-) and Aldona from Germany (Cologne).

When I hit the rails again...

Well, if you are following this blog occasionally you probably already know that I like trains. So, I didn't hesitate to do another asskicking trip by train. This time I went from Vienna to Barcelona which covers a distance of approx. 1800 kilometers. I can say that the connection has been really great. I got from Vienna to Zurich, from Zurich to Geneva and from Geneva to Montpellier Saint Roche without any remarkable thing. But then? Disaster! For some reason none could sell me both ticket and seat reservation for the train from Montpellier to Barcelona except for train staff in Montpellier itself. So I had 36 minutes or so to find the counter, buy all the stuff and get back to the train. Unfortunately the train was full by the time I got there. What else could have happened if I was not able to buy the stuff before. So, I got myself a special acceptance card in order to use any free seat if there is one. Great! I have been on tour since 18 hours or so when I got on-board. Around 10 minutes outside of Montpellier the train died down. After that it tried to cover the distance by many, many, many smoking pauses. For both people and the train. Over one and a half hours later we got another diesel-powered horse to take us through a stunning ride along the coast.

I was totally wasted when we finally arrived in Barcelona but in fact, I'm here and I will be here for the next six months minimum and by now I can just say it is truly amazing.

See you soon with more news. I've got to to some Spanish-homework now. :-)