Homecoming

Things I've done instead of updating this blog: got a Catalan girlfriend, got a cold (consequently), spent three hours renewing my student visa, six hours at an extreme sports festival, and went on a nice hike with Alex, Andrea and Magalee. It might not seem like a lot, but that - and some breaks of sitting around - easily managed to fill up the ten days since I last bothered to write anything down, and it's frankly still hard for me to process all of it. Since I only have pictures of the hike and the extreme sports festival and only words for my new romantic pursuits, I'll divide them evenly that way: I met Cristina at a language exchange event at the University of Barcelona that I arrived at late and almost didn't bother going to at all. The Education Abroad event was supposed to help us meet more Spanish students, but instead of pairing us up with students one on one to explore the city (as they did in Morelia), we were all on a balcony together and told to make nice like infants in the play room at an adult party. When that didn't work, they introduced a ridiculous charades-type game where we each got a word that we had to describe in our non-native tongue to find the other person who had it. Zander, as is his way, was so disappointed by how the event was progressing that he decided to leave after twenty minutes. And I, as is my way, was almost swayed by his skepticism to do the same.




Thanks to my eternal luck, I decided to give it another five minutes. Cristina first caught my eye when, after our program coordinator explained that it was "to help us get to know each other and exchange info" she laughed sarcastically "Oh really? That's the point? Cause I wasn't sure what we were doing, exactly, with this game." Had I been so bold, I probably would have made the same joke. With her cropped, raven-black hair hanging just below her ears, she looked like Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs but without the frigid, art-chick stare. She was nonetheless a little intimidating, though, being six-foot and joking around with everyone in the room like she'd known them for years. I thought "I have *got* to talk to her" and immediately found an excuse to ditch the neurotically-timid Peruvian girl I was speaking with. You know those moments of fleeting romance in which you feel a sense of déjà vu but then realize it's only because you've seen the exact same situation in five John Cusack movies? Meeting Cristina was like that. Everything seemed to flow so naturally that I felt like I'd fallen into a movie I would have scripted for myself: I was curious about Catalan identity within Spain, she happened to identify deeply with Cataluña and not so much Spain (later she told me that she found it attractive that I wanted to talk about politics; seriously!), she likes Cut/Copy, I had unthinkingly thrown on my Cut/Copy shirt before getting up that morning. Rarely have I ever had to try less to win over a girl, and that was made all the sweeter because I actually liked her, too.



When the event died down (I never bothered to find the person with my word, and I can't even remember it) we went out to the Obeja Negra for a beer with Marc and Incredibly Young-Looking Dude (whose real name I also can't remember), two guys from Illinois who I've never really talked to before but ended up being fun drinking buddies. Cristina kept ordering pitchers of sangria, and as the night went on seemed to pay more and more attention to me until she told Mark and IYLD that she had a problem: she wanted to take me out for a date but didn't know where to take me. I thought she was joking at first, but when Mark and IYLD went to play a game of foosball she took me by the hands, said she wanted to see me again, and asked me wouldn't I kiss her now that we were (temporarily) alone? It was enough to make me look around to make sure my friends hadn't set up some elaborate, Punk'd-style prank to squash all my hopes and dreams. Unfortunately, there was one catch: she was sick with a cold when I met, and now, a week later, she has been hospitalized for pneumonia and I have a cold of my own. Thus, we still haven't had that first date that she talked about, and I won't be able to take her with me to see Of Montreal tomorrow like I had originally hoped (if I can even make it myself). But I'm still riding high on that thrill of new romance, trying to forget that the romantic comedy déjà vu can't last forever and basking in how much more I seem to love Barcelona the more I immerse myself in it.