When in Barcelona

Week number 3 here in Barcelona has come and gone, and aside from the rainy weather a few of the days, there are no complaints to be found. Unfortunately I have not declared a theme for my blog yet, but it has been a work in progress; I'm waiting for inspiration to hit, my "eureka" moment. Early in the week we had the opportunity of getting a more in depth and more detailed "guided" tour of the exterior of Herzog and de Mueron's Forum on the waterfront, a unique structure to say the least. We also had the opportunity to head to Plaza de la Virreina to work on some sketching exercises looking at proportioning and scaling systems both in plan and section- my new blog theme? We'll see. However, as I was leaving the plaza with Mike Hoak and Mike Iskandar I was lucky enough to run into an intoxicated Barcelonan man walking his dog down the street following siesta. We stopped for about 10 minutes to talk- I figured it would be a good cultural experience. In broken English he praised the United States over and over again as being a great country, but insisted that as a language English was incredibly hard to learn. Naturally we responded by telling him that his English was in fact quite good, and insisted that Spanish was just as hard if not more difficult than English to learn. It occurred to me then that, regardless of which language any one person may hold as their own- whether it be English, Spanish, Catalan, or any of the other numerous languages spoken in such a diverse city as Barcelona, there is sometimes a fine line between the "language barriers" of different cultures. It was never more apparent to me than at that one moment, standing on an idyllic Barcelonan street trying to communicate with a man from an entirely different culture than my own using all the hand gestures and broken Spanish phrases I could come up with. In any case, it was one of the most noteworthy experiences of my trip thusfar.

Later in the week I finally had the chance to see Frank Gehry's fish sculpture/pavillion up close and personal, and I was not disappointed. We also had the chance to explore the waterfront and analyze the relationship of the Meteorology Center to the urban context of Barcelona. As I was sitting on a bench sketching, a bus of tourists unloaded and made their way right in front of me. Although it may seem somewhat trivial, about 3 or 4 of them passed by and kindly said "hola" to me. I guess after 3 weeks of living in Barcelona, I'm gradually starting to blend into the culture. Que quay.