First Weekend in Catalunya

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Since arriving in Spain on Tuesday, I have more or less settled into life in Barcelona. I understand that this is the sixth year of the Georgia Tech College of Computing program in partnership with the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. This week has been filled with a lot of little things such as learning how to get to class, a university tour, and two days of actual classes. There has been a lot of time this week to explore the city and get adjusted to the new time. I can more or less go anywhere I need and get along pretty well. The primary language in Barcelona is Catalan, which is similar to Spanish but with French influences.

Working with money has been interesting because for the most part the price in euros is similar to the price in dollars. However, 1 euro is about $1.30 at this time, which makes things more expensive. It is pretty easy to get around the city using the metro system for which I purchased a monthly pass for 41.75 euros. One of the little things I have noticed is that commas and periods with respect to numbers are reversed, so the price of the monthly pass is shown as 41,75 and 1000 would be written as 1.000.

I am officially taking 9 hours of classes and intend to take the Spanish class without going through Georgia Tech. I really need the class for personal learning but do not need the hours at Tech since I have already taken Spanish there. It will be nice to be able to work on the language without having to worry much about the grade. Otherwise, I am taking Cognitive Science, Computing in Society (Ethics), and Computational Photography.

I have started a photo gallery to which I will post the pictures as they are taken. It can be accessed at the following URL:
http://gamma.rietta.com/~frank/gallery/bcn2005

More to come later.