Barcelona

Tomorrow we leave for Paris. Last night, I went out with some people to a bar. I'm staying in a different hotel than my classmates because there was some sort of mix up with the rooms and so a professor and I are staying together. It's gorgeous!  There are TWO pillows here and they are perfect. There's also a swimming pool, which I will take advantage of later.  I was up till 4, and then Maria and I got up at 9:30, had breakfast (almost a real breakfast, not ham and cheese sandwiches like in Sevilla), and then dropped off our clothes at a wash and fold place. I just picked them up, and my clothes look so neat and tidy, all folded up and clean. Other than that, because today is a day off, I have been sleeping and reading.  One of our professors, Yaron, leaves us here, so we are going to have a goodbye dinner for him.  He will join up with us again in Greece.  

One of the things I wonder about here is the racism.  We visited a recently-discovered synagogue that hasn't been used since the Jewish population was destroyed/converted/expelled in Barcelona in 1391.  There's a sign on the wall of a building near it to let people know it is there as it's a historical site, but it's been graffiti'd over with "Libre Palestina" and I think a swastika- they washed it off best they could, but it shows up if you take a photo with flash.  The other signs for the synagogue are taken down at close and put back up when it opens to avoid having them destroyed.  If you were next to the door, you wouldn't know it was a synagogue, unless you knew to look for a low doorway with a space for a mezuzah.  In Granada, we saw graffiti equating the star of David with a swastika.  There's a lot of anti-Semitic sentiment here related to Palestine.  I know there is a small Jewish community in Spain- people were talking about visiting an Orthodox synagogue last night for Shabbos, but it didn't happen- but I cannot imagine why they would have come back to Europe to live.  The other thing I noticed is more familiar.  The laundry place was going to deliver our clothes to the hotel, but Maria and I were nervous because they weren't here at 1:45 and the place closes at two.  Anyway, the guy who works there and who also does deliveries is black.  The woman who we talked to asked us to let the front desk know that there would be a black man delivering our clothes as a lot of people won't get their deliveries since the front desk guys freak out when they see him and refuse to help the delivery guy.  I could see Maria feeling really awkward as she let the front desk know that there was a "negrito" man coming with our clothes before 2 p.m.  I can only imagine how much more awful it would be to actually BE the delivery man.

Oh, also, yesterday I went to the Sagrada Familia, which is Gaudi's fabulous cathedral.  The outside is just beautiful but because the inside is so unfinished and construction continues, there isn't much to see unless you go up top, which requires a long wait and an elevator ride that costs 2.5 euro.  Seven of us elected to go to lunch instead and we found a little restaurant where we had a long, long lunch and consumed three bottles of wine before going to our lectures in a hot stuffy room on Judeo-Arabic and the Disputation of Barcelona.  For the rest of today, I am going to pack, read, swim, and then go to dinner with the group.