Catalunya: "We are NOT SPANISH!!!"

So this weekend I went to Barcelona, and I had a GREAT time. I had a lot of warm bocadillos and paella. We also went to this restaurant called Kirin. It was "Japanese" but owned by Chinese people. The restaurant was really long with a long two-lane conveyor belt going down the middle with little plates of Chinese/Japanes "tapas." There was sushi, watermelon slices, fried bananas, dumplings, sashimi, etc. It was more fun than delicious!

Barcelona is a beautiful city, but with a more modern feel than Rome. I suppose it only makes sense that when Rome was already a bustling metropolis, Barcelona probably consisted of some canoes and huts on the beach at the foothills of the mountains. When I was there Barcelona was in a drought, but at least the reservoir was at 40% instead of the previous 18%. A medieval city had been uncovered because of the low water levels. The fountains were all dry and the sewers smelled pretty bad. This is sad because one of Barcelona's biggest plazas, called Plaza Catalunya, had a really great ocean theme.

Barcelona also has a bit of a crazy topsy-turvy feel. It's the home of "gaudy" and also legally vends absinthe. I visited the Sagrada Familia, which is a huge cathedral designed by Gaudi early in the 20th century. Some parts of it are old, and after the pollution of about a century looks ancient. The other parts look like Disney World.

You can see the seam between the old and the new parts. The cathedral is built only on "donations," which can also mean tickets. No money from the state is accepted because it comes from taxes. The construction is therefore somewhat slow, and when I was there I could see an enormous hole in the ceiling. I got to take a lift to the top of one of the spires and look down across Barcelona. Notice the balls of fruit on top of the pointed white gables at the top.

The open container law in Barcelona is not in place after midnight, and before then it is loosely enforced. Therefore there are plenty of street venders in the night yelling "cerveza? 1 euro!" Everyone told me Spain had a "drinking culture," and look what could be purchased from Burger King...

I also met some Catalans who were really nice after they opened up. They really adamantly deny that they are Spanish because they speak a different language and only belong politically to Spain because of the defeat in 1714.

Last week I also took a walk around this park that surrounds several villas, including Villa Torlonia. There was lots of greenspace and JOGGERS! I hadn't seen any joggers before then and just assumed Italians walked. But it turns out they don't want to inhale the smog from cars and I even saw someone wearing a surgical mask! There were lots of children playing soccer, a birthday party, fountains, obelisks, statues, and GRASS. I hadn't seem stretches of grass for a while.

I climbed to the top of a hill and looked down on the villa. For a while Mussolini rented the villa from the Torlonia family for 1 lira a year. The Torlonia family is very famous in Rome, and they are named as the commissioners of many churches, chapels, and other architectural structures. Also under Villa Torlonia are some Etruscan tombs, which I will definitely visit in the future.

Yesterday Adriana arrived, yay! I walked to Termini to meet her, and we ran around Rome until we found the tiny street her hostel was on. Then we went to explore Rome. We went to the historical part of Rome with the ancient structures and visited some churches. One beautiful church called San Paolo della Croce (Saint Paul of the Cross, if you didn't figure it out) had a wedding inside and was connected to a convent. It also had ancient frescoes underneath, which we will go see at a different time. The lady at the museum told us that the church was free and we could go "around" to the "bell tower." Well I really wanted to go into the bell tower, and we knocked on the entrance beside the bell tower, but we were turned away because it was a convent. So we went inside the church, watched the wedding, and then walked in the direction of the bell tower. It turns out we were immediately in the convent, and the man threatened to sequester us (or "lock up" in his words) according to the convent's rules. We made it out alright, but we realized that "convent" and "convicted" might have a common origin.

In the middle: my belltower. To the right: the convent. To the left, what we thought was part of a church but actually part of the convent. At the bottom: people attending the wedding.

The getaway car for the happy couple seen through the gates to the ancient Roman foundation of the church. I wanted to go into the ruins but I was not skinny enough to fit through the bars of the fence.

Inside the church where a wedding was going out. Notice how beautiful the church it. The wait to have your wedding takes about....1 year, according to the sign on the door. But you'll get to be surrounded by 8 saints and 4 popes when you get married.

We also climbed up a HUGE hill on the other side of the Circo Massimo (Circus Maximus) to get a great view of Palatine Hill. The ruins are really sprawling and tall. You can see a part of the circo at the bottom of the pictures. On the same note, Adriana made me climb the steepest part of the hill in my white mini skirt. Yes, stairs were available, but instead I slipped and slid down the grass several times.

So everyone knows that in Europe, people drink wine with every meal. No one really thinks of meal-time wine as alcohol, but that it's simply part of a meal. You eat bread, cheese, and have wine. The one problem is: doctors don't tell women to stop drinking during pregnancy. The result? 4 out of every 1000 children have fetal alcohol syndrome, as compared to maybe 2-3 per 1000 of American births (in non-Native American areas). Alcohol prevents the migration of cells during fetal development, so some babies are born with very little or no corpus callosum. Pretty interesting stuff I learned from my friend Vera who helped do an epidemiology study on FAS in Italy.

Also in the lab: there is no such thing as a sharps disposal. You recap the needles and throw them away in the trash can. I think Health and Safety officers at Emory would be screaming if they saw that, haha. Also the surgeries did not begin today as planned, something is wrong with the levers in one of the experiment boxes. They have to be fixed before the surgery because the rats who are tested at "home" will be living in the cages immediately following surgery.