Let's eat

9th day, Saturday

Saturday was "doing chores" day - we washed clothes (they dried in 1 hour because the sun is relentless here), we had our basin in the bath repaired and paid the rent (half, for September) to the landlord. Very conscientious indeed. I am most certain that the landlord noticed how the air in the apartment now smells like jasmin and soap, and not dust and cigarette smoke.

Before us, some girls lived in the apartment - but I can't fathom how! The washing machine and the oven hadn't been used - neither the shower for that matter - supposedly they sent everything to their mothers for washing and only ate pizza but still, we had to use gloves in the beginning.

In the evening, we went downtown and marveled at the numerous Chinese bazaar/stores that basically had the same products but many customers. I bought myself a Chinese gown (I think I have a ball dress for this year's BA graduation party) and - Silviu, writhe in pain - it is pink (other colours were much more adequate as to what I like but the sizes were either too big or too small). A blonde makes do with pink, how cliché.

PS (#1): It turns out that the truck with gasoline cylinders comes today, not Thursdays how we expected (this is how we get hot water and fire granted that the apartment is older than my dad by a considerable amount of years). You basically have to get out to the balcony when you hear the ruckus they make and yell "1 (2) bombones aqui" - you pay them 1 euro and they bring the cylinders to the piso where you live. We have 3 full cylinders right now, so we're good.

10th day, Sunday

Today, the most incredible thing happened! The wind blew all day and the sky actually tried hard to be cloudy. I also noticed that if it were really cold, I would freeze in my room, because the window is not tightly closed and it lets wind in.

Meals have consisted so far in vegetarian soups, vegetable salads, cereals and mils and fruit. We decided to go wild today since it's  Saturday and spent the morning doing pancakes with finetti (yummy:)) and spaghetti with chicken meat, champignons and grated cheese.

In the evening we went to the Catedral Real located downtown and attended the shortest service in my life. It lasted only 30 minutes. Many old people and no choir but peaceful nonetheless. I think next Sunday I'll go back to the neighbourhood church "Nuestra Senora de la Consolacion" though.

I have put together a faculty schedule and it looks very bad - they emphasize here more the teoricos and so far, less the practicas. I have 6 subjects to attend, each with at least 2 teoricos (lectures) and only one practica (lab). For instance, IA is packed with 4h of lecture and 2h of practica.

I just have to get through 8h of Spanish classes tomorrow.

Vivimos aqui sub pod.

7th day, Thursday

I had Sistemas Multimedia for the 1st time (since we missed Tuesday's lecture). The teacher is young and nice but we were nervous nonetheless. Well, that ceased the moment he started asking the whole class "Savez por que es el cielo azul?" and ultimately "Que es el sonido?". Silence. Either the rest of the students were being slow (I said the definition as I remembered it and the teacher was pleased *insert bewildered emoticon here*). He had to resort to a very plastic analogy as to make them understand what exactly is sound - "imagine you have a room full of gelatin and if I punch it - bam! - it will shake and be wobbly-wobbly" (we learned about sound 7-8 years ago and without such metaphors).

This is when depression hit me for the first time since I left home.

Afterwards, the teacher surprisingly made a smooth transition from "wobbly-wobbly" onomatopoeia to Fast Fourier Transform definitions and  algorithm to analyze sound. I felt better.

The girls went out in the evening, but I had to go to a 2h lecture from 7pm till 9pm which I thought was Logic Programming. Instead it was Programming Languages and it was tremendously easy (characteristics of all programming languages, a bit of C, a bit of Haskell). This confusion occured naturally because their schedule  has the subjects abbreviated. I stayed anyway - I was the only girl, and there were 6 boys too.

I got depressed again. I got really mad, however, when one of them asked me something about lists, trying to convince me not to drop the whole course. I understood "Lisp" and I told him "No, I don't know Lisp yet, I hope I'll learn it soon". He  only understood "No" (obviously never heard of Lisp) and started to enumerate fast in Spanish "areyes, matrices, pero no Matrix, no la pelicula".

Concluzion: he took me for a stupid girl who never even heard of lists, and the only matrix there is would be the one in the eponymous movie.

I can't understand Spanish perfectly and I certainly can't express myself correctly (right now) in Spanish. English is useless.

I had no way of getting through to him, he was already feeling smug. How could I tell the idiot that last year I implemented in C++ the entire DSA and RSA cryptosystem, including attacks? Nevermind that, how could a third year in Computer Science ask someone about such basic concepts? It's like asking a painter if he knows what is a chevalet.

I slept with a headache, and I woke up with it. 

8th day, Friday

Today was a better day - firstly because I finally found the schedule for Logic Programming and secondly because I started doing tutorials for Processing. It even has OpenGL. I'm wondering how the GUI will come up for the BA paper & application, using Processing and Java but I am looking forward to it. I think I'll start making the designs after I figure out the RDFa and the Ontology parts.

In the evening, we went out (we all do it in threes) and met with Linah, a Flemish girl that lives in Belgium  and was born in Africa (she told me that people living in Flanders hate French and consider themselves Dutch). It was fun to see the town at night time (teeming with people).

PS (#1): We're known around the campus as the blonde, the redhead and the brunette Erasmus students, me incidentally being the blonde, Anca the redhead and Oana the brunette. That is indeed something I would like recognition for, I bet everyone back home envies me.

PS (#2): Sometimes at the TV they show gypsies that claim they're Romanian and recount how vile the Romanian government is, how they don't receive any help (and money for free like they do in Spain) - "Vivimos aqui sub pod", "Nostra casa - ne-am carat-o cu roaba - patru cinco", "Nimeni nu s-ar intoarce in Romania de buna voie" ("Nobody would willingly come back in Romania").

I am very tolerant, but how can I agree with a minority that slanders my country everywhere and compromises it internationally beyond any hope of redemption? When in Romania, most of them say they're not Romanian - they don't have a sense of belonging to Romanian culture - they're Roma. I wish my country were not slandered, and foreigners wouldn't confuse Romanians for Roma gypsies.

PS (#3): Oana calls every Spanish person "Rodriguez". How was the Artificial Intelligence teacher called? Rodriguez. How was the guy to your left called? Rodriguez. How is the landlord called? Rodriguez. And she takes a photo of every single God damned graffiti :) .