Come Se Dice... EVERYTHING?
Stare and Essere are completely interchangeable, IMO.
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So yea, I pretty much failed at trying to make one post a day for each day of my break. But I’m gonna try to pick it up now? Or something?
Anyway, Day 3 In Barcelona
Day 3 was Halloween, October 31st, which is awesome because:
- Halloween is my favorite holiday ever.
- In Barcelona, Halloween is treated as a 3-day-long affair, culminating in Dia De Los Muertos on November 2nd
- Barcelona is awesome in general.
The greatest part of all of this, however, is that people really go all out with the costumes. For example, Erica (who, if you remember after all this time of me not posting a goddamn thing, is the friend I went to Barcelona with) and I went to the gay bars this night, and the guys there (as you can see in the photo above) were decked out in creepy-ass Halloween gear.
Like, usually in the states, people will take Halloween as an excuse to be slutty and hook up at the bars. CERTAINLY this would be so at the Gay Bars, which are pretty much just excuses to find people to have sex with. But no. In Barcelona, people don’t give a shit about social norms, and instead will fearlessly do whatever they want in order to have the best time they can while also being as garish and awesome as possible. Erica was talking to a transvestite ghost bride at one point who, in a creepy high-pitched voice, told her about how she “killed her husband, and then killed herself.” And Erica was mildly disturbed by this. But I just think it’s awesome that Spaniards will go so all-out just to put on a Halloween extravaganza.
Oh Spain, how I miss you.
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Fall Break, Day 2
Day two of Fall Break, I went to Parc Güell, which is a park that Gaudí designed, so the entire thing is made of irregularly-shaped stones and it all is very flowy and curvy and organic. And, as per Spanish stylistic tradition, it also strikes a wonderful balance between off-putting and beautiful. Fuck yes.
And also, apparently this is where the ANTM Cycle 7 Runway Show was held, as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPNwpFhes_g
But I already knew that it was there, since my brother had been at Parc Güell before I went, and mentioned the presence of this infamous runway on his own travel blog.
After that, though, Erica and I then went to La Pedrera, also known as Casa Milà, another Spanish national landmark designed by Gaudí. This time an apartment building, Casa Milà is just as warped and curved and Doctor-Seuss-y as Parc Güell, and the greatest part of it was that the tour of it began by taking you to the rooftop, where you could walk around the red-tiled steps and go under the funny arches with head-like stone structures on top of them. Google-Image it to see what I mean.
After that, it was night time, however, so Erica and I went home, got spruced up, and went out to a straight club (Erica and I decided to alternate Gay club nights and Straight club nights for each other). However, when we got to one place at around midnight, we saw that there was no one inside, and the person at the door told us to come back at around 3AM when people start showing up.
Basically, Barcelona (and I think maybe the rest of Spain, too)is set on an incredibly late schedule (even later than your average European one), and I suspect that this because the Barcelona Metro closes at midnight, and re-opens at 5AM. Now, one could look at this one way, thinking “oh, I can go clubbing at 11PM and then at 3PM take a night bus back home.” But that’s kinda too complicated since the night bus system is kind of, well, complicated. So instead, people will just go out at 11:30 to go clubbing, rage all fucking night long, and then go home at (at the earliest) 5AM once they can finally use the Metro again.
I just keep loving this city/country more and more.
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Fall Break!
I’m back from my Fall Break now, and let me tell you — it was fucking AWESOME. I think I legitimately want to live in Spain for the rest of my life now, and Ireland is a beautiful, friendly, and fun-loving country. To fully portray the awesomeness of it all, though, I think I’ll make a daily post on Come Se Dice for each of the 8 days I was away. We’ll see if I can manage to keep up with that kind of schedule.
So, to start things off, this post will be for the day me and my friend Erica first got to Barcelona. We moved into our AirBNB place (hosted by a woman named Belén who was VERY helpful and super super nice) and then went out to get Tapas (for the first time in my life, at least) at a restaurant.
The first thing I noticed about Barcelona, though, that I fell in love with so instantaneously was the colors of the city. The photo above is of the placemat at the restaurant we were at. Sure, it’s in English (boo) but look at how great the colors are! I was later talking with Erica about the colors of Barcelona that night before we went to sleep, and I concluded that the best way to describe the colors is that they are FEARLESS. The whole culture really has a certain element of fearlessness about it. They’re not afraid to have things appear garish or strange or whatever. They just put the colors out there, and they are beautiful and glorious in how brilliant and bravely composed they are. This is something you will NEVER find in Florence, meanwhile. The style of Florence is much blander, and much more “chic,” if you will. Definitely not my style.
Needless to say, I was very excited for 4 more days of this place. Woooooooooooo!
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So, it’s 5:30 AM right now and I’m almost done packing to go to Spain tomorrow. Barcelona, in particular. I’m super excited because I’ve wanted to go to Spain for years now. Ever since I learned Spanish to an almost-fluent level in High School, visiting Spain has definitely been a dream of mine. I’ve always had the sense that the country has a personality that matches mine really well… and yes, I am saying this partly because I took a “Which Country Are You?” Facebook Personality test and it said Spain. But I knew that it was Spain before I even took that test, so nyeah.
Either way, I’m super fucking excited for Spain (gonna be there for 5 days, woo woo) and then Dublin, (visiting there for 1.5 days) where I’ll see a high school friend of mine and then hopefully prance around in an Irish field and then meet Kate Bush (She’s half-Irish, you know!) and meet a leprechaun and drink beer.
DRENNK BURRR!!!
But before I go, I figured I’d make a blog post, since I haven’t done one in a week. Midterm week just finished… and I had only one midterm test and I think I aced it. Woo study abroad! The picture that is attached to this post, though, has nothing to do with anything I’ve just said, but it is my wood palette that I’m using to do my oil painting in my Beginning Painting Class. This is the first time I’ve used oil paints (I’ve always been an Acrylic kinda guy) and so seeing my palettes turn into messy, washy, wonders of color is kind of exciting as I’m growing into a new medium. Woohoo!
Barcelona + Dublin, here I come!
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This is my first post in 2 weeks and I apologize for that. But really, not much interesting has realllly happened lately. I went to Cinque Terre recently, actually, and I’ll put a video up for that in the future. But other than that, nothing much. Just the same old same old. I still live in a ridiculously fancy apartment in Florence. I still go to classes and do stuff. I still shop for groceries a few times a week. Lately I’ve gotten into a Kinder Egg fetish, but that’s really not too interesting in of itself. If I made posts about all of these things, you’d get bored, right?
I certainly hope you’d get bored with it all. Anyway, earlier today, though, I went on about the most awesome field trip I’ve ever been on in my entire life. It was with my sculpture class, and we drove to and then hiked up to the top of one of the 330 Marble Quarries in the city of Carrara, Tuscany. It was beautiful and amazing to see these incredibly large hunks of pure marble get cut out of mountains and then pushed around with tractors. (And that is what the photos of this post are from) Also, climbing up in of itself was an awesome experience, since there was all this mud and it was very steep uphill trekking, and whenever a tractor was coming up or coming down, the entire group had to quickly make a single file line to the side of the road in order to not get instantly killed by one of those giant steel pieces of machinery barreling down a mountainside at 30 miles an hour.
It was fuckin’ AWESOME.
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OKTOBERFEST VIDEO LOG!!!!
I know it’s been a while, but hopefully this is worth the wait! It’s Danielle (aka Danierre) and I at Oktoberfest! Drunkenness ensues….
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[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
READY FOR OKTOBERFEST.
Yes, I am going to Oktoberfest. At 9PM tonight, in fact, I’m getting on a train and by 6:30AM the next day, I’ll be in Munich! And in case you were wondering, yes, I will make some sort of video that fully… depicts what will happen. I’m as excited as you are! Except even more!
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[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
I promise that I’m doing a lot in Italy. I really am! I’ve been meeting a lot of people, doing a lot of art, a lot of drawing and painting and even some sculpting and animating, and I’ve been doing a LOT of eating, and a ton of looking at monuments, and having a lotta lotta fun. But instead of making a post that’s related to any of those things, instead I’ll just upload this silly video I found I had taken. If you ask me, this store looks like it belongs in Germany more than it does in Italy. But it’s still super cute. And those tourists add to the video too. Enjoy!
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The point of this was to slap these two videos together haphazardly and with little rhyme, so that it would be somewhat painful to watch. Very art-kid of me, no? Both locations were shot in Florence.
