Today I have a riddle for you guys …

What is wrong or, let’s say, weird about this picture that I just took of a can of Coca-Cola I bought here at the university’s vending machine today?

Those of you who solve it get a gold star!

So the decision is made finally regarding roommates. I did not want to write about it until everything was certain which is why I waited until now.

On Saturday, a girl our age (I forgot how old exactly she is, but somewhere between 20 and 25), Nuria from Tarragona [a city that is also in Catalunya, like Barcelona] will be moving in. We had also found someone for the bigger room but just tonight Jordi and his girlfriend decided not to rent out his room after all [for now]. Talk about confusing. The two girls we had considered for the room were kind of annoyed that after waiting so long we had to turn both of them down, but it is not our fault Jordi cannot make up his mind. In fact we were pretty annoyed with all of this too. It is nice he lets us choose our roommate and doesn’t just present us with one, but at the same time we put a lot of time and money into this and now we find out we might as well not even have bothered with finding someone for one of the rooms. I just hope he won’t change his mind again next month, because we don’t have that kind of time to show so many people around the apartment all the time. He is a nice guy but it is a bit aggravating that he is so unreliable.

Anyway, in the end of course this is better for us, the girls in the apartment, as Jordi and his girlfriend will still not be here much [they are keeping the room in case she finds work in Barcelona but even then she would probably not be around much more than a couple of nights a week I assume] and there will essentially only be three of us most of the time. So it will be Anais and me, and Nuria, and as she seems like a really sweet girl I hope we will all get along great!

Furthermore we will not have to deal with any more questions from the concierge who is a bored old lady who pokes her nose into things that are none of her business and a pain in the butt. Since renting out rooms in Barcelona without a contract is not exactly legal and Jordi has not been around a lot, especially at her working hours, she has been asking Anais a lot of questions to find out if he even still lives here. It’s none of her business of course but she is good friends with the apartment owner so we have to be careful with what we tell her. Luckily, she thinks I don’t understand her very well so she doesn’t ask me anything. She actually refers to me only as “la extranjera” [the foreigner] when talking to my roommates, which is kind of ironic because all of us are foreigners [but Nice is Argentinian and since Anais already lived in Spain last year her Spanish is much better than mine]. At first I was a little insulted because that is pretty rude and kind of racist, but now I think it’s convenient for me that whenever I don’t want to understand her, I will just pretend that I don’t. [I think she got this impression that I don't understand Spanish very well from when she was trying to tell me something about panties that had fallen down from our clothesline and that she had put them on our door, and I did not understand what on earth she was talking about because I did not know the word for 'panties'.] So while Anais tried to befriend her a little so she would not be malicious and tell the owner something that could get us thrown out of the apartment and had to endure all her questions, I kept saying ‘hola’ whenever I came and went, and that’s it. The concierge could have become a real issue if there were four of us living here besides Jordi [because she could figure out then that since there are only four bedrooms he does not live here anymore], but now we don’t have to deal with that either.