I just had to check my laundry. You see, our semi-rusty washing machine is pretty messed up. We always had to manually set it to the spinning cycle after washing, else the laundry would always be dripping wet coming out of the washing machine. It also never really washed that well. Now, it has gone one step closer to being broken. It does not stop washing any more. It gets stuck somewhere before the end of the cycle, and if you don’t stop it, it happily keeps washing for twelve hours or longer. [Twelve hours was how long it washed the first time this happened the other weekend.] It of course also keeps spinning. The last time I did laundry, I forgot about the spinning for a short while [maybe half an hour instead of the usual ten minutes] and the washing machine seemed kind of warm when I finally did stop it [and so did my clothes]. Now this was the first time my clothes came out of the washing machine as dry as they should be, but I don’t want to risk the washing machine my clothes catching on fire, so I suppose I won’t repeat the experiment. Let’s just hope the washing machine keeps “working” for another three months.

Other things I miss in this country:

• A vacuum cleaner. [All we have is a broom and a mop. I wish we had a vacuum cleaner. Spoiled brat that I am, I never had to live without one.]
• A bathroom that has a toilet in it. [Our toilet is separate from the bathroom and you have to walk from one end of the apartment to the other to get from toilet to bathroom and vice versa.]
• Heating. [Now it's okay, but there were some times in December and January that were really cold and all we have is one mobile heater in the living room.]
• Insulated windows. [I live at a busy intersection and our windows are not insulated at all. Noise + no insulation = bad.]
• The absence of cockroaches. [Granted, the one we found in December was the first and last one so I think it's safe to say there aren't any more, but just that one was pretty gross as it is.]
• An oven. [We do have a stove but no oven and no microwave. Living without a microwave is okay, but sometimes I do miss the occasional pizza or fries. Or muffins. I also miss popcorn.]
• An electric stove. [We have a gas stove, and I really do not fancy having to use a lighter to ignite the gas every time I want to cook something. I also think that gas stoves are just accidents waiting to happen. Like, someone leaves it on by accident, and boom, the entire building explodes. Or something.]

There are probably more things I miss, but these are the most obvious and also things I always took for granted. Does not mean I am unhappy here or spend a lot of time mulling over an oven or vacuum cleaner because I know this is only temporary, but sometimes I do miss them. A little.

I also noticed today that there is a hole in the cable leading from the power adapter to my laptop. Not good. I did not even realize that it would be really bad if I got water on it [and caused a short circuit] until a friend mentioned it [until then I had just been worrying about electrocuting myself]. I put some scotch tape on it, but will have to buy some insulating tape to make sure it is properly insulated against any water or coke spillage. As for how this happened, I have no clue. It’s a small hole so it may have been there for a while, and I just didn’t notice until tonight. The cable must have gotten stuck or squashed or something. I have never had that happen before.

Friday night I went to see No Country For Old Men at the movies with Maggie. What a …disturbing [but interesting] movie! Javier Bardem is a very convincing psychopathic killer. With a really bad haircut. See for yourself. The movie is definitely worth seeing if you can stomach it. [You can always just close your eyes at the gruesome scenes like I did.] I also read up more about the movie on the IMDB discussion boards, and that was really interesting, particularly as there is so much more to this movie than you can see at first glance.]

Yesterday my parents came to Barcelona. We went to Park Güell yesterday evening, as the weather was nice and I figured it would be a good idea to go now as the last time I went [with Julia] it was really foggy and you couldn’t see very far. Today we went to Sagrada Familia but we didn’t go inside because the line was very long. We’ll probably have to go there earlier in the day [like at 9am] sometime later this week. Then we ended up at the aquarium [by accident, sort of] so we went in. It was really expensive [€16 per person, with a 10% discount for students] but it was actually nice. It had a very long underwater tunnel which kind of made it worth it. I would probably not go in again, though. [Just because it really is expensive, and was the third aquarium within the last three years that I have been at. In the end they are not that different. But I would recommend it to someone who has never been at an aquarium.] After that we spent some time walking along the port / beach, had coffee at a café there, sat at the sea for a while, and then went to Parc de la Ciutadella. It was really nice today, warm and sunny. Tomorrow it’s supposed to rain, so maybe we’ll be spending most of the day at museums then, and after that we will see. They’re staying until Saturday so I think we will have enough time to see everything important.
I am really happy that two more of my friends are definitely coming to visit. Last week Aleks booked a flight for the end of May to come here for an extended weekend and tonight Bea booked a flight to come here April 2nd to 6th. I will have to go sightseeing again, and considering that Bea is coming here in two weeks already I hope I will not be fed up with it by then [from sightseeing here all week this week and next week in Madrid] but I am really excited to see them again, particularly Bea who is one of my best friends and who I haven’t seen since August last year.

Here are some pictures from today at the aquarium.

A shark. Some of them were actually pretty big. And they did not eat the diver who came into the aquarium to clean it.

This fish was really nice and didn’t move at all which is why it doesn’t look blurry at all.

A squid. It is absolutely beyond me why anyone would want to eat that.

A pretty cool fish that looks more like a plant. [The name is 'leafy sea dragon'. There are also 'weedy sea dragons', which look like this.]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 0:59 and is filed under Family, Friends, Life in Spain, Photo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.