Sometimes it's hard.

That's what he said. Anyway. In this episode, Adrienne gets a little emo, so feel free to scroll down to the far more exciting and enjoyable Pasapalabra post. Because sometimes it's hard, and sometimes it's not.

My crazy hilarious Spanish teacher Ata pulled up a graph on the projector screen (after struggling with it for several minutes, muttering, "Oh I luff my life."), charting the typical moods of a study abroad kid. These first few weeks we’re supposed to be in the honeymoon period—everything is novel, every interaction is awesome and quaint and full of excitement and life!!!!!! From this initial honeymoon phase, the line drops sharply ("this isn't new and fun anymore, this is actually life/ Jesus Christ this place is annoying.") and then the rest of the semester is a slow climb up ("Oh hey I'm adapting!"), before it finally levels out at a mid-range level ("Hey this is normal life to me now."). And then once back in America the kid is supposed to plunge into another deep depression/ culture shock. Well that’s a whole lot of awesome to look forward to, I thought. But the thing about it is, if this is the honeymoon period, why don't I feel like it is? 

Sitting with some girls at a cafe yesterday, we started talking about it. Each one of us was incredibly grateful and thankful to be here, we love Barcelona, and thus far, everyone, Spanish, American or otherwise has been nothing but helpful, friendly, and open. And yet none of us were experiencing this amazing feeling of euphoria that our friends in other places were (and every time I hear from them, I get so incredibly happy that they're thriving, the kind of happiness that just fills up your lungs so much that it's hard to exhale. You know what I'm talking about? I hope so or else I probably have some serious medical condition in my lungs I need to deal with soon. So keep talking, people). We were kind of depressed, actually. Maybe it's the language barrier, but none of us really thought that was the reason. After mulling it over, we decided that maybe not having a honeymoon period is okay. Maybe that chart was crap. Maybe we were getting our homesickness out of the way. Maybe we were just seeing things as different, not better or worse than our cultures back home, just different, and that was what was hard. 

You know when sometimes you just get so wrapped up in your head and what you're going through you get so annoyed and you just want an out of body experience to get away from yourself? If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's an example. Imagine your body is you, and your thoughts are Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love. You need to get out of the theatre ASAP because she is a-n-n-o-y-i-n-g. Now, I'm not a religious person. But yesterday I needed to feel stillness and I needed to get over myself. So I found my way into the small 12th century Parroquia de Santa Anna, a church located next to Las Ramblas and Placa de Catalunya, and yet almost impossibly tucked away. Once you enter the courtyard, the hustle and bustle of the city disappears and it becomes eerily quiet. I entered the dark, still, and kind of creepy church. It was like a mini Gothic cathedral, with rib vaults and a high ceiling. I sat in a pew in the back. You know that feeling that old churches have where you can feel the energy of all of the people who've been there before you; the fear, the hope, the desperation, the boredom, the anger, the joy, the resentment? Because of it, even though the only other person in the room was arranging flowers up in the front near the altar, I didn't feel alone, and I didn't need to think about me anymore.

 After a time I walked outside to the cloister and watched ants eat a peach that had fallen off one of the trees.