Wine Tasting & Miscellaneous

Hey everyone!
Another week has gone by in Barcelona and it has definitely been an interesting one. Last weekend, my roommate Margaux and I went to the Picasso Museum because it was rainy and gross out and there's nothing better than a museum on those kinds of days! They have an exhibit going on right now called Secret Images which is a collection of erotic Japanese prints that Picasso collected, as well as some of his art inspired by these prints. While the subject matter was somewhat graphic/strange, it was actually a very beautiful show that also highlighted the printmaking process in Japan, something I found very interesting. We also went to the rest of the museum and saw a lot of Picasso's work, from his early oil paintings in Malagá to his later works such as Las Meninas. It was a great way to spend a rainy day and I will definitely be returning.
My classes also started this week at IES, the program I'm doing my study abroad through. I am taking "Food as an Expression of Culture" and "The City as a Place to Live: the Barcelona Experience." So far, they have been very interesting...I actually look forward to doing the reading assigned to us every night because it is something that fascinates me. My food class has many exciting aspects, such as an in-class wine tasting (score!), field trips to markets and restaurants around Barcelona, and in-class samplings of local cuisine. Needless to say, this might turn out to be my favorite class of the semester! My city class is very interesting as well. It is basically about city planning and what constitutes a "good" city as opposed to a badly laid out one, as well as the difference between European cities and American cities, with a focus on Barcelona, of course. We have some fun field trips planned in that class to different public spaces within Barcelona. My classes at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, one of the local universities in Barcelona, don't start until Monday, and I'm taking "Contemporary Spanish Art" and "Images of Spain in Film" there.
Also this week, I went to the movies to see The White Ribbon (or in Spanish, La Cinta Blanca) because I have heard a lot of buzz surrounding it and admire the director greatly. However...the movie is in German, with Spanish subtitles. Although my brain was working overtime for two and a half hours translating Spanish into English and absorbing the images of what was occurring, I can confidently say that I understood about 98% of the film! I was pretty proud of myself, not going to lie.
Yesterday, Margaux and I went to a wine tasting that our school set up through a local wine shop near the Picasso Museum in the La Ribera district. There were probably fifteen kids from IES there as well, and our instructor was a young man who knew a LOT about wine! We started out with a cava (champagne) that was absolutely delicious. In Spain, cava is kept in a cave (which is where it gets its name) for nine months, or sometimes longer. This creates a pressure in the bottles that is almost three times that of French and American sparkling wines. Our instructor taught us what to look for in a cava, as well as how to hold the glass so that we didn't warm it with our hands. Next up was a white wine called Muscat which was by far my favorite wine of the night. It had notes of lychee and pear that were amazing. Finally, we finished with two red wines, one from 2004, and a more recent one. I loved the 2004 one, and it was really cool learning to distinguish between an older wine and a newer one, as well as finding out exactly what to look for. However, the best part of the tasting came at the end, when our instructor told us that all of the wine we tasted could be purchased for a mere 4 or 5 euros!!! In Spain, because wine is so local and does not have to be imported, it is extremely cheap while retaining extremely good quality. He told us that the same wine would be around 20 to 25 euros in France, so I am definitely grateful that we have this available to us here.
Nursing my (small) headache from last night's tasting (our instructor didn't want us to waste any wine!!), I have to head to Spanish class now. Next weekend, I'm going to Tarragona with everyone in the IES program for a three-day study tour, so I will try to get some pictures from that up as well as a little bit about how my first week of university classes goes!

Lots of love,
Kelsey