Montjuic: Beautiful Parks in Barcelona & A PhD Student's First-Year Rant

I realize I've been MIA for the last month, but I have a good excuse! 

Montjuic Park, Barcelona - BREATHE

Three and half weeks of intense working (schools close shortly!), practicing for the DELE B2 official Spanish exam (3 weeks to go!), studying, and preparing for my first year PhD project plan and presentation to the board (a few days ago).  Basically, it was a 15 minute presentation with 30 minutes of intense questions and suggestions so you can have 10 days to revamp what you're doing and re-submit it (in progress!) Not to mention planning a pilot-study so that I can test my instruments this summer on my 'guinea pig' friends to make sure they're A-OK for my real participants this fall ;)

Terrace studying fun!

This involves many, many 3-4 hours of sleep nights. I have managed a few trips to the gym, walking the lovely Kiara (who is in LOVE with my friend Olivia), cooking a couple healthy three course dinners for a midsummer night's fun ;) and a couple of beautiful brunches with Olivia (one Canadian item I miss is the concept of brunch!). Other than that, I've been shut up in my beautiful apartment/terrace sorting out inventing linguistic tasks, trying to program a horrible software called DMDX  to get it to do my bidding (ick!), and typing up an academically sourced plan for the next four years of my life.

Fried egg, chickpeas, peppers, avocados and tomato sauce!

Orange juice and cava on the Terrace (at 10 am)

My Happy Study Buddy!

Yup, that's the life of a PhD student. 

I love it!

Now, in the hopes the  paragraphs above haven't bored you to death with geek-iness, here is a much overdue slideshow of Montjuic Park. Sean and I visited the park and spent the day lazy-ing around the first week of June (he was kind enough to jet over here from France to puppy-sit the weekend I was in London and stayed the week)

In case you haven't made it to Montjuic yet, it is spectacular - we barely saw half of it. It is a mini-city of wonder, with a cemetery, many gardens, a restaurant with a lovely three course meal for 15 euros, fountains, museums, part of a uni department,  modern art structures, a funicular, a castle and more. It's only a couple euros to take the metro/funicular up from Parallel station to have a beautiful, quiet view of the city. Enjoy the slideshow! (If you are on a mobile device that does not allow Flash, please click here for the link, or here for the still photos.

Don't worry...I do have summer adventures ahead aside from pilot project data analysis--- beginning with a week in Bordeaux  mid-July, three weeks in August to return to childhood passions (the piano and writing fiction), days on the beach reading novels, and two weeks in the UK for a couple of weddings in August. Summer!!!