head over heels in love.

Best weekend of my life. Last week was pretty busy as I had a midcrit in studio. It continued to be busy because today we had our final theory project due -- which I pulled an all-nighter to finish. So I'm currently waiting for our trip prep for Venice, went on a 2-hour walk this morning to a few churches -- it was supposed to be 3 hours but our professor decided to give us a break since we were all basically falling asleep while standing up. So nap after class, then it's off to Venice first thing in the morning.

Now about the weekend. I went to Barcelona and it was absolutely amazing. We knew some of the things we definitely wanted to see, so we just took a map with us and basically walked the entire city -- eventually getting to our destinations and seeing so much stuff along the way. That, in my opinion, is the only way to explore a city. The receptionist at our hostel told us which metro to take to get places, but why would anyone want to do that? In a new and beautiful city it's such a waste to go from stop to stop underground where you can't experience the city for yourself. That's the one thing I love about all cities -- you can walk everywhere. Technically I could walk to some places at home too, really only the CVS down the street, but a city is so much more adventurous. I do love living in the suburbs, but I also have a great love for the city, as long as it's not NYC. Maybe I haven't experienced NYC the right way yet, but out of the few times I've been there I'm not impressed.

Barcelona, on the other hand, I could stay there forever. It's probably as big as NYC, laid out on a grid pattern which makes it really easy to get around, but there's a completely different feeling about Barcelona. There aren't many highrises, only a few in one district. And everywhere I went there I felt like I was in a completely different place. From the main part of the city to the gardens to the sea -- all just so beautiful. I did not want to leave, and I do want to go back. I'm thinking about looking into doing grad school there -- there's one program I found that's only 2 semesters and probably about a quarter of the cost of Northeastern. I will definitely be doing some intense research during my downtime this week.

Besides going to places such as Sagrada Familia, La Ramba, Casa Mila, and the Barcelona Pavilion, we used part of our day and took a little vacation at the Barcelona Zoo. It was 16 euro, a bit expensive, but so worth it. Barcelona was a vacation in itself, but what we did most of the time there and what we do all the time here is look at buildings. It was nice to forget about the buildings for a few hours and check out the kangaroos and zebras and monkeys and meerkats. It was a very refreshing day, and a great addition to a great weekend.

Tomorrow morning it's off to Venice. Hopefully the weather will be nice!