June 3rd - First Day of Work

   My first day at the Consulate!  I have to say, I have certainly had better starts to the day.  When I arrived in Spain I changed my wristwatch, and yesterday I set my alarm to go off at 6:30 a.m. Unfortunately, I forgot to change the time on my alarm clock.  Needless to say, I woke up at 8:00, and rather than the leasurely hour or so I had planned on I was out the door in less than 10 minutes and running for the metro.  The force must have been with me because I arrived at the Consulate just before when it opened, and my supervisor had yet to arrive.  The morning proved relatively uneventful but exciting.  Anyway, they taught me how to get in and out of the consulate as well as my particular section of the consulate, and all the emergency procedures.

   It was a really cool and informative morning working with lost and stolen passports.  Lunch went well.  The other interns and a few employees walked down the street and got a good yet cheap lunch and took our lunch break.  Then in the afternoon I got to go to the prison to visit two American inmates.  I was very surprised both with the prisons as well as the prisoners.  We also got to ride in the cool diplomatic car, all black, tinted windows, cool license plate, etc.  We drove through the countryside where I got to see some vineyards and learn about the economy of Catalonia and such.  Pretty cool. 

   The evening was just as good.  I went and visited La Ribera y Barceloneta.  I saw Sant Pere de les Puel.les. which is an old Benedictine monastery built in 945 AD using Greek Architecture.  It was kind of scary walking down all these old, narrow Medieval dead-end streets with no exits by myself, but kind of cool.  All of a sudden I emerged in a large courtyard with a fountain in the middle and the monastery across the street.  I went in and only a handful of people were there.  As I mentioned, some have thought me French, and once again a woman came up to me and started talking.  I didn’t understand here the first time and asked her to please repeat, to which she asked, “Don’t you know French? I thought you were French.”  I got it the second time.  She thought I was a Frenchman come for mass which happened to be just starting.  Rather than correct here I just went in and sat in front of Saint Judas for a while until I had planned my route. 

   I stopped by the Antic Mercat del Born, a collection of ruins from an ancient Roman village, but it was closed while they worked on the staircases.  I continued down the Passeig de Picasso and saw some weird stuff representing him and his work, and turned down la Avenida Marques de l’Argentina and walked all the way down to the Marina where I spent the rest of the evening browsing the market, watching the sun set over the city, and even sat and listening to a musician playing on the docks.  Mostly original work or Spanish music, but he ended with his own rendition of Message in a Bottle on acoustic guitar.  Since I had quite a way to get home on Calle Aragon I didn’t stay until it was completely dark, but overall a very nice evening.