Estoy hecha polvo!

Phew! I'm pooped! I don't know why, but that particular expression for tiredness seemed to fit what I am feeling best.

Today was the first day of the MoodleMoot. Overall, I'd say I enjoyed myself, but there were up and down parts.

Good (or fun or enjoyble) parts:

• Meeting people. The other volunteers are mostly young, many of them students, and many of them students in technical fields. I enjoyed meeting them and chatting with them. At lunch, I ate with (among other people) two boys studying computer science. Neither of them are what you would stereotype as "nerds" and I got curious and asked them if computer science majors here have a reputation for being weird and for being mostly male. They laughed and gave sort of a resigned groan as if to say, "you mean, they have that reputation where you come from too?" I'm glad I asked :) Though perhaps I should have known, since Israel has proclaimed that our department at la UOC (where we develop software) has all the "freakies".
• Getting really good at saying the same phrases over and over again in Spanish. The first part of the morning, I was repeating, "Here you have maps of Barcelona, a conference schedule, this thing-y here to put your nametag in and a USB memory stick." If I said them in a different order, I would undoubtedly trip over my words. When I said them in the practiced order, I would only sometimes trip all over my words. Later on in the day, I got well-versed in saying, "The Auditorium is down here on the right." (that is, when I could remember how to say "on the right" in Spanish. It kept coming to me in Catalan!). "Yes, Sala A is upstairs." "Yes, Sala C is upstairs." (No one ever seemed to want to know where Sala B was. And that about covers it.
• They gave me an 8G USB drive for volunteering. 8 Gigs.
• I heard a Catalan language cover of Eagle Eye Cherry's "Save Tonight" in the taxi.
• We ate Lebanese food for lunch. Yum.
• Coffee Break. At around 11, there was a pause in the conference and we all got to go downstairs and have coffee and snack. You could have cafe cortado, cafe con leche, one of various kinds of teas, orange juice, water, and as many mini-pastries as you could want. Mini croissants, chocolate croissants, powdered sugared napolitanas, glazed puff pastries with kiwi or strawberry or grape or nuts or...the list goes on. Unfortunately, the pastries were astoundingly mediocre, but they were beautiful and I was amazed at the assortment. I have to admit I tasted a lot of them. After all, Israel told me to. "Aren't you going to eat anything?" He asked me. "I already had one," I told him. "Just one? Don't be shy!" he said as he picked up one pastry for each hand. Later, when it was almost time for lunch, he asked me and some other volunteers if we were hungry. We mostly answered, "not really." He said he wasn't either, what, with the coffee, and the two or three croissants. "Just two or three?" I teased. "Well, two or three chocolate ones," he admitted with a wink.
  

The Not So Good

• It was a long freaking day. I had to be at the University of Barcelona at ~7:45 this morning. I left Citilab at 7 PM. I spent at least 5 of those hours standing. When I got stationed by the door of the auditorium to check that people entering had their conference credentials, I started to get downright miserable. My knees hurt. My ankles hurt. My shoulders really hurt. I was feeling a bit dizzy. I didn't have anybody nearby to talk to and I was stationed right next to the bathroom (more on that later). When Israel told me I didn't have to stand there anymore, I was elated. I managed to find a bottle of water and plopped down in a chair behind the registration desk and at least two people commented on how exhausted I looked. I can't tell you how much better I felt after sitting down for a bit, drinking some water and sucking on a Vitamin C drop.
• When I arrived in Barcelona, I bought a monthly metro pass. It expired yesterday. I hadn't used public transport all day until I was about to go home today. I tried to buy a monthly pass with my credit card at the tram station, but it rejected my card. I didn't have cash, so I bought a one-way ticket, thinking it would get me home and I'd buy a new monthly pass tomorrow. 1.30 Euro. I put in 1.40 and it didn't give me change. And then when I tried to transfer to the metro after two stops, it wouldn't let me. Apparently, it was a tram-only ticket! I didn't even know they had those! I thought that if you bought a TMB (transporte metropolitana de Barcelona) ticket, that it was good for all TMB transports in the same zone! Guess that doesn't apply to the one-use "simple" tickets. Silly me!
  

I think that's probably a pretty good summary of my day. Except the bathroom thing, which I said I'd say more about. Well. In Citilab, they don't have separate men's and women's bathrooms. And it's not like there are individual unisex bathrooms. It's way more bizarre than that. When you walk into the bathroom, there are four or five stalls. It looks just like you have walked into any bathroom you might find in an office building or a movie theater. But then you may realize that there are no sinks. That's because each stall has it's own sink inside, like you might find in some handicap stalls. So it's almost as if there were individual bathrooms all lined up in a row, but they're open on the top and bottom. Let me reemphasize that the first impression is that of having walked into a women's room or a men's room. If you never saw anybody else in the bathroom, you'd think you probably wouldn't think anything of it. Which is why it's so surprising when you come out of a stall and see a man standing there. This didn't happen to me, but when I was stationed by the bathroom, I saw so many people react with surprise, and check outside the door to make sure they were in the right place. I knew from our visit to Citilab yesterday that this was the case. We were outside and had just called a taxi when Israel told me he was going in to use the restroom. I figured I could at least use a tissue so I went in as well. But to find out that we could be using adjacent stalls... it was just too much for me. It's one thing when you don't know the other people in the bathroom with you. But when it's just you and your office manager... no. I'm sorry. but no. There aren't enough awkward turtles in the world.

Well, tomorrow will be another long day, but at least there's the private event at the museum to look forward to. But I'm off to bed. Bona nit!