Mazie

We just landed in Budapest!! Prague and Bratislava coming up also this weekend! I can already tell I’m going to love Hungary. The airport was clean and orderly and felt very Scandinavian. It’s silly, but I feel like I can gauge tell how much I vibe with a place based on the airport bathrooms 😆.

I took a little photoshoot at the Barcelona airport while I was waiting for my friends to get there :)

And I figured I’d include the view from the window of the plane… I glanced over and gasped when I noticed those mountains 😍

Hashtag sitting in the coolest hostel ever in Morocco trying to do my homework one hour before its due because everyone forgot it’s Sunday but my fingers are too frozen to type and my classmates are throwing up all around me.

Hehehehe at least I’m in Morocco.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!!! I absolutely must go to bed, but wanted to send something on this holiday that I love so very much!

I love you all and eat some chocolate cuz I haven’t had ANY 😱. A valentines not to be forgotten, that’s for sure!

OMG WHAT THE HECK I’M IN AFRICA NEW CONTINENT UNLOCKED THIS IS SO COOL HOW HAVE I LIVED TWENTY YEARS AND NEVER BEEN HERE.

Hey loyal readers! Sup from Morocco!!! I’m here until Sunday and am ready to soak in every last drop (literally and figuratively- it was raining pretty hard today). Today we flew in (can’t seem to escape windy, bumpy flights) met our Morocco Exchange program leaders who are all super nice, rode camels on the beach, got a tour of a small Medina (city/town), exchanged Euros for Moroccan Durham, tried some traditional breads with cheese, took a 3 hour bus ride into Rabat, the capital of Morocco, and met the host families we will be staying with for the next two nights! Our host family is a mom and dad with two daughters who I would guess are 15 and 22, maybe? I could be very wrong. They are all so nice and welcoming and have told us innumerable times to make ourselves at home :). We learned about Moroccan culture throughout the day from our program guides, but there is nothing more real than actually staying in someone’s home. It’s things like being instructed on how to use a squatty potty and told that you won’t use silverware at dinner that really got to me. Then there’s the language aspect: I don’t know a single word of Arabic, and it’s not like Catalan where you can kind of piece it together if the words look similar to Spanish. It’s crazy how impactful it was to look at street signs and store names and just be so completely lost. At dinner, our host mom and host sister mainly spoke to one another in Arabic, which left me feeling unsure if I should interrupt to ask a silly question in English or just smile and laugh along. I can’t even put into words how cool and different it all was and how hard I was resistigg geeking out about every tiny little thing, trying to remind myself that this is just another version of mundane, everyday life. Before I zonk out for the night (I’ll attach a picture of our room), I have to say just how good the food our host mom made was. If I only had one word to describe it I would say: flavorful. She made homemade bread (actually everything was completely homemade) with a veggie/eggplant dip, and these roasted curried potatoes with chicken; those chicken and potatoes were some of the most flavorful I’ve ever tasted.

When school is canceled due to the weather 🤷‍♀️ (Me enjoying the Wind Day)

Tomorrow we have a Wind Day. There will be no school, no activities that aren’t completely necessary, and no absolutely no fun. Just kidding. But only about the no fun.

You might say: Huh, that sounds like a snow day… Just with wind. And you would be exactly right!

Although Mazie the Meteorologist says y’all are making a big deal out of a little breezy blustery wind, Weather App the more professional meteorologist argues back with a solid rebuttal, claiming a Severe Coastal Event Warning, Severe Wind Warning, and pleasant breezes up to 50mph.

Although I may not sound it, I am delighted that the Wind chose tomorrow to strike- I was really starting to question how I was going to catch up on six assignments, an ungodly number of pages of reading, two job applications, and packing for Morocco in the 0 free hours I had tomorrow. Well thank you, Wind, for saving my life: by vastly improving the quality of the assignments I will be turning in tomorrow when I would’ve been at my internship and by ensuring that I will not become a wind-flattened pancake on the sidewalk tomorrow (although that may still happen… there’s gonna have to be some pretty serious wind for me not to leave the house).

I don’t like to speak for other people, but I feel that my brother Tyler would also be delighted in this news. How often is it that you get a Wind Day on your birthday? Granted it’s a little less cool than snow (literally and figuratively).. and he’ll still have to go to school… but at least now he can stride confidently into Edina High School knowing that the Catalonians in Spain are taking the day off in celebration of him. If a lot of wind means sound travels farther, he might even hear us singing happy birthday on the breeze and think: If insanity starts to set in when you turn 16, I wonder the state I’ll be in at 60?

There’s actually another birthday tomorrow that might be just a bit more important for Spain, but certainly not for Meteorologist Mazie. It’s St. Eulalia’s day, the Patron Saint of Barcelona and martyr against Roman authorities. Legend holds that the 13 year old girl was beaten in 13 different ways before they managed to kill her- that’s true grit right there. St. Eulalia’s day is celebrated every year at this time to recognize her bravery and defiance and remember the values of faith and justice that her story surfaces. I am fairly certain this year will be the first combined St. Eu-Wind-lia’s Day, but there’s gotta be a first time for everything! Although strong wind and activities like stacking humans and playing with fire- what many Catalán traditions entail- is probably not the best combo. Maybe celebrations will have to happen on Friday the 13th… funny how that happens. As long as we don’t have another Wind Day.

I encourage you all, even if its just in spirit, to get out there tomorrow (probably leaning on spirit for this too unless you’ve been wanting to explore life as a flattened sidewalk pancake) and enjoy you’re Wind Day!

The day’s chocolate (and some other things I talked about in my super long post)!

All of the little scenes are from the chocolate museum and were made out of chocolate.

Even if I am putting other things off, posting is still a very valuable use of time on its own. It’s productive procrastination as I like to say. Anyways, there are two points to this blog post.

1. To tell everyone about my day (cuz why not)
2. To report on recent earth-shaking happenings in the music world that you mines while go bury yourself in a hole if you don’t know about. You can dig yourself back out after reading this.

Today was of the go-go-go type- not quite rushing from one thing to the next, but walking to the next thing, just really really fast. My route to class Monday and Wednesday mornings is: Metro L7: El Puxet - Plaza Catalunya, then a 20 minute walk from Plaza Catalunya to Carrer de Casp 130, Oficina COACB. From there I scan my fancy little student access code and walk up seven flights of stairs and down the hallway to my class. It’s literally the farthest classroom in the entire building. One of these days I’m gonna make a day in my life vlog and you can all watch this process instead of reading about it, which I’m sure is just riveting. Anyways, the point is that I can be a bit of an optimist in the mornings and sometimes the Google Maps walking calculations really do forget that you have two functioning legs and are not 105 years old. This morning I attempted to shove the 20 minute walk into more of a 10 minute kind of thing, which is better than some mornings have been but still not ideal (my dream is a lazy walk down the street where I can stop into a bakery for a croissant). I was 5 minutes late to class and sounded like a freight train bulldozing into the room after championing all those stairs.

We took a field trip today in my Comida y Cultura class to the Barcelona Chocolate Museum (I don’t think micro.blog really does emojis, but I would put a shocked face or chocolate bar or something here cuz thats how I felt when I learned there was a museum about chocolate in this city- and that we were going!). It was a very small museum; the coolest thing were the sculptures made purely of chocolate. They had Messi, the Smurf’s, Yoda, some historical scenes, a giant elephant, and a bunch more stuff made out of chocolate (I’ll include some pictures). Oh yeah, and our tickets themselves were bars of chocolate! Delicious! Turns out me and one other girl from my class took too long inside, so the rest of the class walked back without us and left us to rush back (no wonder…) to school just in time for my second class.

Cross-Cultural Psych was also fun today- we watched a documentary about babies. There was no narration which would usually bore me, but this documentary was actually really interesting! It followed four babies and their mothers from distinct areas of the world- Namibia, Madagascar, San Fransisco, and Tokyo, during their first year of life and hinted at the multitude of different ways to raise a happy and healthy child.

After class I have a break from 1:00-3:30, and today I set out on a mission: All I wanted for lunch was my absolute favorite “Empanada Pollastre” (which is just an empanada with chicken and peppers) from a bakery, or Forn de Pa in Catalan, right by my internship. As my internship is a solid 30 minute walk from school, I usually try out something different on school days, but today my mind was set. But when I arrived at 1:30 with a chicken empanada shaped hole in my heart, the lady told me that they hadn’t made any today and they’d be back tomorrow. Cry. After much deliberation I found a solution: Tío Bigotes, an empanada chain place that looked good. Another 30 minutes later I walked in the door there and ordered two empanadas: a spicy chicken and a caprese. These empanadas were a little longer and flatter than the one from the Forn de Pa by my internship, so they weren’t quite capable of filling the hole in my heart exactly, but nevertheless they were quite good (and they were heated up!). On my way back to school, and with time to spare, I passed the most adorable and delicious looking bakery I had ever seen in my life and simply had to stop. I ordered this mini hazelnut-filled donut thing and it was the most adorable and delicious tasting donut I had ever eaten in my life. And an added plus was I got to sit there amidst the heavenly smells for a while and do some work before I had to head back for my next class!

My last class of the day is Sustainable Development where the lectures are genuinely so interesting. Today we continued learning about how the city of Barcelona as we know it today has been shaped by historical factors and conflict, especially the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship, conflict between Madrid and Catalonia, and the 1992 Olympics. We also had some time to work with our final project groups- we’re building a project proposal for the UK’s Darwin Initiative, assisted and constructed largely by AI with us as overseers and quality control. Its funny how professors have completely opposite views on AI use for assignments- I think my Ecospirituality professor from St. Olaf would faint if she heard about this project.

After class ended it was another 30 minute fast walk over to LOVECYCLE Barcelona for my first in-person spin class in Spain, which also happened to be free! The building was hip and cool, and so were the other people in the class (if I’m going to judge books by their covers). The class itself was SO much more fun than any other spin class I’ve taken, probably because it was live and the energy in the room was palpable, but also because the instructor literally had us dancing the entire time! It was never: Set your resistance to blank and cadence between blank and blank, but instead she would tell us a number of times to spin the resistance dial and then everyone would naturally fall into rhythm with the music. Every song was a dance party- she would give us a sequence of new moves for each one. I’m not kidding when I say dancing while spinning had so many benefits: it gave your upper body and mind a workout along with your legs, it noticeably increased the group’s energy, it made me connect with the music more, and it helped keep me from getting bored. I felt like such a newcomer trying to understand the instructor’s shouted Spanish over the loud music (also in Spanish) and being constantly surprised by class routines and traditions (like when everyone waves their towels in the air during the last song). But it was seriously a really fun time- cultural immersion for the day? check!

It was also right on my way home, so I had the perfect amount of time to get home in time for dinner at 7:40 after class ended at 7:05. If, of course, you define perfect as 35 minutes for a 35 minute walk. I barreled up those streets and ran red lights for fifteen minutes until I glanced down at Google Maps and saw that I somehow still had 30 minutes to go and was going to arrive late for dinner. So I shook off the confusion (my route was basically a straight line following a big road for 2km, so if I actually did manage to stray from the route, I’m honestly impressed) and barreled even harder this time all the way back. I did some serious barreling and walked in the door 8 minutes late, but better 8 minutes than 9!

Dinner was the most wonderful experience tonight. Cristina made cheese tortellinis with tomato sauce which was just so perfect, and we had our usual salad with the crunchy fried onion bits and bread. She also put out these fried fish stick things which were pretty good. After we cleaned up, Natalie rushed off to go see a movie and I ate my leftover chocolate pudding while watching a bit of Cristina’s game show. Then I decided to be smart and kind to my future self and hopped in the shower. Turns out that shower was an experience almost as wonderful as dinner.

Back in my room drying off, it was almost 10pm and I was still lingering in all that wonder and dreaming about getting a lot of sleep when I opened up my laptop to the scariest email I’ve ever received. The sender was Wrangell Mountains Field Studies, Alaska, one of the places I applied to for the summer, and the subject read: “In google meet call- here’s the link if you’re having trouble getting in”. I had totally forgotten that I scheduled an interview with them for tonight, because who schedules an interview for 9:45pm other than a forgetful study abroad student? I immediately turned the light in my room back on, threw a professional-looking shirt on, and logged in, blurting out an apology that was 70% truth and 30% excuse. I quickly realized that it didn’t matter that I’d been late, because there was no way I was going to be participating in this program anyways. Just a few of the reasons, from most to least salient, include: It costs $14,000 for seven weeks, there’s a bunch of fancy required gear, the guy interviewing me was way too cool, and you’re conducting actual field research and writing scientific reports the whole time. I know that last one is literally in the name, but somehow I read “field studies in Alaska” and understood “fun camping trip in Alaska”. It was still cool to hear about the program though, and now I’ll get to see if I even would have the option to go (if they accept me).

Then I did like two minuscule productive tasks and began writing this and, just like that, it appears my dreams of getting sleep jumped out the window to their death. I should’ve known to never leave dreams unsupervised. Ooooh inspirational quote moment, I like that! Tomorrow I’m back at my internship and part-time piano teacher position with a growing interest base, and then Friday at 4:00am Natalie and I will be heading to the airport bound for a verified 100% rainy, no getting around it weekend in Portugal! But its all good because tomorrow I am going to have a chicken empanada for lunch.

OMG I forgot I was going to write about Noah Kahan! No time- he came out with a new song, you have to listen, it’ll change your life, you also have to go to his tour, that’ll also change your life. And text or call or talk to me about it cuz I’d love to change our lives together :)

Some (ok actually kind of a ton) of pictures from the last week!

OMG I just have to say: Every time I get back for the night, the first thing my host mom says to me is “Que tal su día? Esteis cansadita (How was your day? You must be tired!)” and I know its said out of a kind and caring place, but it comes across as condescending and gets on my nerves, to the point where I flat out will say “Nope!” and give her a big, energetic grin to really prove it. It feels like a statement more than a question; like her thinking through the events of my day, taking a look at me- I must just naturally look tired- and concluding that there’s no way the person standing in front of her could have survived a day like that without ending up weary. Like thanks Cristina, but its going to take more than a 30 minute metro ride, a few hours helping kids with math or science or photography or piano lessons, and a 45 minute walk back accompanied by some banger music to break me down like that.