One year in Barcelona
So on Friday the 16th was the anniversary of our first year in Barcelona. It has gone so fast and it only feels like a couple of months ago when we were looking for apartments. We were lucky and managed to find a really nice apartment after 2 days of arriving here. Of course researching from London helped a lot. We are very centrally located near Placa Espanya, 10 minutes bike ride from work, 15 minutes bike ride to Camp Nou and with a gorgeous view from our living room. Settling in to a new country has been a lot less pain than previously thought. We still miss family and friends from London, but thanks to Easyjet’s low fares and high frequency of flights we have been able to go back a number of times since to visit.
My Spanish unfortunately is not at the level where I can confidently talk to people fluently. It takes me too long for thought processes before I can actually speak. However I am working on it. Now we have quite a few Spanish people in the office who understand my need to have a slow conversation, it will help improve my Spanish.
On Wednesday is the football match I have been praying for since we moved. FC Barcelona vs Liverpool at Camp Nou. We have been to a couple of FC Barcelona matches before but both have been pretty small matches against teams that FC Barcelona could easily have played a second string 11 and so the atmosphere had been pretty crap. Of course it takes a lot to matche the atmosphere at Anfield especially in a Champions League match. I have memories of Liverpool vs Juventus, Liverpool vs Chelsea on the run up to the win in Istanbul, where the crowd noise was still playing in my ears hours after the end of the matches. Spanish football is very laid back with a lot of technical skill and ball retention in midfield while English football is very fast, lively and agressive in the tackling. Liverpool, I feel have a good mix of both which should make for a very entertaining set of 2 games against Barcelona. Alia and I were lucky to get tickets for the game at Camp Nou. We became “socis” of FC Barcelona for the ability to purchase tickets before the general public. A month or so ago, 500 tickets were made available for “socis” of FC Barcelona on the Internet and at Servi Caixa cash machines. The Internet site being used did not work properly in Firefox, Safari or Opera causing IE6 running under wine with the help of IES4Linux to be needed. It took 2 hours of a very sluggish site and continually having to try different seat combinations to get 2. But it was worth it. Whether Liverpool play again at the Camp Nou while we still live so close to it, I cannot be sure so it was an absolute must to get these tickets.