I'm all brain-dead lately and I don't know why. I think I've been speaking English too much, walking around a lot; maybe it's just that being in a constant state of indecision is exhausting. The more I think about getting a Richter grant the sillier it seems. Barcelona is like one big stand-still.

My cousin, Manong Willie, randomly called me yesterday. I guess Uncle Bong finally called him and gave him my number. He wanted to meet up that day, took me to a Filipino restaurant and then to our cousin's house to meet some more fam, eat roasted chestnuts and drink Fanta, sing some kareoke- you know, the usual. Lani (I hope that's her name) is my second cousin, maybe (Willie and I have this really ridiculous language barrier to overcome that we pretty much didn't, so I don't really know how she and her husband are related to us); she speaks Spanish pretty well so we did a weird hybrid of English and Spanish, and her husband, Reyno, was pretty fluent in English, but it depresses me that I can't understand Willie. I imagine that another reason for being so brain-dead is that my inability to communicate due to language barriers has now increased two-fold. Ughh.

But Willie walked me to school afterwards. Went to the library with Prim, who gained us special access to look at old books. Ridiculous! I got to casually flip through Hartmann Schedel's Liber Chronicarum, written on lamb's skin in 1493- you know, no big deal. There were two copies of 16th century editions of Dante's Inferno, one that had been successfully hidden from the church during the Inquisition and one that was censured (like the scratching out of the word "Divine" before "Comedy", and other sacrilege and blasphemies). And a first edition Lope de Vega, and a text book (huge! with dimensions close to 1.5 ft x 1 ft x .5 ft) of Roman law, with professor's comments surrounding the text, with student's notes surrounding the comments, all tiny and perfectly scrawled, with hands with huge middle fingers pointing to the very important lines, and with the occasional 12th century daydreamin' doodle of a crown in the margins. The holes left by centuries of book worms were cute.