Maritime Time

Today I woke up, got a little coffee at Fornet, and then went to the Maritime Museum. I met up with a girl named Sarah from my Latin America class, as going to the museum is actually an assignment for us. The one-page response (I love studying abroad) isn't due for another 2 weeks, but I'm going to be out of town for the next 2 weekends so I won't really have time before then to visit.

An audio guide is included in the price of admission, and my professor recommended we pick them up for the museum. They were pretty spiffy little Vodafone Palm-Pilot looking devices. Each stop was funny though, because as they were informative, each point was narrated by characters with accents, speaking in the first person. Clever but sometimes a little odd. We walked into the main (freezing) room of the museum, which is where they used to build ships back in the day. They had a humongous and very ornate ship in the middle of it all. It really must have been horrible being one of the oarsmen on those big ships.

We had a bunch of spots to check out that our professor had lined up for us. One of them was watching the 10 minute video in the audio-visual room. The movie was again from the first person perspective, and then the wall that the movie was playing on opened up. No one else in the room moved. Eventually Sarah and I got up to look outside the walls and they started to close. Turns out we were in fact supposed to walk through them. Oh well, no harm done.

It was an interesting museum and I'm glad I went. Definitely a great place for people who love boats and models of boats. We learned some good stuff about trade between Catalunya and the New World. The most interesting thing to me where these things called "Exvotos." Basically, they were wooden plaques commissioned by sailors who had survived shipwrecks. The plaques depicted the scene of the wreck. They were then brought to a shrine to the Virgin Mary for bringing them home safely. Pretty interesting.

I came home after the museum and did some work. I hung around the house tonight, warmed up some left over chicken tacos (:-D), showered, and did some more work. Made a visit to ikea.com, always a favorite. I'm going to go to bed now because I have class at 8:30 tomorrow. It should be a pretty typical day, and then tomorrow night our Spanish house activity is going to be to watch a movie at home. Sweet.

Besos