Barelyfocused

It’s been a whole month now since I moved to Barcelona.

It actually feels more like just a couple of long and exciting days, with many things happening, and my brain not really caring about recalling all the periods of sleeping and eating. At the same time, all the things going on directly before arriving here now seem so light years away.

Life is good here. Found a nice, quiet living place in the city center, about 30 minutes, or roughly one unit of my Spanish lessons, walking distance away from the office. Reason good enough to actually do the lessons on my way to work, plus I get a perfect dose of walking every day.

Managed to see a few of the more obvious landmarks, like Park Güell or Sagrada Familia, but doing worse at finding more ordinary places, like household product stores. I guess I will need more than 4 weekends to walk all the neighborhood.

Surprisingly, wave of tourists is quite a nice change after a year spent in my quiet and small hometown, especially with my, obviously biased, ears frequently catching phrases spoken in Russian and other central-European languages. The army of locals walking around in the night with six-packs of beer and trying to sell a can to every person passing by, tourist or not, is definitely more annoying.

And… the sea. Attracting both local people and tourists, so beaches are quite crowded. But for somebody who have spent all his life in mid-land places this is not really that discouraging. Besides, not many people seem to like to walk a couple extra minutes, in full sun, to get to the end of those narrow artificially elevated peninsulas cutting into the sea, where you don’t hear the city anymore, and there are only waves, wind, sun and a couple of quiet amateur fishermen.

And I get to see the sea on the weekdays at work. Fluendo’s office has a great, panoramic view of the sea and the port, and most of the developers have their desks in the “seaside” part. All those sail boats, bigger and small, leaving the port or coming back quietly and graciously is a sight that will take me some time to get used to. Not mentioning the huge ferries and ships passing by just 20 or 30 meters away from our windows…

I guess the view is one of the things that makes working at Fluendo fun. One of many things. But I’ll write about it some other time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 23:49 and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.