Rain, books, and an indoor picnic

Today was an unusual day for Barcelona, at least for me. The last couple of days have been cooler and less sunny, but without anything to show for it. Then today, finally, it rained like cats and dogs! (Side note: living in Spain makes me reconsider all sorts of figures of speech like that, and try to figure out how I would explain them to a non-native speaker, whether I'm going to have to or not. In case anyone reading this doesn't have English as their first language, basically that just means it was raining very much, for a long time.) Luckily, the whole time it was raining, I was inside at work, so I stayed dry. Also luckily, we have a cool translucent roof, which meant that when it was raining so hard, I could look up and see the rain pounding on it.

On a separate note, yesterday I had mentioned to my supervisor that I have trouble reading in Spanish at any sort of reasonable speed. So today he brought me three books of short stories to borrow that have the same story in English on one side and Spanish on the other. They're made for Spanish speakers to learn English, though, because they have little footnotes explaining some of the more unusual English words in Spanish, and no corresponding notes explaining unusual Spanish terms in English. I think it will be helpful, though. I started to read one of them on the train on the way home, and so far, it's slow going.

Finally, tonight my friend and her friend and some other people from our program and I had what was supposed to be a picnic, but due to the weather mentioned above, it occurred indoors. It was a lot of fun, with everyone bringing something to share. My friend made tortilla, which is basically an omelette with a little more structure, as I think I've mentioned before. I brought bread, cheese, and mini chocolate croissant-ish things. For some reason, we kept discussing the meanings of random words and expressions in English, such as "the skin of your teeth." I hadn't met most of these people before, but I had a very good time.

Tomorrow I'm having a 4th of July party for my coworkers and friends at the beach. I am going to attempt to show them what a proper 4th of July party is like, but we won't have a parade or the real kind of fireworks, so I'll just have to do the best I can. I've instructed everyone to wear red, white, and blue :) I hope it's fun!