The Dory of Mountain Climbing (Sing it with me: Just Keep Jogging...)

Today was a Mellow Monday at its best.  For me at least.  My coworkers made the normal Monday grumbles, which surprised me both because of the contrast with my own mood and because I had a "Holy crap they have 'a case of the Mondays' here, too?" moment.  I wonder if Office Space became a cult classic here after it was dubbed in Spanish.  If not, I may need to have labmate movie bonding time, Netflix providing.  I should tell you that my lab atmosphere is highly informal.  There are regular discussions about people's outfits (usually between Nadia, Sergio, and Paula about Sergio... and sometimes Nadia), victory dances when someone announces they're going to the beach (it seems to be the equivalent of the touchdown dance in the US), and general ribbing about people's social lives.  For example, Grand Poobah Ignasi saw me yawn today, which I believe is residual traces of jetlag but he instantly perceived as Post-Fun Weekend Exhaustion (PFWE).  I believe it looked like this:

and am definitely hoping it didn't look like THIS or THIS or THIS and especially not THIS.  Awkward conversation that followed:

Me: I have no idea why I'm yawning.  I got nine or ten hours of sleep last night!

Ignasi (with knowing smile): Ah, but what about the night before?  One? Two?

Me (sheepishly): Three...

Ignasi: Ah... (smiles victoriously)

The ribbing about PFWE commenced and survived long enough to become lunch table discussion fodder.  Ever since they found out that I'm doing a new thing every day, they like to hear about my tourist adventures.  Today, however, it was simply the lead up to the discussion of what the heck I was doing Saturday night that made me so tired.  When I admitted that I went out, the table cheered, and normal life immediately resumed.  The tourist has been christened by the city of Barcelona.  One more Rite of Passage that I can cross off my list.

At the end of the day, I got to go to see the Estabulari (Rodents), the name my lab uses to refer generally to the animal crate highrises in another wing of the laboratory.  In these rooms, gleaming shelves hold boxes of 2-6 rats or mice with shining pelts and squeaky voices.

 (Not my lab, but a close approximation of what it looked like)

The room has a smell of sawdust mixed with something I couldn't recognize, but which probably has to do with happily fed rodents.  After several rooms of mice (the most common research mammal here, and possibly anywhere), we looped around to see the bigger animals.  On one side of the room, pigs crowded around a trough, as pigs are wont to do.  One pigs long, pink tail was wagging as if it were a dog as it happily grunted.  We oohed and awwed, glanced at the uglier spotted sheep who stared us down, and retreated, peeling off the layers of surgical scrub-like gear required to keep the animal wing isolated.

I looked like a green version of this.

It was my first real interaction with lab animals, and sadly I'm going to have to see one of those cute piggies splayed open tomorrow when my labmates do heart surgery.  It really makes the science behind all those discoveries real.  I think it's hard for people outside of the research environment to really understand the hours, the methods, and the meticulous research that went on in a laboratory to produce the minutiae of their everyday lives.

But let's not get preachy.

Tonight, I had the opportunity to run with more lovely people from around the world, several of whom were in Thursday's group.  The challenge: show Montjuic who's boss.  Montjuic, which I visited briefly on Saturday in the form of Fundacio Miro, majestically watches over the city of Barcelona.  It is a hill with a history: it literally means Jew Hill in medieval Catalan, but nobody seems to know why.  They think it might actually come from the Latin phrase Hill of Jupiter, which would make a lot more sense.  Montjuic is currently home to a fortress, 

which was used during the Civil War by Franco as a prison and execution site for anarchists, Nationalists, and Republicans (basically, anybody and everybody).  But today, the thing people go there to see is the view of the city

and, if I do say so myself, the sunsets.  We arrived at the top just in time to catch the sunset flaring over the mountain and illuminating the city in one last glow.  Today was relatively cloudy, so my fellow runners made me promise to come see it another time when the sky is clearer.  I don't think that will be a hard promise to keep.

Spotted: A volunteer opportunity to walk dogs at a local shelter.

I sent them an e-mail expressing interest, and received a canned reply saying I'd get a real response ASAP.  Luckily, fate brought me a dog today.  One of the other runners brought his puppy, who was a ball of energy.  After I gave him a 10-minute rubdown, we were immediate best friends and are clearly in love.  The best part of the run was seeing him drag his owner up the hill, then get tired and give a big puppy yawn, then see something up ahead and jettison away, reinvigorated by sheer fascination with everyday life.  I think the puppy has the attitude I'm trying to have toward Barcelona.