A Quick Overview of Week Two

Hola Todos!

Two weeks of classes are officially finished, and before Friday! That’s because tomorrow morning (at 6:30 am… uhg!) I leave for Cantabria, a region in the northern part of Spain. This week went by particularly fast, partly because it was only four days long, and partly because I had a visitor!

My friend Hyland is backpacking around Spain until the end of July. She arrived in Madrid about a week ago, and after spending a few days there, she came to Salamanca on Monday to see the city and ME! In my free time, we hung out at cafes and walked around the city to do some sightseeing. Many of the things I saw with her were not new to me at that point. However, Wednesday after my classes, we toured the Convent of Saint Stephen, which until that point I had only seen from the outside. The convent was fairly large and really beautiful. The building had an intricate façade carved into it. Once inside the first thing you saw was an open square courtyard. The courtyard was peaceful and almost completely silent, except for a slightly creepy prerecorded audio/visual of a nun confessing in one of the confessional booths off to the side of the courtyard. I sat in the confessional for a few minutes, but left quickly because something about the video of the fake nun creeped me out a little.

All around the courtyard there were doors leading into other various places in the convent: a tomb, a museum with old artifacts from the church, and a church. The church was by far the most impressive part of the convent. It was large and in the shape of a cross, as was typical of catholic churches built at that time. The front of the church had intricate gold columns and statues of angels as well as a mural. The choir sat on a balcony in the back with an another large mural on the wall above. I’m not sure if mass is still held there, but if it is, I would love to sit in on a service.

Earlier tonight my roommates and I got yelled at for the first time by our Madre. Truth be told, she didn't really yell, and it was actually kind of comical. She did laundry today, and we accidentally took our clean clothes before she had ironed them. In the US this wouldn't be a big deal. I never iron my clothes at home! But when she saw we had taken the clothes before they were ironed, she came in our rooms and demanded the clothes back so she could iron them. I have to admit, they looked a lot better after they had been ironed...

Seeing Hyland and the Convent were the two main highlights of this week. Now I need to get some sleep because I have an early wake up for Cantabria in the morning!

The Convent form the outside

The Courtyard in the Middle of the Covent

 

Hasta Luego!

Aubrey

Adventures in Portugal: Lisbon, Sintra, and Cascais

Hola Todos!

This past weekend I got the chance to fall in love with Portugal.  Let me begin by saying that if you ever have a chance to visit Lisbon, GO! Two days was not nearly long enough to explore this amazing city, especially when you also visit some of the smaller surrounding towns and cities, and you definitely should!

I went with a group that takes students from the university on weekend bus trips, and since most of the JMU group studying in Salamanca went on this trip, it was already bound to be a blast! The trip included transportation to all the different cities and areas that we were scheduled to visit as well as a room in a hotel, all for a reasonable price.

We left Salamanca around three on Friday and arrived in Lisbon around 9 (we gained an hour thanks to the time zone change). By the time we were all situated in our hotel rooms it was close to 10, but we were all pretty hungry, so we took the metro to the barrio alto, which was an area of Lisbon with lots of bars and restaurants, to get food. Despite the fact that none of us spoke Portuguese, the metro was fairly easy to navigate. The restaurant we found in barrio alto was fairly expensive, but I just ordered a side of rice and a glass of wine, so my meal didn't cost too much. One difference between American and Portuguese restaurants: they charge you for the “free” bread that’s put on the table at the beginning of the meal. And it can get expensive! I didn’t eat any of the bread, so I wasn’t charged, but the bread and butter that would have been free in the States cost two euros per person.

The next day we had to be at the bus by 9:30 to travel to the first of our two excursions for the day—Sintra. Sintra is a small town near Lisbon with amazing historical sites. The town itself was small, but beautiful. Many of the buildings were painted bright colors of yellow and blue, and the ones that weren’t were a crisp white. The streets were lined with open air cafes, ice cream parlors, and various shops. I could have spent half a day just wandering the streets of Sintra, and I probably would have if it weren’t for the castles on the hills overlooking the town. There are actually quite a few castles in Sintra, but two were more appealing to me than the rest. A short bus ride up the winding streets of the hill took us to the start of two separate and distinct castles overlooking Sintra. The first was the Palacio de Pena, a brightly colored Romanist palace, and the more popular tourist destination of the two. The second was the Palace of the Moors, a medieval Moorish castle. Unfortunately, we only had about three hours total to spend in Sintra, allowing only enough time to see one of the castles up close. I chose to see the Moorish palace. The palace reminded me of the walls around a story tale castle. The castle wound through the hill, its grey stone stairways extending higher and higher up the hill to provide the best vantage of the surrounding cities and the coast. The view from here was truly magnificent.

After we left Sintra, we headed to a beach town called Cascais. I spent most of my time here just relaxing on the beach. The weather was warm, but breezy, so sand kept blowing in my face and all over my towel. Also, though the Atlantic was beautiful to look at, the water was ice cold, so I only waded in up to my knees. Still, even with too much wind and too cold water, you can't go wrong with a day at the beach!

Saturday night I went out to a club in Lisbon called Urban Beach. It was really cool because the club was located right on the water, so it had a nice view. The music was surprisingly good considering I don't usually like house music much, but they played a good mix of foreign songs I've never heard and familiar ones from the US. It was fun, but it was also a really late night, so I was pretty tired the next day. That didn't stop me from doing some last minute sightseeing in Lisbon before we left though!

Sunday we walked around two different areas in Lisbon—first a large plaza area and second a waterfront area of the city. The plaza area was really beautiful! Many of the buildings were a lighter almost pastel color and there were trees with lilac colored flowers in bloom all around the plaza. In the middle of the plaza was a large fountain. My favorite part of this plaza, however, was the tiling on the ground. The tiles were black and white and arranged in a wiggly, swirvey pattern that made the ground look like it was two different heights. After we left the plaza we went to a waterfront section of Lisbon with a large and stunning convent, a monument to Portuguese navigators with a great view from the top, and a bridge that looked suspiciously like a smaller, less grand (and less red) version of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. As it turns out, the bridge was designed after the Golden Gate and was made with the same materials. The San Francisco comparisons didn’t stop there though. Lisbon also had cable cars, colorful buildings, and was built on the hills (although nowhere near as steep as Lombard Street).

All in all, it was a great trip, and I’m really glad I decided to deal with the six hour bus ride in order to see a little bit of Portugal.

 



Bright colored buildings in Sinatra, Portugal



If you look at the mountain top, you can see the Moorish Castle I visited

 

 



Me on the Moorish Palace with the Palacio de Pena in the background

 



A cool wall in Cascais. I saw lots of murals and art on the sides of buildings in Portugal.

The other side of the Atlantic Ocean!

The Plaza in Lisbon

 

The convent in Lisbon. The line was too long, so I didn't get to go inside.



NOT the Golden Gate Bridge

Hasta Luego!

Aubrey

P.S. Sorry about the lateness of this post. I wanted to get it up by Monday night, but I’ve been fairly busy and I had a lot I wanted to say, so it took a while to get it all together. 

Classes and Cathedrals

Hola Todos!

Well, I’ve finished my first week of classes, and with them, my first of six weeks in Salamanca.

Since the first class on Monday, we’ve really started to dive into the course material. In my Spanish art class, we have already covered prehistoric art and roman art, which both play a huge role in influencing later Spanish art. Next weekend we will travel to Cantabria, an area in the north of Spain, and I am hoping we will have a chance to see some of the cave paintings there! In lit we have started to learn different poetry vocabulary in Spanish, and have started reviewing the different historic periods in Spanish literature. Unfortunately, I don’t think we are going to read an entire novel in Spanish for this course, as it seems to be focused more on poetry and short stories. I guess reading a full length Spanish novel is something you work up to, so hopefully this class will help me gain the skills I need to (eventually) tackle Don Quixote or One Hundred Years of Solitude in its original translation. My third class, Spanish grammar, did not meet for the first time until Tuesday afternoon. As it turns out, this is the only time we meet for this class! Once a week on Tuesdays from four to five, one other girl and I (we are the only two people in the class) meet with our professor to review grammar concepts and ask questions. Other than that, though, we just have a lot of homework to compete from week to week to practice the material on our own. I am actually very happy, albeit surprised, by this arrangement. All the concepts we are going to cover in this class are things I have learned in past Spanish classes, so I see no need to meet with the professor every day. With this arrangement, we get to test our knowledge of the grammar concepts and then ask for clarification on specific areas where we are still struggling. Since there are only two of us in the class, I have no doubt that, despite the fact we are only scheduled to meet in class six or seven times, I will come out with a better grasp on the usage of Spanish grammar.

(Side note: as I write this, we have just crossed the border from Spain to Portugal)

Classes have allowed my mornings to fall into a nice routine, though I wish I didn’t need to be awake quite so early… I have classes from nine to ten and from eleven to twelve, and don’t need to be home for lunch until two, so I spend the time in between studying, socializing, and sightseeing.

On Tuesday mornings many of the museums and cathedrals in Salamanca are open to the public for free. I have made a goal to visit one each week between my nine and eleven o’clock classes, at least until I run out of new things to see. This first Tuesday, I went to the top of one of the two old cathedrals in Salamanca. I believe it was the newer of the two. I went with a friend, and we climbed up numerous flights of stairs until we reached the top. On the way up we heard an ominous and spooky voice, like the narrator of a scary movie, echoing through the stairwells. My friend and I both stopped mid-way up the stairs curious and startled by the frightening voice. As we began to climb again we heard the voice again, but this time a man popped his head out from behind a bend in the stairs, and we both let out a small shriek in surprise (I really want to emphasize the word small because I know if I don’t, I am going to get teased for this). It turned out that the voice we were hearing was just a recording of a man narrating the history of the cathedral, and the man that popped out to scare us was a German tourist who had stopped to listen to the cathedrals history, and decided to try and scare us when he heard us coming up the stairs. Nevertheless, the people who run the cathedral should really consider having that audio rerecorded, this time by someone who doesn’t sound like the devil cursing the place…

From the top of the Cathedral, we saw a breathtaking view of Salamanca. I saw the other cathedral, the university, miles of houses and apartments, and beyond all that I even saw the wide, empty fields that let you know you are beyond the reaches of the city itself. I’ve included some photos of the view from the top of the cathedral at the end of the post.

As previously mentioned, I am currently on a bus from Salamanca to Lisbon, Portugal for the first of my two free weekends. As of now we have been driving for about an hour and a half, so I still have a good four to five hours at least until I will get any sight of the Atlantic. It’s a long drive on a cramped bus, but the views of the Portugal from out the window are stunning, and unlike on the drive from Madrid to Salamanca, I am awake to enjoy it. We are passing lots of tree-covered mountains and small towns full of white houses with brownish-orange roofs.

I’m excited to add another city (and country!) to my list of places traveled. From what I hear, Lisbon has a vibrant and unique personality all of its own. Can’t wait to tell you all about it! Have a lovely weekend!!

 

Classes are held in San Isidoro Monday through Friday

 

The other (I think older) Cathedral seen from the top of the Cathedral I visited on Tuesday morning

 

 
 

You can see where the city of Salamanca ends from the top of the Cathedral

 

One of my first views of Portugal, out the bus window

Hasta Luego,

Aubrey

Tapas!

Hola Todos!

Classes began today at 9 am. I had a really hard time waking up at 8. I was so tired that I had to fight to stay awake during my 9am Spanish Art History class, and I never fall asleep in class. Ever. Aside from being extremely tired, I enjoyed class. I've heard the professor (who is also our program director, Jesus) is hard, but Spanish art is a fun and interesting topic to study, especially in Spain, so I am more excited than worried for this class. It will also be really cool to see many of the works of art that we study in class in person on weekend excursions! After art I had an hour break  before my next class during which I grabbed a cup of coffee to wake up. My next class, Intro to Spanish Lit, went well also. I am curious to see how I do in this class because English (as in reading and analyzing literature and then writing about it) is kind of my thing. However, this is not English lit; this is Spanish lit, and the language barrier may make understanding the prose and poems on a deeper level of significance more difficult because I will first have to make sure I can just read it and know what's being said. My third class, Spanish Grammar, doesn't meet for the first time until tomorrow.

After classes most of the day was fairly typical-- I walked around the city for 2 hours, ate lunch at 2:30, took a short siesta, and went for a run. Where today differed from other days was in our dinner. Typically our Madre (host mother) cooks us dinner to eat around 9, but instead today we went out for tapas!

Tapas are similar to appetizers in that they are small plates of typically two to three bite foods, but unlike appetizers they do not precede the meal. Rather, multiple plates of various tapas make up the meal. You order multiple plates of different tapas and then you eat one or two of each small food to make up the meal.

We visited two different tapas restaurants tonight for dinner. At the first we had bread, chorizo, ribs, and some food that I can only describe as thick bacon pieces with a sweet glaze-- Jesus told us what they were called, but I can't remember now. It all tasted amazing, though I was still hungry at the end, so I was very happy when I realized we were going to a second restaurant for more tapas. The second restaurant was located in one of the rooms above the street in the Plaza Mayor, giving us a beautiful view of the plaza. Up until that point I was very curious about the rooms above the plaza. Were they restaurants? Government offices? Expensive and highly sought after apartments? Dinner in the restaurant gave me at least a partial answer. The food here was also very good! We had bread (bread is a staple here and is served with basically every meal), croquettes, tortillas, fried calamari, beef with papas fritas (aka French fries) and cod wrapped in peppers. Croquettes have become a favorite of mine. They are a small ball with can be filled with meat, potato, cheese, fish, vegetables, or basically whatever you want, and then they are breaded and fried. I've only had ones with meat, cheese and or potato so far, but they have all been delicious! Surprisingly, I enjoyed the fried calamari. It was served with a lemon to squeeze the juice over, so it tasted really good, I just had a hard time getting past the rubbery texture. Tortillas in Spain are not what you typically think of when you picture a tortilla. They remind me somewhat of an omelet or quiche as they are made with eggs, potato, though there can be other ingredients as well.

Dinner ended around 10:30 and I sat in the plaza for a bit before returning to the house. Now its past 1 and I should probably go to bed so I can stay awake in art tomorrow, because unlike with classes in English, I can't zone out for even a second or I get so lost trying to understand the information in Spanish!

Fried Calamari with Lemon (I only ate the rings, not the part that looks like a squid)

The Plaza Mayor

Chorizo. Yum!

Delicious bacon things whose name I forget

 

 

Spanish Tortilla

The view of the Plaza from the window of the second restaurant

the ribs didn't have BBQ sauce like in the USA, which was new for me

Hasta Luego!
Aubrey

Exploring Salamanca

Hola Todos!

I have now been in Salamanca for about three days and have had lots of opportunities to explore the city. Friday and Saturday we had brief orientations in the morning to review information about the culture, the host families, and the classes, as well as to get familiar with a few important places in the city. After a large lunch at 2 pm, the rest of the day was ours to use as we pleased. Although I'm adjusting fairly well to the time change, I will admit that Saturday I took a brief siesta after lunch because even though it was only 3 in he afternoon, I was already wiped out. Actually though, despite my previous reservations about the concept of a siesta in the middle of the day (I don't like the idea of wasting prime daylight hours...)  after even just a few days here I can appreciate the siesta. The days here are incredibly long! I have to be awake for 9 am classes starting on Monday and dinner is not served until 9 or 9:30 pm. Also, if I want to go out after dinner, the nightlife doesn't really even begin to heat up until around 1 am. That means I don't get home until 2 or 3 in the morning (which is a very early turn-in time for Spanish nightlife!), and the day repeats itself in the morning with a relatively early wake up, because even on the weekends I won't be sleeping past 10:30.

Aside from a brief siesta, my afternoons have been spent primarily by walking around the city for a few hours. I love just strolling through the city without any real destination because the entire city is so beautiful and old that it hardly matters where you go. One of my favorite places to walk through is the University campus. The school is over thousands of years old, much older than anywhere in the USA. Also, near the campus there are a few churches and cathedrals with large, stunning domes. In general, the architecture of all the older buildings is one of the cities highlights. Once you get into the city and away from the more major, paved roads, many of the streets are narrow and made of cobblestones. It's easy to forget that these streets exist for cars to drive on, and that they are not just for strolling around the beautiful city. Speaking of walking on the cobblestone streets, I have to say I am extremely impressed by the ease and grace with which the Spanish women are able to walk these streets in stilettos. They poses none of the praying mantis like quality I'm used to seeing in American girls incapable of walking properly in heals-- and they are doing it on uneven ground. Props.

After a few hours walking around the city I would usually stop at one of the many cafés on the sides of the streets and in the Plaza Mayor. At these little cafés I have taken to drinking café con lecher (coffee with milk) which is a small amount off strong espresso with an equal amount, if not more, of milk. I have come to enjoy sitting at these cafés with friends and talking and people watching. Sometimes we order helado (ice cream) or tapas with the café as well. It is a very pleasant way to spend the evenings, and also makes a good snack between meals since lunch is served at 2 and dinner is served around 9. Sunday we had a free day, which I spent similar to the afternoons of the previous two days-- with a long walk exploring Salamanca and then at a café.

Classes start tomorrow morning at 9 am, so I will start to get into a more normal routine. Having a wonderful time so far!! Here are some photos of Salamanca:



La Plaza Mayor lit up at night.

 

Hasta Luego!
Aubrey