Salamanca
Two weeks ago I went to Salamanca for three days with our group. It was such a beautiful city and I really have a hard time putting it into words. I feel like I say that a lot but as a pretty awesome quote I saw spray-painted there said "All language is nothing but a poor translation" and trying to describe all of these different cities I've visited with words would be nothing except an injustice. That being said, I'll attempt to explain Salamanca the best I can, haha. First of all, the city is made for college students with half the population only being in town during the school year. La Universidad de Salamanca is actually the fourth oldest university in Europe if you can believe because I know I didn't. After Bologna, Paris, and Oxford the university there is next in line. There are a ton of bars and the night life is much more lively coming from such a town such as Cáceres.
Casual panorama of the Plaza Mayor at night.
The facade to the University of Salamanca from the 17th Century.
We toured through the old school and were able to see some of the original classrooms. The original students weren't able to keep any notes because of the price of paper and instead would listen to their teacher lecture and have to memorize it. After all this they would be placed in a room of all of their peers and professors and be bombarded with question after question to determine if they were done with school. Mind you this was all in Latin, which they had to learn before they could even attend the university.
Sitting before the firing squad in La Capilla de Santa Barbara
Also we toured two extremely old cathedrals, cleverly named The New Cathedral and The Old Cathedral. The New Cathedral is only 250 years young and is the epitome of gothic style. Both the exterior and interiors are ornately engraved with the live of Jesus and saints that are important to the city and Spain in general. Oddly enough, many of these statues that were placed on the facade no longer exist because they fell from the aftershock of the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. The cathedral is actually crooked with a large crack in sections due to this, which is pretty ridiculous. Also another nice little tidbit is that is the only cathedral to have the Four Fathers of both the Occidental and Orthodox Church behind the altar in the entire world. Chew on that.
The Old Cathedral is bit older, naturally, clocking in at about 800 years old and is of Roman construction. It is right up against the side of the New Cathedral and is also a very interesting church to go through, with many ancient frescos on the walls.
We were able to meet up with my host sister Ana and her boyfriend Roberto while we were there and had a pretty awesome time with them. Unfortunately, my other host sister, Ester, was very sick and wasn't able to hang out with us. Being that half of the city is students the prices for clubs and bars were much cheaper and were tailored towards students. I would go back here in a heartbeat, but we'll see how the ol' wallet feels towards the end of my trip haha.
Sevilla
Sevilla really is something special. Many of you may not now that most of Spain was actually conquered and inhabited by Muslims for the better part of 800 years. Sevilla was the capital of their state and you have to imagine that they imparted a bit of their culture on the region. Well you would have imagined correctly. At times I had to remind myself that I was still in Spain and wasn't studying abroad in Saudi Arabia.
I kid you not, those are all pictures from the Real Alcázar in Sevilla. I didn't take a trip to Saudi Arabia or something for these pictures...I was in Spain the whole time.The palace was enormous and right across the street from the third biggest cathedral in the world after St. Peter's (Vatican City) and St. Paul's (London). These pictures really don't do justice the intricate geometric tile work that these people put into this building. Outside of the buildings were at least 5 acres of expertly-kept gardens all smack dab in the middle of one of the biggest cities in Spain. The craziest part is that this isn't a Muslim palace, it was actually built with catholic intentions in mind with many figures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus throughout. Oh, and also this is where the Catholic Kings, Fernando and Isabel, were married.
Finally, we saw The Cathedral of Sevilla which I said earlier is the third largest Catholic church in the world. It was very cool to see in comparison to St. Peter's but it was a bit of a disappointment with the amount of renovations that were going on. That being said we still saw about 250 grams of where Christopher Columbus may or may not be kept. His body is separated all over the world so they're pretty sure it's him, but they're not positive.
I guess it could be him, seems like someone important at least.
One thing is for sure though and that is that both of his sons are buried in the church and that there is a small chapel where all of the sailors prayed before sailing into the unknown of the New World. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.
We also saw some Flamenco, which is a pretty big part of Andalucian culture. It's a dance which is extremely difficult to learn, a style of singing which is extremely difficult to sing, and a style of guitar which is damn near impossible to play. Just by listening to it you can tell there is some Arabic influence and if I knew much about dancing I'm sure you could see that as well. There is so much passion in the song and dance that it absolutely mesmerized me the entire time. I couldn't keep my eyes off the dancer nor focus on anything but the beautiful runs of the singer's voice. If I can find time, I'm going to try to sing like this because it just digs so deep into a person's soul and just emits raw passion to the audience. It seemed like the singer lost himself in the song a few times and sang as if he was on his own. It was easily one of the coolest things I've seen since being here. I'll try to put my video up on Facebook, it's totally rad.
Finally, I've started my project while being here which is teaching in a school. I've only been there for five hours at this point but boy is it some work. I teach 11-14 year olds in all sorts of classes like history, geography and English, sporadically switching between Spanish and English. I would be rushed to talk about the 4th of July right after explaining the layers of the Earth and then shoved into a classroom to talk about the importance of teenagers volunteering outside of school. I start up again tomorrow and, although I'm nervous because I have no plans going into it, I can't wait to talk to all of these kids about my culture because I get to feel special being the only American! Anyways, sorry for the delay on sending any postcards, I'm just awful at it. I'll get them out as soon as possible and as soon as I refind everyone's address haha. Love and miss everyone!
¡Hasta la próxima vez!
