Trip Home

My trip home was quite exciting. I left my apartment at 6am, and even though I was only a few blocks from the bus station, I called a taxi (my first time calling a taxi in Salamanca) to take me there because I had 2 suitcases, a carry-on bag, and my backpack. One of my suitcases was full of rocks and books, and although it was very small, it weighed over 100lbs. A few weeks before I left, I found out that there was a new bus service to the Madrid that went directly from Salamanca to the airport, which was excellent, because I had way too many bags to worry about. When I got to the airport, I found out that my small bag was too heavy to legally fly, so I switched a chunk of eclogite with a pair a sneakers, and that did the trick. The person who ended up checking my bags was in a hurry, and didn't charge me any over-weight luggage fees, even though both of my bags were over-weight. It was really annoying when I was at the counter getting ready to leave, and the people started speaking English to me as soon as they saw my passport, because their English was hard to understand, but I wouldn't have had any trouble understanding their Spanish.
The flight to the states was pretty uneventful. The person I was sitting next to was really friendly, and it was a pretty pleasant trip for 9 hours in an airplane. We left an hour late, which is perfectly normal when you're flying out of Spain, and had to change our flight path to avoid a big storm, so we ended up getting to Dallas 2 hours late. It took forever to go through customs, and by time I was ready, my flight had left. I was really tired from my trip, and I didn't know what to do, so I ended up at the information desk looking lost a bewildered. Fortunately, there was the really nice woman named Dianne who helped me figure out what to do. I ended-up flying flying to Minneapolis, but there was a mechanical problem with the plane, so that flight was delayed an hour. When I finally got to Minneapolis, the airport was nearly empty, and my flight to Madison was going to leave in 20 min. I ran through the airport, and got there just as they were boarding the final passengers. I got to Madison after midnight, and got home at 1am, after more than 24 hours of traveling. My bags didn't make it with me, but they got home the next day. So it was a successful trip. 8 months and 30 days, and it was quite a challenge, but exceptionally rewarding.

Adios España

Madrid (ballet and geology)

The weekend before I went to Costa del Sol, I took a short trip to Madrid to help my flatmate move home. She wasn't taking any classes at the university, so she was done, and I wanted to go to the ballet and the geology museums in Madrid, so we decided to go the night before she left, go the the ballet, and then after she left, I would spend the day in Madrid and go home for dinner. When we got to Madrid, we decided to take a taxi to our hostel, because my flatmate had all of her earthly belongings with her, and we didn't want to risk her bags to the Madrid metro. There was a big outdoor concert on the street that our hostel was on, so we had to walk a bit, but we figured it out without too much trouble. Our hostel was really close to the Teatro Real (royal theater), so walking was easy. We saw Romeo and Juliet by Ballet Stuttgart (they are from Germany). The dancing was good, but I didn't really like the color scheme. I was also really surprised by how small the theater was. The floor area was quite small, and the balconies were really steep, but it was lavishly decorated, and there was royal box for the King and family (they weren't there). After the ballet, we got Turkish fast food, since the tapas in Madrid were horrendously expensive.
The next day, I went to the airport with my flatmate, and then went to visit the geology museums in Madrid. There are two: The Royal Geologic Museum, which is housed in the same complex as a whole slew of other natural science museums, and the Geologic and Mine Institute of Spain's museum, which is smaller, so I went there first. Since the museum is in the same building as the offices for the Geologic and Mine Institute of Spain, I needed to show ID to get into the museum, but that was fine. The museum was a little old, but really well-organized, and it showed how Spain changed over geologic time and highlighted the mineral wealth of the different provinces in Spain. I spent more than 2 hours there, and it definitely exceeded my expectations. The Royal Geologic museum was a little more of a disappointment. The geology museum was closed because they were renovating the biology museum that was in the same building, and the main exhibit was about Darwin's time in Spain, but they were dismantling it when I was there. They did however have a really cool exhibit on the Mediterranean, and a really good outdoor geology museum, plus they didn't charge admission because so much was closed, but it was still disappointing that the main geology museum was closed. Those silly biologists.
The trip back to Salamanca was uneventful, and, because I didn't spend much time at the geology museum, I got home with plenty of time to study for my exams the following week.

The ceiling at the Geologic and Mine Institute of Spain.

Costa del Sol

My last weekend in Spain, I took a trip to southern Spain, to the popular tourist location known as the Costa del Sol (the coast of the sun). It is on the Mediterranean Sea, and the area I visited has the largest ultra-mafic body (the Ronda peridotites) in the world.
I stayed in a very touritsty town on the coast, but the first place I visited was a small town in the mountains where I had good access to the lherzolites and dunites. This town, Istán, is one of the white hill towns of Andalucia, and it was very quaint.
The town is well-known for its artisian wells that are all over the town, and you can hear the water running under the streets from all of the fountains.

This sign says "Don't forget, behind a ball there is always a child."

Despite its closeness to the Mediterranean, this part of Spain is really dry, and the landscape looked very dessert-like.


This was a cave that was below the town. There were some of these caves that looked like tree houses.

I also say a pair of doves just outside of the town.

Marbella, the town I was staying in was full of resorts, and there were beautiful beaches. It was also perfect beach weather while I was there, so it was pleasant for studying.

The weather was wonderful, and it was surprisingly clear, and, I could actually see Africa.

They also had a bonsai museum in Marbella, and some of the trees were more than 500 years old. Marbella was interesting culturally, because it was so touristy. There was actually a really large Russian population there while I was, and I heard nearly as much Russian that weekend as I did Spanish.

Santiago and Galicia

The weekend of May 1-3, I took a trip to Galicia. I'd wanted to go to Santiago, because it was one of the culturally important cities that I hadn't been to yet in Spain, and the I found out that there was a suite of ultrahigh-pressure rocks on the very northern edge of Galicia, so I decided that it was worth one of my last weekends in Europe.

Galicia is the northwest-most autonomía in Spain, and it has the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Cantabrian Sea to the north. Santiago de Compostela is the capital and alleged burial place of St. James (his tomb was discovered in Santiago in 814--St. James died in 44ad--during the Christian reconquest of Spain) . It's a very popular spot for pilgrims, and it's the final destination of the Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James), which is the pilgrimage route that goes across Northern Spain.
There is a very ornate cathedral that was built in 1122, but was re-clad in it's current façade in 1750, because the old one was starting to dissolve because of the rain, since Galicia is one of the wettest places in Europe.
This is the high alter, which has St. James' tomb under it.
Some pilgrims outside of the church. I was only in Santiago for a couple of hours really early in the morning because I was waiting for a bus to the coast. The trip was quite exciting (11 buses in one weekend), because it was Spanish Labor Day, so it was a bit more difficult to get transportation. I had to take a bus to Madrid to catch the bus to Santiago, but after getting to Santiago, I took regional buses to Cariño, so it was much less busy.
Cariño is a popular vacation town, and near the northern-most point in Spain. I was there in the off-season, so it was pretty empty, but it was breath-takingly beautiful. The coast was really rugged and rocky, and I found some amazing eclogites, which were what I went to Cariño to see.

A street in Cariño.
Mountains of eclogite
The weather was beautiful when I was in Galicia, but the lush forests (it looked like rainforest) made it pretty clear that it is extremely wet in Galicia.
The northern-most point in Span
Cariño from the mountains
A 1 Euro-cent coin modeling with some eclogites

updates

Just so you all know, I made it back from Spain safely the 30st of May after some exciting travel (I missed one flight and almost missed another). I stopped updating my blog in April because I got really busy with school, and I was planning on not finishing it, but some people said that they would like to read about the rest of my adventures, so I'm going to right one more post for each of my trips from April 17 until May 30th.
Since I started my post about Portugal in May, that one will actually appear before this one.
Enjoy.

Portugal (or Paradise)

If you remember last semester, IES took us on a weekend-long trip to Granada and Sevilla, and this semester, they took us to Portugal the weekend after Easter. We left on Friday, and the first place we stopped was Coimbra, which is the Salamanca of Portugal: it's a relatively small city, whose history is dominated by a historical university.
We took a tour of the university and the old town. The picture above is from the oldest part of the university (the patio de escuelas-where the frog is- would be the Salamantino equivalent). There we saw the old library (below) and a richly-decorated chaple, both of which were remnants of Portugal's gold age of exploration.
The University of Coimbra also has many student customs, including their typical dress, which they wear from sophomore year on, and reminded me of Harry Potter robes (they even had black capes).
Coimbra is also home to the oldest living thing in Portugal, which is a 1,000-year-old olive tree that was a gift from the Holy Land. It doesn't look very impressive, but it's really neat to think about all of the change that has happened while this tree has been alive.
Since Portugal is much closer to the ocean, it was warmer and more humid than in Spain, and there were a lot of fun, nearly tropical plants, like the bird of paradise here.
On the way to Lisbon, we stopped for lunch in Batalha, Portugal, which is the place where the Portuguese finally beat the Spanish to secure independence. They built an amazing monastery and church with great stained glass.

That evening, when we got to Lisbon, we checked into our hotel and then went to a Brazilian restaurant, where they had amazing black beans and rice and 10 different kinds of meat that the cut from giant skewers onto individual's plates, which was pretty neat.
The next day, it was beautiful in the morning. We drove to Sintra, which is a suburb of Lisbon, to see the royal palace. The palace was ok, but the city itself was a tropical paradise. Everything was lush and green, and just breath-takingly beautiful.

We had some free time after we visited the palace, so we picked a road to walk down, and we came across this waterfall, but then, we turned a corner and found a spectacular garden/ villa that fit my idea of paradise perfectly. It was 9 euros a person to enter, but it was probably the best 9 euros I spent on that trip.
The gardens were actually designed to represent Eden, and they had stone structures hidden in plants and windy paths and nooks and crannies and caves and a secret tunnel. The first floor of the mansion was modeled after Roman villas, but the other floors were just really strange. There was one room with bookshelves along all of the walls a mirrors underneath of them all around the perimeter of the room, so it felt like the room was floating in a never-ending tunnel of books. It was very, very creepy. The towers offered nice views of all of the surrounding area though, but they were really narrow, and not easy to climb up.
After Sintra, we headed to Boca do Inferno, which is the furthest west point of mainland Europe. There were some pretty rocks, and the ocean was really big and enticing.

As soon as we left Boca do Inferno (which means mouth of hell in Portuguese), it started to rain, so the rest of the day was much less enjoyable. We rounded out the day with a trip to a monastery in Lisbon, where I got to see some gargoyles spitting water, and a visit to the mariners museum, where I found some nice fossil ammonites.


On our way back to the hotel, we saw a bridge that is nearly the same as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransisco. Lisbon also has their very own Christ the Redeemer statute that is the same as the one in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
On our way home from Portugal, we stopped in Fatima, which is a holy city in Portugal where the Virgin Mary appeared to some shepherd children and told them three secrets, which the Vatican has decided were authentic. There were a lot of pilgrims there, and it was really interesting to see all of the intensely faithful people thanking or praying to the Virgin of Fatima.

The bus ride home was really long, and when we got back, my housemate and I realized that we had a stomach bug that kept us pretty miserable for a couple weeks. We were sick the Monday we got back, and missed the important Salamantino holiday of Lunes de las Aguas, Monday of the waters, which celebrates bringing the prostitutes back from the other side of the river, where they had to stay during lent so they couldn't distract people from being good, faithful Catholics.

Semana Santa- Grandparents

For the second half of my break, I stayed in Salamanca with my grandparents. We met in the Madrid airport, and I took them back to Salamanca, where we checked-in to the hotel, and they got some sleep. The next day, I gave them the grand tour of Salamanca, and we had a coffee date with my señora where I got to play translator. Spain goes a bit crazy for Holy Week (Semana Santa), and there were processions all hours of the day and night, and more people than I've ever seen in the streets of Salamanca. On Thursday, we went to Zamora (I was there before in September), which is well-known for its processions. The processions are sponsored by certain "brotherhoods" who are in charge of carrying certain special statues through the streets. The uniforms they wear are slightly scary looking, and for that reason, the KKK took the inspiration for their robes and masks from the Spanish Catholics (there's a little bit of irony here). Some processions, like the one that ended just before we got to Zamora have women wearing the traditional Spanish headscarf (women during Franco times were required to wear them whenever they left the house), and all of them are accompanied by one or more bands. They also walk really slowly. For the first procession we went to see, we went to the Plaza Mayor, which was listed in the paper as being on the route. We waited for 45 minutes after the time it was supposed to start, and then we started back toward the hotel. We didn't get too far, though, before we ran into the procession, which was blocking our way. When we found it, it was only 5 blocks from where it was supposed to start, and it was an hour after it was supposed to start.
On Friday, we spent the day in Salamanca shopping, which was lucky, because it snowed! It wasn't too bad in Salamanca, except for being crazy cold, but when we went to Madrid the next day, there was a lot of snow along the highway. Our hotel in Madrid was near the airport, so it would have been difficult to get to downtown, and all of the touristy places were closed on Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Fortunately, the mall near our hotel was open, so we had Easter dinner at a buffet with pretty good Spanish food. Monday I went to the airport the Grandma and Grandpa and then came back to Salamanca after a very nice, and (mostly) relaxing break.
The garden near the Facultad de Ciencias with the wisteria arbors. It is a very lovely place to read when it's warm enough.

Coffee Date

A procession

This is the only picture we have from Zamora because we spent most of the time walking around. The flowers were really pretty though.
Snow! In Spain! On the 10th of April (Good Friday)!