One Month!

Today is October 1st which means I’ve now been here for a month.  I really can’t believe this. That may have been the fastest month of my life.  I can’t believe that within the same month I have already travelled to so many places within ( and out of) Spain and done so many new things.  Yesterday was the last day of the early start program and on Monday we will be retested for our regular semester classes.  This also means that the rest of our program has arrived in Spain and new people are moving into the residencia.  Some are Spaniard students which is good because now we are forced to speak in Spanish all the time, even though I imagine my Spanish probably drives them crazy.

I feel like it has been a long time since I last blogged so I have many updates for everyone.  Last weekend we went to Bejar, a different city and hiked for about seven hours of the day.  It was beautiful there and we had an amazing view from the points we hiked to.  We were hiking off the trail at one point and realized that the sign we walked by translated to something like “Private hunting ground, keep off” which when we read we immediately ran off back to the main trail.  We also encountered a donkey some cows and even two bulls (which i thought should have been contained better than they were) and a woman who lived on the mountain who joined us for a little because she wanted us to get to a certain point on the mountain to see the view from there.  After an entire day of hiking we wandered our way back to the bus station and returned to Salamanca.

On Sunday we went down to the Tormes River, the big river that runs through Salamanca and rented the paddle boats and took them out on the river for about an hour.  The river was beautiful, the weather is still so nice here, it’s hot enough to wear shorts still even though it’s October now. At the end it was so hot and we had been paddling for so far that we all jumped into the river, in our sundresses, and then had to walk all the back home across the city back to the residencia.  

This past week was filled with studying and once finals were over we spent our free time figuring out more of our travel plans for the rest of the semester.  We also spend most of our afternoons wandering around Salamanca and exploring still.  This week we went to two different museums and to a movie.  On Tuesday we went to the Domus Atrium which was a museum that used to be a prison and most of the art and photography in the museum were very modern, and more than I expected were representations of things in the United States.  On Wednesday we went to the movies and I saw “Silencio de Amor” which was a French film about an Italian family but dubbed over into Spanish. Woah.  I was pretty impressed that I could follow what was happening in the movie and the movie itself was pretty good too!  On Thursday we went to a strange museum that I would not even know how to explain but apparently it’s a big deal here, it was called the “Museo Art Nouveau y Art Deco.”  Fun fact: they have the biggest collection of dolls in the world.  And I thought Stonehill’s shovels were cool. 

Today we went to Segovia for the day and saw the aqueduct which was very impressive!  We also saw the castle and cathedral in Segovia which were beautiful too. The cathedral there was designed by the same person who designed the New Cathedral here in Salamanca so the cathedral in Segovia looked very familiar.

This week marks the beginning of the regular school year here in Salamanca and the beginning of all my traveling.  Let’s hope that the next months don’t fly by as fast as that first one just did!