Salamanca

Back on September 15th I went to Salamanca a city in Castilla-Leon west and a little north of Madrid as part of the language school's program.

Salamanca is home to the second oldest university in Spain, The University of Salamanca, founded in 1218. It is so old that from what we saw on the tour it looks like they don´t even have classes in it anymore.
Before we went inside our teacher told us the legend of the frog on the façade of the building. Story has it that any student who can find the frog will have academic success. The tricky part is that the façade is of the Plateresco style. The etymology of this word alone can give you a good idea of just how hard achieving academic success is in Salamanca. The word plateresque comes from the word for silversmiths, “plateros”. The thing is the style has nothing to do with silver. It is named this way because the extremely ornate façades of plateresque buildings resemble the most intricate silverwork.
But like anyone looking for a life of easy A’s we were determined to find it. Our teacher tried to help us out and tell us where to look for the little frog. Unfortunately no one could understand her. So like major tourists we stood and stared and even took our cameras out to zoom in for a better look. There were a few false alarms but we really couldn’t find it. Our teacher was anxious to get the rest of the tour going and we started to worry that we were all doomed to academic failure but we refused to give up and at last one of the boys found it! I’ve heard that academics abroad can be a joke but I never expected I could get guaranteed good grades from just staring at a wall for 15 minutes!

On the tour inside we saw the chapel, some classrooms, a lot relief sculptures with dragons which we learned is because dragons represent youth, a sycamore tree in the middle of the courtyard that was a gift from California, and some stairs where if your man servant lets your toga drag it is very bad luck. Luckily my servant is always very careful with stuff like that.

After enjoying our señora-packed-lunches in Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor, we had some free time to explore the town on our own. So we wandered through a flea market without buying anything because I didn’t have strange herbs, animal skin rugs, over-priced jewelry or magic talismans on my shopping list that day and I was too full from my avocado and caviar sandwich to try any of the food. It happened to be the end of a festival there so even with out getting anything it was fun walking through all the vendors dressed in medieval garb and watching parades of musical jesters.

Salamanca is unique because its the only town in Spain that has two cathedrals. On the tour we heard all about the architectural differences between the two. The old one is Romanesque from the 12^th C. The new one is Gothic from the 16^th C. As we walked out of the first one all ready to see the next cathedral our teacher asked me which one I liked best. I couldn’t answer because I hadn’t realized that the two were connected and we had just seen both of them! Where was the magic frog on that one?