Frog spotting in Salamanca

Hola!

Well, there was no update yesterday because I was not feeling too well. I woke up with a sore throat and decided to lay low all day. I’m glad I did because today I feel so much better. I also let myself sleep in rather than attempt to get in line at the police station this morning.

Today is my last full day here in Salamanca because tomorrow I leave to go to Madrid for the weekend for training and whatnot. I am not going to bring my computer because it is too heavy and I am only going to be gone for a few days so this will be my last update until Saturday or Sunday. In my next post I’ll let y’all know how the training went!

Also, as y’all may or may not know, since I still don’t have Internet I have been going to McDonald’s to be able to get wifi so that I can check my email, update my blog, etc. As I was walking here I passed a building here that I pass everyday, and for all of you Aggies reading this blog, I can’t help but think of the Century Tree every time I walk by it. For those of you who are not Aggies, the Century Tree is an enormous tree on campus, and it is said that if you walk under it alone you will be alone for the rest of your life, but if you walk under it with a significant other, that you will be together forever (or something like that…). Anyway, I guess no matter what country you’re in, people have similar superstitions/traditions (whatever you want to call it), because Salamanca has it’s very own version of the century tree, more or less…

That is the Univeristy of Salamanca façade, and amongst the detailed carvings on this wall is a tiny skull with a frog sitting on top. It is said that if you can find the frog that you will be married within the year. No matter when I pass by the University façade there is always couples gathered around it, standing there hand-in-hand, heads thrown back and straining their eyes to try and find it.

You may be wondering if I have found the frog or if I have even attempted to look for it. Well, friends and fam, I have, indeed, found the frog. I, however, cheated and had some Spaniards point it out to me when I was here last summer. Not sure what that means about my marriage prospects, but I’m not too worried about that right now, hahaha.

There he is!

Have a good rest of your week/weekend! Ill update again as soon as possible!

XOXOXO

Mi escuela

Hola!

As promised, I am writing today with an update on my residency card situation and with how my meeting went with my school.

Once again, I made no progression in obtaining my residency card today. This time I woke up at 3:30am to ensure I would be one of the first in line so that I could make it to my meeting later on in time. I arrived a few minutes after 4am, a whole hour before I arrived last Thursday, but this time the line was already SO long. I know that they don’t take more than 30 people a day, and when I counted I was number 33. So back to bed I went! I can’t say I was too upset about this when I got home and was able to crawl back into my nice, warm bed.

Then my meeting with my school was quite interesting. Everyone was very nice in the English department, but mostly during the meeting they were arguing about the curriculum for this school year and by the end of it they realized they had not come up with a schedule for me and the other two teachers and told us to come back next Monday after our training is over. It gives me the rest of this week (until Thursday, that is, when I have to go to Madrid for training) to finish trying to get my residency card, at least. Also, the other two teachers seem really cool! There is a girl, Hanna, from Massachusetts and a guy, John, from Ireland. It’s nice having two other people in my school in my same position and to be able to bounce ideas off of each other. It’s also nice having two more friends here in Salamanca, and, in fact, we’re meeting in the plaza tonight to get a beer and hang out.

A little about my school: I.E.S. Francisco Salinas is a bilingual high school here in Salamanca. I will be teaching not just in the English classes, but I will also be helping out in history, science, and/or math classes, as well, on days when they are having the lessons in English. Soooo, I am excited to know my schedule and know what type of classes I will be teaching!

And to give y’all back at home a better visual of where I’ll be teaching, here’s a picture of the school!

Happy Monday, errbody!

XOXOXO

Hola!

Good Sunday morning friends and fam! It is another beautiful day here in Salamanca, and since literally nothing is open on Sundays, I have felt justified in being super lazy today. Plus I need to rest up for tomorrow because I have to once again go stand in line at 4am to finish taking care of this whole residency card thing, and then immediately afterwards report to the school that I am teaching at for a meeting in which I will find out about my schedule and whatnot! Wish me luck!

Now, although I will be walking to the government office at 4 in the morning (and naturally, my mother and other family members have repeatedly expressed concern for my safety), I have to say that I feel very safe in Salamanca. I know that bad things can happen anywhere at any time, but Salamanca is a small college town and it seems as though everyone knows everyone in town, and it really is a very safe place to be. I had to laugh out loud when in an email my mom wrote me, she warned me to be careful because she looked up on Google maps where I was staying when I first arrived and she saw that there was a lot of graffiti.

And, yes, there is a lot of graffiti here. Muchísimo. So much so that you begin to become immune to it and not really notice it anymore, and it honestly doesn’t take away from the beauty of the city. It just gives Salamanca some character. Anyway, here is some of I have shot that I either thought was interesting, poetic, or just funny.

I'll let y'all know how tomorrow goes with the residency card situation and the meeting with my school! Have a wonderful Sunday and a great week!

XOXOXO

Mi barrio!

Hola!

So I have been here for a little over a week now, and although I still don’t have Internet in my apartment, I am finally starting to feel quite a bit settled in. This is only the second weekend that I am here, but already it is striking how quiet weekend mornings are. Considering how hard Spaniards party (relative to us conservative, Puritan Americans, anyway) I don’t blame everyone for sleeping in so late. I wanted to wake up early this morning to drink my coffee and enjoy the peace while I could J

My neighborhood is never really to crazy, anyway. Yesterday was one week since I had moved into my apartment, and since then I have had enough time to realize that the only people who live in my ’hood are really old people and families with little kids. It’s a quiet and peaceful area to live, and I already love it very much. The best things about living in the part of town is that: a) if I want to go out and be around people my own age, like I did Thursday night, the plaza is only a 20 minute walk from my house; and b) there are absolutely no Americans in my area, so I am forced to speak Spanish all the time here.

Also, I have started meeting my neighbors! Juancal is the older woman who lives next door. She teaches flamenco on guitar and flamenco dance, and she told me anytime if I were interested in learning she would teach me. She also told me if I needed anything at all that I could come knock on her door, because we are, after all, neighbors aren’t we? I have probably said this before and I will probably say it again, but no matter how blunt the people can be here, they are truly wonderful and caring as a whole.

There is a bocci ball court that is literally in front of my apartment. I don’t really know the rules for it or anything, but I think it is some kind of Italian ball game. Either way, the old men in my neighborhood LOVE it. I swear to you that they are out there on the court playing from 12pm through 6 or 7pm every single day. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, the weather is pretty perfect so I don’t blame them for playing so much, but it just cracks me up to see these little hunched over, silver-haired men with canes playing this game for HOURS. I couldn’t help myself and I had to take a picture of them to share with y’all.

There were also some people sitting right outside of my window with their guitars playing and singing flamenco, so while I made myself dinner I opened my windows and shut off my own music so I could take theirs in.

After dinner I decided to take a walk around my neighborhood and take some pictures so that all of you could take a peek at the lovely place that I will be calling “home” for the next nine months.

My front door!

Side view of my apartment where the windows are.

The picadillo I made myself for dinner last night :)

The bar next door to my apartment where all the old men go to watch fútbol.

The medical office where I can go if I get sick. Good news is that it is only a 5 second walk from my apartment.

The road on the way to my favorite grocery store.

Aaaand on the way back (My apartment is on the top of a hill. It is very hilly here).

Panoramic view of my street. On the very right is where Juancal lives.

More updates to come! And as a side note, I have been dying to skype with many of you who are reading this right now. I promise, promise this is going to happen as soon as I get Internet in my apartment. It is really hard to skype from McDonalds, and it is hard to be more flexible in when I can skype. I have to have my residency card before any company will give me any kind of Internet service contract, and also I will know my teaching schedule on Monday! All this to say, I haven’t forgotten about any of you! I miss you all and think about y’all daily.

xoxoxo

Salamanca night life

Hola!

I’m sorry I haven’t been updating you guys more, but I still don’t have internet in my apartment and I have been really busy this week trying time and again to get my residency card and trying to finish getting set up here before I have to leave to go to training in Madrid next week. Yesterday I woke up at 4am to go stand in line at the police station so I could get a number in order to even get a chance to turn in my paperwork. The cutoff number was 30 and I was number 27, so if I had woken up any later I would’ve been out of luck. Then after the station finally opened up at nine, I had to wait until 12:30 for anyone to even see me. I still have to go back one more time, but I decided to wait until Monday to go. I have had enough of that place for this week.

Besides my frustrations with the Spanish bureaucracy, life here in Salamanca is pretty wonderful. Last night I went out with some of the other people in the same teaching program as me to a few of the over 2,000 bars here in Salamanca. It was so much fun getting to let loose a little with my fellow teachers, and night life here in Salamanca is quite a bit different than it is back home. First of all, as soon as you walk into the plaza, there are people everywhere giving you fliers to encourage you to go to their bar, and as an extra incentive, when you take the flier they give you to the bar, you can get a free drink or shot. So last night we bar hopped, and I managed to only spend one euro the entire night. At one bar they played American music, like songs from the movie “Grease” and it was so much fun dancing with my new friends here and listening to the Spanish people around us singing along to the songs that all of us know by heart. Apparently, they do, too.

The nightlife is also a bit more…intense, let’s say. I mean, I wimped out at 2:30am last night/this morning because I had been up since 4:30am (Thursday morning), but at 2am when all the bars would usually close in the United States is when the bars and discotecas really get going here. And then! At around 5am when everyone decides to stumble out of the bars and discotecas  is when the churrerías open up to serve churros con chocolate (the drunk food of choice here) to munch on on the walk home.

No worries, friends and fam, I am much too responsible to engage in this craziness, ahem. But really, this place is awesome.

More updates to come!

Otra vez en McDonalds

So this week is not going exactly as I had planned. I mean, I haven't even been here a week and I already have a cell phone, an apartment, and a bank account set up here, but getting my residency card has been proving to be very difficult. Yesterday morning I went to the police station and after sitting in line for more than an hour, they finally called my number only to tell me that I was in the wrong line but that I have have to come back tomorrow (today) because they were no longer giving out numbers. So this morning I got to the station even earlier and I was turned away at the door saying they were no longer giving out numbers. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for tomorrow. Third time's a charm, right?

What I can't complain about, however, is the weather. It has been so beautiful here! In the mornings/at night it has been in the 40s/50s but during the day it warms up to the 70s. There is never a cloud in the sky. No matter how frustrating getting set up here may be, it is so hard to be anything but happy when you're walking outside in such beautiful weather.

One of my favorite things about Salamanca is the Cathedral. First thing in the morning, during the middle of the day, or at night, it is absolutely the most breathtaking structure you've ever seen. And truly, there is something undeniably magical about the Cathedral. Maybe it's just the sheer size of the enourmous building, or the incredible architecture of it, or the very mystery that surrounds it. The Cathedral was built in the 15th century, nearly 500 years ago, and what continues to puzzle Salamancans and people from around the world is an astronaut that has been carved into the building. The carving has been there since the building was built, but astronauts and space travel were very far from happening 500 years ago, and no one can explain the presence of the very out-of-place astronaut on the Cathedral. Check it out:

Anyway, I miss you all and hopefully Ill get internet soon so that I dont keep having to update my blog from McDonalds haha. Ill update again soon!

xoxoxo

First post from Salamanca!

Hola!

Sorry that it has taken me until today to finally update my blog. The past few days have been so crazy. I traveled the entire day Wednesday and didn’t get into Salamanca until Thursday evening. Although it was a veryyyy long day of traveling, everything went very smoothly and when I arrived in Salamanca, I went directly to the apartment of another girl, Laura, who is doing the same teaching program that I am doing. Laura is so, so nice, and Thursday night after I arrived, we walked around Salamanca and ended up eating some paella at a café. It is so surreal being back in this beautiful city. Sometimes I feel like this is all a dream and that I will be going back to Texas next week. Other times it starts to really sink in that I will be here for nine months.

Friday went really, really well. On Thursday I was feeling a little overwhelmed at everything I had to do, like getting my residency card, opening up a bank account, and finding an apartment. Laura informed me that everything is pretty much closed on Friday, so that I would have to wait until Monday to go apply for my residency card and to open my bank account. I was also getting stressed about finding an apartment. Although Laura said that I wasn’t a burden or anything, I knew she had people that would soon be moving into her apartment and I was just really anxious to stop living out of a suitcase and to finally start settling into a home of my own. Which brings me back to Friday. After I slept in and finally caught up with my sleep, Laura and I went walking around Salamanca to look for advertisements for apartments for rent. We found some phone booths with hundreds of advertisements on them (this is a totally normal way to find housing here, by the way), and I began to get really discouraged when I couldn’t find anything that I was looking for. After lunch we went back to her apartment and I began to look for apartments online. I called a few ads that I was interested in and made appointments to go look at some of them. I now have a really nice one-bedroom apartment that I absolutely love! And it is quite big for Spanish standards. Here are some pictures:

My kitchen/living room!

The living room part of my kitchen/living room

My room!

The bathroom!

Anyway, I miss everyone! I am, however, quite happy here. I don’t yet have Internet in my apartment, but once I do it will be much easier to stay in communication with everyone and I will continue to update my blog as much as possible! Love you all!

T-minus one week!

Hello friends and family!

Welcome to my blog, where I intend to keep all of you updated on the whereabouts of my life from across the ocean in beautiful Salamanca, Spain. If I have invited you to read my blog, you should know that I love you very much and I figure you love me back enough to want to keep up with what I am doing from time to time :)

I am a week away from leaving the US for nine months! Just so that everyone is up to speed, I just graduated from Texas A&M University this past May (whoop!) and I now have a contract to teach English at a high school in Salamanca, Spain :) I am so, so excited to be going to Salamanca, specifically, because that is actually the town where I studied Spanish last summer. It is SUCH a beautiful little town, and obviously I fell in love with it enough to want to go back.

This is a shot of the majestic cathedral that stood across the street from where I lived.

The beautiful Plaza Mayor on my first night in Salamanca last year!

This is me at the Plaza Mayor during the day, literally moments before Spain won the World Cup last summer :D

Anyway, those pictures were just to give you a brief glimpse into where I will be living for the next 9 months. I will keep posting pictures on this blog and updating you on my life abroad as much as possible! Hopefully the pictures will be beautiful/enticing enough that you will want to come visit me! 

As I already mentioned, I leave a week from today. The past few weeks have been very bittersweet. As excited as I am to embark on this adventure that I have been working so hard to get to, it has been so, so sad saying goodbye to everyone I love here! Y'all are the best and I will miss everyone dearly. The point of this blog is to close the gap that traveling/living abroad inevitably creates so that we can still be a part of each others lives as much as possible :D

Muchos besos y nos hablemos pronto!