F&G: Salamanca 1

June 16

Hello all,

We’ve decided to restart our blog since we’re doing a bit of traveling again. This time we’re going to be in Spain for about five weeks while Grace studies Spanish for four weeks at a language school in Salamanca.

After a little extra stress in the Madison airport (our original plane had a bird hit the engine so we were put on a flight that left an hour later), we made it to Chicago with about an hour to go before our flight to Madrid. Iberia, the Spanish airline, was having some sort of celebration and had a special section in the terminal with free food and drink for the passengers. It was a great way to start the trip, even though throughout the terminal we could see crowds of people watching Spain lose their game against the Netherlands. Our flight was in a brand new plane and was uneventful. The 8.5-hour flying time felt quite short compared with our last long flight back from Hong Kong.

We arrived in Madrid’s beautiful new airport on Saturday morning around 8:30am and were met by a friend of a friend. One of my friends in Madison, a fellow ethnomusicologist, is from a town outside of Salamanca. She helped us figure out a place to stay and had several contacts for us. She needed to bring two violins to Spain this summer so we took one for her as one of our carry-ons. In Madrid, her first cousin picked us up at the airport, drove us around for a quick tour of downtown Madrid and then made sure we were on the right bus to Salamanca.

The bus trip is about 2.5 hours but it flew by for us since we slept hard the whole way. In Salamanca, we were met by the 10 year-old owner of the new violin we brought and her mother, who drove us to the place we’re staying. It was incredibly nice to be welcomed at every stop by someone who was expecting us.

We’re staying in an apartment with a woman whose three grown daughters are now living elsewhere in Spain. It seems like it’s going to be an ideal set-up and is within 20 minutes walking distance of pretty much everything we need in Salamanca (less then 10 minutes to a pool).

We walked around a bit Saturday afternoon before we were met by another friend of my friend, who took us out to a mall to get our phones sorted out (we were excited to put new SIM cards in our old Manila phones, which we’ve missed) and then came with us for some aqua con gas in Plaza Mayor. She’s also the one who figured out our lodging and seems to be a great contact in case we ever need anything.

Grace and I caught up on our sleep that night by sleeping for 13 hours (!). We spent the morning exploring town without a map, just wandering wherever looked interesting. We went back to a lunch of delicious paella at 2:30 and then one of the woman’s daughters, who comes to the apartment on the weekends, took us out for a swim at a private pool that belongs to the neighborhood where she lives.

Grace starts up classes tomorrow. More to come soon!