Cornerstone

Day 37


When I woke up I realized that the electricity had gone out at some point during the night. I used this as an excuse in getting my act together very slowly. I needed to do this anyway, there wasn´t much light, even with the window open and I didn´t want to forget anything.

I had two things left to accomplish before leaving for Madrid. I returned to the Old and New Cathedrals to climb the tower the connected both of them, but was mainly part of the Old Cathedral. It was pretty cool to be able to climb up through the rafters of the cathedrals. Most of the time when you climb a church it is just straight up, step after step. This one had different levels and lead me through chambers of the cathedral at various heights. I got the chance to view Salamanca from every angle, each was more stunning than the next.

The other cool thing is that you got to walk across the top of the New Cathedral. This gave me an up close and personal view of the paintings on the ceilings. They were much better than they had looked the day before.



One of the rooms that I spent some time in was called the cornerstone room. It was basically the room that supported the weight of the Old Cathedral. Over the years the caretakers of the cathedral have lived here. It was easy to see damage from both the Lisbon earthquake in the 1700´s, as well as some fire damage. For some reason this room seemed more special to me than all of the ornately decorated chapels. I spent some time just staring at the walls and taking it all in.



I also spent some time checking out the Roman bridge. It wasn´t as impressive as everyone had said it was, but it was still interesting.



Someone had told me that the ride to Madrid was only about 2 hours, even if you took the cheap, slow bus as I was doing. This was why I didn´t watch the time very closely for when I would leave. The bus took more like 4.5 hours and I got to Madrid just as it was getting dark.
After some time on the Internet I ended up hanging out with some Brazilians and an American at the hostel bar before heading off to sleep. I had a early day that I wanted to be sure to be up for.

Zamora

Day 36
I was up pretty early so I decided to go ahead with my plan to visit Zamora. The rude man was behind the counter again, but I came prepared because I had studied my guidebook and learned what I needed to get the ticket. While I was on the bus the woman sitting behind me kept knocking me on the back of the head, hard. I cried out ‘ouch’ very loudly on 5th or 6th hit. She never even apologized.

When I first got off of the bus I couldn’t understand why anyone would recommend this place, it was just so very generic and dirty. Then I stumbled upon the old city. The whole thing was walled and it was quite amazing. There were very few cars or people about. I really felt like I might have stumbled back in time.



By sheer luck I found the tourist office. Here I picked up loads of information on the town, but everything would be closing for siesta shortly. The only thing I could visit was the Cathedral, and I would only have 40 minutes for that.



I breezed through the museum a bit. I tend to only like religious art in its natural habitat. There was a rather impressive collection of tapestries. The cathedral itself was quite nice. One of the chapels was covered in murals of familiar bible stories. Noah was there as was Jonah and the whale. Most of the chapels had a green looking Jesus on a cross. Each one was more gory than the next, making me wonder if it was some sort of competition.



When I left the cathedral I grabbed lunch while I poured over all of the information that I had picked up at the tourist office. Nothing really inspired me to wait around until 6 pm when siesta would be over here. I got back on the bus and headed to Salamanca.



It was still siesta when I got back and I picked up some food on the way back to my hostal. I mean to go out and check out a salsa club that the girls I met the night before had recommended. This never quite happened. I had been reading a book called Saints and Soldiers and decided to stay in and finish it. It was a good book, what can I say?

Finding Frogs

Day 35

I had to be out of my posh hotel by noon and I wanted to make sure that I had some time to appreciate it. I used the whirlpool tub for a bit and took a very long shower. I also took all the the soaps, pens and pencils with me. At noon I hopped in a cab and headed to Hostal Las Vegas. It had been recommended in my Let´s Go book and was about one third the cost of the place I had been at the night before. I was delighted to find that it was also right in the middle of the old part of the city.

After finding Plaza Mayor and having my breath taken away by this large and perfect looking square I made a quick stop at the info center for a map.

Salamanca is not a big city, but it is attractive. It is known as the golden city because of its same colored buildings. Salamanca´s university, built in 1280, once rivaled Oxford and is still a very good school. I went searching for the university building that I had seen on Rick Steves. It was the main entrance and hidden in the stonework is a frog. If you find the frog you get good luck. I had no problems with this, mostly because I cheated. He had said where to find it on his show.

Just down the street is the New Cathedral. Its actually 2 cathedrals and a cloisters built together. The new section began construction in 1513, but was not completed for over 200 years. Its not the most beautiful cathedral I´ve seen, but definitly worth a look. It was rather atmospheric though. Monks chanted over the speakers and birds chirped in the rafters. The dome and the alter are rather spectacular. The chapels range from rather boring to complicated wooden sculpture. One chapel housed the arm of a saint, which one, I´ve got no idea, but it fed the creep factor.

The New Cathedral is free, but the Old Cathedral, the museum and the cloisters are not. The Old Cathedral, began in 1152 and completed in 1445, was really the best part. The altarpiece is made of 53 panels that depict the life of Christ as well as of Salamanca´s patron saint. It is considered to be the best piece of renaissance art outside of Italy. I was mesmerized by it for quite a while.

The museum circled the quiet cloisters. The rooms were full of very old and fascinating tombs. Other rooms seemed to contain all of the bits that no longer fit in the cathedral. One room was stuffed full of life sized wooden saints. Another had paintings that at one point had hung in the various chapels.

When I left the cathedral siesta was beginning and everything was closing. I headed to the bus station to figure out what it would take to get to Leon the next day for a day trip. The man behind the counter wanted nothing to do with my bad attempt at Spanish. I went to the information desk and was able to get a hold of a schedule there. I did have to go back to the rude man to find out what it would all cost. This time I wrote out the date and times and put a ? next to the euro sign. I sighed loudly, but wrote it down for me. It was going to be almost $30 to spend about 3 hours in the town, so I decided to ditch that idea.

After taking a nap back at the hostal I wandered the commercial side of Salamanca and picked up a cheapie dinner at the grocery store there. I took it back to my room and ate it while I watched the Simpsons in Spanish. I had noticed an interesting bar right next to where I was staying and decided to check it out. It turned out to be the place where a lot of the student expats hung out. I met about half a dozen American students. It also happened to be quiz night. I was on a team with a couple of the other girls, but we did very poorly.

One of the girls recommended Zamora as a day trip, it was closer and cheaper to get to than Leon. Her description of it had me sold and I left so that I could get a good nights sleep and get there early on in the morning.

I´ve also started a You Tube site. I´ll upload when I can. It can be found here: http://youtube.com/user/dresdenfae.

Completo

Day 34

I was up early for several different reasons. I had gone to bed around 8pm the night before, I wanted to be out the door early for a day trip to Braga, and because I had a night bus and the more tired I was on it the more I would sleep.

After an hours train ride I was in Braga. It looked much more modern than Porto. There were more new building and high rises than the faded elegance of Porto. I quickly was on a bus and on my way to Bom Jesus, the reason for coming here.

For some reason about 150 years ago someone felt that they should recreate the crucifixion story in Braga. Over about 350 steps you walk through scenes from Jesus´s death. When I got off the bus most people headed straight for the funicular to avoid the stairs. This meant you walked through the story backwards making it more like Easter Sunday than the crucifixion. I would be huffing and puffing my way up all of the stairs. It wasn´t really that bad. There were rarely more than 30 stairs before there was something else to check out.

Each circular building enclosed another part of the crucifixion story in gory detail. The sculptures were made of wood and quite good. I had the walk to myself. The cool breeze, birds chirping and mossy atmosphere just added to the experience. When I reached the top I was greeted with a spectacular view and a nice cathedral. There were probably about 200 people milling about the top. I thought, oh great, it will be like a herd of cows going back down. The weird thing is that they never walked down. I had the path to myself once again. I don´t understand why you would go to look at the top and not check out the rest of it.

I had expected Bom Jesus to take a lot longer than it did, but I was greatful to have the time to check out Braga. From the bus ride I could tell that there were loads of cute plazas and fountains to check out. When I got back to the train station I set off to explore. After walking for over an hour I hadn´t found a single fountain or square. I was about to give up but decided to get my haircut instead. When I had finished that I was going to head back, but someone managed to stumble upon the Se Cathedral. My guidebook had said that it would be closed on Mondays, but it was clearly open.

The cathedral itself isn´t all the interesting. What was interesting was the room full of relics and brain boxes. I don´t know why I find bits of saints to be so interesting, but for some reason I do. I spent some time trying to figure out just which bit of each saint was there. Most of them were too far away, or too deteriorated to tell.

I managed to make a train with about 1 minute to spare. That never happens! I still had some time to kill at the hostel and ended up talking to a nice Canadian girl named Gisela for a bit. She was doing a 9 month Europe trip after spending some time in Chile.

After walking the 30 minutes to the bus station I waited for it to be time to board the bus. I had no problem checking my big bag, but for some reason the bus driver wanted me to check my smaller backpack as well. He told me that I could only have one carry on. I simply stuck my day pack in the book bag and boarded. He then can and found me and said no, that I can´t do that. I tried to explain to him that I had important things in the bag and wasn´t going to be checking in and that I had one bag now, so what´s the big deal. He was insistent and I have learned that there is really little use in arguing with people who have minimal English skills. I simply took a plastic bag I had on me and put most of the contents of the small back pack in it. Now I had my purse and a plastic bag. How this was ok and the backpack alone was not, I don´t know. But really, whatever.

The bus ride was uneventful, but I didn´t sleep much. I was meant to be dropped off in Salamanca at 5 am, my plan was to hang out for an hour at the bus station and then find my hotel. For unknown reasons the bus arrived at 2:30 in the morning. The bus station was locked and there was no one around. I couldn´t even find a cab. I had no map and really no idea where I was in relation to, well, anything. This is my own personal travel nightmare. I found a hostal (hostal seems to be the word for cheap hotel), completo was all the man said. Apparently this means full. I checked a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th hostal. Completo, completo, completo. Same thing with numbers 5 and 6. I was growing desperate at this point. There was still no one around and not only where my bags growing heavy, but I was becoming very tired. I walked up to a hotel, a 4 star place, thinking that I would be so out of my price range that it would be ridiculous. It was expensive, but not obscenely so, and best of all they had a spare room. I was sold.

The room was a real treat, but I was too tired to appreciate it fully and passed out on the bed exhausted.