Rodrigo makes it rain

Friday night. Oh Friday. Our group met under the reloj (clock) in the Plaza Mayor at 1:30am. A.M. Our goal was to stay out until 6am so we could we go to a little churro con chocolate hole in the wall here in Salamanca, that we were told was something we needed to try. It was definitely worth it—I LOVE churros con chocolate. So Friday night has turned into Saturday, and in the late afternoon we met with one of our Intercambio partners, Ana, to take a bus about 25 minutes out of Salamanca into the suburbs of Salamanca to our other Intercambio partner’s (Ana’s cousin), Helena’s house to go swimming.

Her housing complex-suburb-thing has a private pool so we got to splash (salpicar) and swim (nadar) and work on Spanish (and English for our Intercambios) :) This experience was amazing! We got out of the pool, and Helena’s family had made us an empanada (jamón y queso), la tortilla español (delicious Spanish food-kind of like an omelette with sliced potato and onion), and then we made ice cream sandwiches out of a chocolate ice cream brick (not like our square gallons from Kroger… it was more of a log of chocolate ice cream) and wafer cracker-cookies. Seeing the suburbs after living in the city of Salamanca was increíble, seeing a house instead of an apartment was a nice change, as well as seeing another part of Salamanca that none of knew really existed.

This last Sunday we had an excursion to Segovia! We saw the aqueduct and the restaurant Candidio that has the famous roasted pig that is cut with a plate. I learned a lot and saw a lot in Segovia that I had never seen before, and it was incredibly interesting! I also met another Chi Omega from another school in the states! It was an exciting in Segovia. Since we were already near/in/by Segovia, we traveled to The Gardens of La Granja. It was a beautiful, gianormous garden where we were able to relax after a day of sightseeing and tours. We had one final tour of the day, and that was the Fountain Tour, in the gardens. What we didn’t know was that the fountains (the first, second, and fourth fountains we saw) start spraying water so the audience (i.e. all of us) get soaking wet (this relates to the title, Rodrigo makes it rain. We asked for rain, and he said in about an hour, it would rain...and an hour later we were drenched from the fountains)!! It was a really nice surprise, though, because it was 90+ degrees and we had been walking in the sun literally all day (11am-4pm, and that was pre-visiting the gardens).

Some fun things here in Salamanca:

It is incredibly clean! Every night people power-wash the streets and some sidewalks. Every morning, shop owners clean their stores, windows, signs, and the sidewalk in front of their shop. The city has vacuum-trucks/street sweepers out EVERY night cleaning up the city. I have never seen anything like this (except in other cities here in Spain).

Pringles. More or less the same, except we have “ham (jamón) Pringles”, and “Pringles” is printed “Pringooooools”. We have been assuming its for the Copa Mundial (World Cup) but we really have no idea why.

Everytime I have gone to El Arbol (the supermercado-supermarket-closest to our house) to buy a chocolate bar or some sort of little treat, I manage to buy little kid chocolate or cookie snacks. Literally for little kids, I had a chocolate bar called “Jungly” that had animal faces on it, and came with animal punch-out cards. BUT, they are delicious little kid snacks J

I have started reading Harry Potter 2, in Spanish-it is just as good in Spanish (so far).

We had a Summer 2 (my group studying here in Salamanca) vs Summer 3 (the other group) soccer game today (Wednesday)! It was a lot of fun, and I actually played soccer for the entire game-an hour and half of sprinting around a soccer “field”.  It wasn’t an actual field, there was a nice grassy field, but we used the gravel one…so of course I managed to completely bite it-sliding on my hip, onto my front, and somehow ending up on my back before my momentum finally gave out and I stopped sliding across the “field”. We are planning a second game for next week…hopefully we will win this next one!!