My Mini-Muffin Love Affair and the Downside of Living in Europe

Some notes about food:

My first breakfast in Salamanca, I fell in love with these mini-muffins Mari Paz (host mom) gives us. Obsessed with mini muffins is more like it-I would eat them every chance I got. However as we are approaching week SIX (tues)…I cannot keep up my mini-muffin love affair. I cannot eat another mini-muffin. I’m having the same dilemma with our cookie-crackers that I dip in my morning tea, granted the tea adds more flavor so I’ll probably be keeping my cookie-cracker habit until I leave.

When I think of foods I am missing, or craving I think vegetables. But my meals have a lot of vegetables, er rather, a lot of the same vegetable. Raw Onion. Luckily my raw onion has been spiced up with cucumber and tomato salads lately J (two of my faves). Speaking of tomatoes, I was in the plaza one night, and (at night in the plaza people from the bars come up to you and try to convince you to go to their and give you a little note card sized piece of paper…I come home with 12 every time we go out) one of these women came up to me, holds up my arm, looks at my arm, looks at me, and goes “you need to tan, eat some tomatoes and it will help you get tan”. So I’ve been eating tomatoes and I think I’m tanner…or redder.

Checkmark Bread. The most delicious bread I have ever had. I usually don’t eat my bread with my lunch or dinner…but Checkmark Bread is a different story. It’s a baguette, and it just has a check mark printed on it, not sure why, but it perfect-nice and fluffy on the inside and a flaky crust that isn’t too tough to rip apart-absolutely perfect.

There is a delicious fruit, just called "melon". It looks like a small watermelon, but is lighter green on the outside, and is green on the inside like a honeydew, but it tastes like a cantaloupe! 

I have discovered the downfall to living in Europe. At first, I loved being surrounded by two old cathedrals, and historical monuments, and living in a really old city…however…the cathedrals are distracting. I was walking home from school and looking up at the cathedrals when I kicked a rock. And there was a tour bus amount of people who saw me do it.

Summer 2 is officially gone, it really set in this week that Salamanca simply IS NOT the same without them here.

Things in Salamanca are very different than the US...the US is definitely more service oriented, where as here I am helped when its convenient for the people working. Not everyone is like that, but in some major stores and some smaller little souvenir tiendas that has been the case. 

There is a market on Sundays called El Rastro (sp?) which my roomate and I went to this last weekend. It was quite the experience. It is a huge parking lot with tent after tent after tent of vendor set up selling purses, shirts, shoes, jewelry, more purses and different kinds of shirts and pants and everything you can imagine. On the pavement in the middle of the aisle of El Rastro, there are people selling DVDs...the DVD's are laying out on a blanket and you have to walk around, and some (most) of these DVDs appeared to be pirated...example: Knight and Day is still in theater and I could have bought it last weekend. 

This weekend we are in Aveiro, Portugal, nicknamed the “Little Venice” because of its canals and gondolas. It is a free weekend for our group so we are hitting the beach! The water is supposed to be freezing cold so I’ll probably just be in the sand. Hopefully I’ll get my pictures up SOON!!