Before I go on with my Christmas holiday, I will just quickly
post some photos of our trip to Toledo where we met the minister for education
for Castilla La Mancha and then had a look around the famous old city. Also, I
have downloaded the 1842 translation of “El Ingeniouso Hildalgo Don Quijote de
La Mancha” and am ploughing through its 716 pages of antiquated English. I have
been working on it all week, but I am only on page 39. It is a challenge to say
the least.
Thursday 2013-12-12
We got up early on Thursday morning and headed for the post
office to catch our chartered bus for the Sierra de Francia. First of all we
stopped at the Peña de Francia and its amazing lookout and then headed on to La
Alberca where we walked around the little, old, heritage-listed town. We saw
the town pig. It is fat and grey. In La Alberca there is a tradition of having
a pig loose in the streets that is fed by the townsfolk. The pig, named
"San Anton", is blessed on July 13, and released onto the town's
streets. On January 17, the feast day of San Antonio (Saint Anthony), the pig
is raffled off at the doors of the church. The funds are raised for the
Brothers of St Antony. The winner of the raffle gets the pig and then it is
slaughtered and roasted and everyone in the town eats it. So I’m still a little
unsure as to what the prize is, apart from the thrill of winning the raffle.
Anyway, when we got to La Alberca we went straight to the bar to get some hot
drinks and use the toilets after the bus ride, but the lady behind the bar just
freaked out at having so many people at once and didn’t want to serve us, so we
left. Weird! We went to the Casa Museo(house museum) which is a house still in
its original state from the 50s. the guy who owns it now inherited it from his
grandparents in the 70s and decided that it had so much old stuff in it (and nothing
new at all) that he turned it into a museum. It was pretty good.
When we got back to Salamanca we went ice skating and
generally tried to avoid the 50 000 drunk uni students from all over Spain (and
the world) who can’t wait for new year’s eve so they all go to Salamanca and
have a practice run on the 12th of December, countdown to midnight
and everything.
Wednesday 2013-12-11
Wednesday was our only full day in Salamanca and we made the
most of it. We started out in Plaza Mayor, moved on to the New Cathedral, Old
Cathedral and climbed the Ieronemous Tower. I think I have told anyone who will
listen that Old and New are relative terms when talking about cathedrals. If
you want your mind blown, just google ‘New Cathedral Salamanca’ for a bit of a
definition of what the Spanish consider to be ‘new’. We cruised past the
University of Salamanca, the 3rd oldest in the world and searched
for the Frog on a Skull. Ryan found it in record time and we retired for
‘Chocolate con Churros’ before heading to the History of Salamanca Museum.
Curiously enough the Spanish call history museums ‘museums of interpretation’,
I guess in acknowledgement of all views of history being subjective.
After lunch we headed to the Plaza de Toros (bullfighting
ring) to check out the statue of Julio Robles, who was best man at Carlos’
grandparents wedding. We finished the afternoon tour off with a jaunt through ‘El
Corte Ingles’ which is like a Myer-type department store and a quick trip to
the ‘Chinese Store’. ‘Chinese Store’ is a generic term for all Cheap-as-Chips/Reject-Shop
style stores here in Spain. One doesn’t need a wild imagination to guess that
it is probably because everything in them is made in China. But have a look
around our ‘Chinese Stores’ in Australia, especially in January, and you will
find that they have more Australian flags, toy koalas & Kangaroos, corked
broad-brimmed hats, tea towels with the national anthem on them … basically
they have more Australiana per square foot than any other store in the world,
the same is true here as well. The only difference being that they have Real
Madrid gear, toy bulls & bullfighters, Spanish flags, Flamenco dancers and
so on …
I’ve taken the first step in fulfilling a personal ambition
this trip in that I have purchased “Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal”, which
even with my limited Spanish I recognise to be “Harry Potter and the Philosophical
Stone” rather than ‘the philosopher’s stone’, but … you know … whatever. I’ll
let you know how philosophical I feel when I try to read it. I also managed to
purchase a copy of ‘El Principito’ (The Little Prince) and I think I might use
it next year with my year 12 students when we start learning the past tense.
There something to look forward to guys!!!!! More verb conjugations, YAY!!!
Tuesday 2013-12-10
We woke up refreshed after a good night’s sleep and
breakfasted on a nutritious serve of molten chocolate in a cup and sticks of
fried donut batter to dip in it (chocolate con churros), which we are assured
is the breakfast of champions. We left the restaurant feeling pretty healthy
and fit for a walk around the fortress city of Ávila. We had arrived on a
Tuesday, which was lucky because the main tourist attractions are closed on
Mondays. Well, that’s what we thought. Turns out that because it was a public
holiday on Monday everything stayed touristy stayed open, and because they were
all puffed from a big day at work on Monday, everything was closed on Tuesday
this week. Well not everything was closed, but the fortress was. And that’s a
bit like saying ‘not everything in Monash was closed, but the playground was’.
So we took a walk and had a smashing lunch in a pizza restaurant. Some of the
girls fell in love with the waiter, the waiter fell in love with some of the
girls … all in all I was pretty happy that we were leaving. We took the bus to
Salamanca and had some free time. Parky bought some red pants and we had
Chinese for dinner.
Monday, 2013-12-09.
Well, I guess it’s time now that I have my laptop back; or
better said, now that I am back where my laptop has been the whole time, to
write the trip diary. Monday we started very early. We met at the train station
at around 6:40am and started the long journey which would eventually lead us to
Ávila that evening. Busses and the purchasing of tickets for said busses has
given us some exciting moments this week, but the first one went pretty
smoothly and we were off by 7:15 and moving toward Madrid. It came a bit of a
shock to the students though that a city could have more than one bus station
and when we got to Madrid we had to catch the subway to another bus station and
take the bus from there to Segovia. This was all well and good and we ended up
in Segovia at around lunchtime.
We saw the Roman aqueduct, built in the 1st
century AD and toured the Alcazar (fortress castle) of Segovia (you can see
them in the pictures), but certainly the highlight of the day for many was the
Cochinillo (whole, deboned, roasted, suckling pig). It had been eagerly
anticipated and warmly received. The only issue was trying to get the students
moving again after they had stuffed themselves up to the eyeballs with roast
pork. But get moving we did and we walked across town to the bus station only
to find that it was a public holiday in Castilla-Leon and instead of eight
busses per day to Ávila there were only two. That shouldn’t have mattered as we
were over an hour early for our bus, but with the reduced bus schedule,
combined with the fact that it was a huge tourist area the bus had already sold
out. Reminder to self; buy tickets well in advance, days are better than hours.
Unperturbed, we bartered with some taxi drivers and got ourselves to Ávila for
a reasonable price, had dinner and got ourselves to bed, ready for a big day
climbing the fortress tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment