Hola! So this past weekend I went to my favorite city in Spain, Salamanca! For those of you who don't know, Salamanca is home to one of Spain's oldest Universities. I took a bus to Madrid around 2 am Friday night and met up with Gwen who had been in Madrid since Thursday. Then we hopped on a bus to Salamanca and got there by 10:30 am. It was a little rainy when we got there, but we found our hostel (via the Plaza Mayor) to drop our bags off. Then we got some tapas and walked around the city. We went to the Cathedral, up into some Towers of the Cathedral, but my favorite part was our tour of the University. There is a tradition in Salamanca to find the frog on the University building. Now, I had been to Salamanca when I was 16, so I had an idea of where the frog was, the only problem was we couldn't find it! After searching and searching the Cathedral building, we overheard someone say that the frog was on a different building. We cracked up and headed off to find the old University building. That led us to a cool museum of the old University. In between that madness we had a nice, long, big Spanish-style lunch at some random restaurant where the waiter brought us two 1/2 bottles of wine (when the menu of the day only included a glass), so we got a little silly and enjoyed ourselves...hooray vacation! Anyway, around 8 am we found the Mercadona to buy some snacks for dinner & I ended up falling asleep until midnight, time to party! We managed to find the famous 1 euro Chupitos bar, which was packed with University kids. There were about 3 other bars around that area and we seemed to kind of cycle through them with the pack. We met some people from Salamanca & Madrid and had a great time. The next morning I bought some U of Salamanca sweatpants & we headed back on the 8 hour trip home.Today is Wednesday 14/11/12, the day of the Huelga General. That means the General Strike. All over Europe countries like Greece, Italy, Ireland, France, Portugal, etc are coming together to show their unhappiness with their government systems & the crisis in general. So I urge you to pick up a newspaper, or if our U.S. news doesn't cover it go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world/ --my favorite site for news, and see what's going on! (Don't worry family, here in Alicante this is not a violent strike by any means, also it is a touristy city so probably not everything will be closed. Still I'm in my house anyway writing a paper today.)
