Halfway There!

Well, today marks the end of two weeks in Salamanca for me! The first week went by pretty slow, but the days are flying now! We´re enjoying some really great weather here-it rained and got chilly yesterday, so we had some amazing hot chocolate last night, but today it´s breezy and a cool 65 degrees-perfection. Hate to rub that in to all of you, since I hear we´re having a pretty nice hot spell!

Tomorrow we´re headed to Toledo-I am so excited! We were supposed to go to Sierra Francia, the mountains, but the group wasn´t big enough.

There´s a phrase in Salamanca that you have to know if you ever come here-it´s ¨debajo el reloj¨, which means ¨under the clock¨. It´s the common meeting place for...everyone! In the Plaza Mayor, there´s this beautiful clock and underneath the walkway is a perfect place to meet with your friends because it´s nearly the center of town, so it´s pretty convienent for everyone! I´m going to try and attach a link to a picture of the Plaza, so look in the upper right hand corner of the blog...can´t promise anything, because the whole site is in Spanish now, so I have to do some major translating!

Some other cool things about Salamanca...they love frogs! (Ranas, in español) They´re considered good luck and the ¨special¨one can be found on a skull on the front of the old university. It´s very small and quite hard to find, but supposedly once you do, you´ll have good luck and good studies at the university. Salamanca also has a very cool tradition with their buildings-they´re all built/covered with the same type of stone. It´s a stone that´s only found in Salamanca, and it´s very sand based, so it´s mixed with some type of chemical/stone that oxidizes over time, so the buildings all have this caramel brown-reddish color-it´s beautiful! I´m desperately trying to find something that I can bring home that´s made out of this type of stone, but no luck so far!

School is going so great. I have never enjoyed learning this much! They teach everything in Spanish, but it makes so much more sense now! Watching and observing them has given me some ideas about how I want to teach Spanish, because I´m beginning to realize that there are quite a few things that could be much better. My teachers are absolutely phenomenal-I can´t get enough of them! They are so encouraging and correct you every time you mess up, which is so helpful because you usually won´t make the same mistake again!

Food in Spain....is quite different! They use a lot of what we do, but in a much different way. I´ve had quite a few unidentifiable things-you all would be proud of me for branching out! =) But, last night we found a Mexican restaurant-it wasn´t very good, but you should have seen us-we were like little kids because we finally found something familiar! We´re saving a night for pizza when we´re really craving ¨home food¨. I think I´m going to make a list of things I want to eat when I get back to the States...

I hope you´re all doing great! I can´t tell you what a great time I´m having over here! We´re in the midst of planning our long weekend trip to Granada for next weekend-should be lots of fun! There´s lots of Moorish influence there from when the Muslims occupied most of Spain from around 700-1492. We´re going to visit the Alhambra, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel gave Columbus the OK to travel overseas and where all kinds of history went down-it´s incredible-I can´t wait to see it! Have a great weekend (mine´s already here-haha!!) and I´ll keep you posted on anything exciting! -Rebecca