We went on an excursion last weekend to Leon and Salamanca to fulfill parts of our culture credits. It was nice to have an entire weekend of travel, food and lodging planned for us by our program coordinator. In Leon we saw the Santa María de León Cathedral, Casa Bonites, and Basilica of San Isidoro. We’ve been learning about the history and architecture of all these historical monuments in our art history class and I love being able to see it with my own eyes.
On Saturday morning we traveled to Salamanca which is a few hours away from the city of Leon. Salamanca is bigger than Leon and there’s a large university with about 22,000 students. Leon was calm and quiet in comparison to Salamanca which was full of young people, lots of bachelor and bachelorette parties, and lots of monuments to see. Because the city was full of students it was easy to make friends. There were even a couple of times that before I could even introduce myself, Spanish students would ask to take a picture with me because I’m American. I should have offered to sign autographs too.
By midday in Salamanca we were all tired, hot, and hungry. We went to a restaurant in the city center that would host 17 people for lunch and it was chaos trying to order food. There were 4 choices for the first plate and 4 choices for the second plate plus desserts and drinks. It took forever for the waiter to explain each dish, for our coordinator to translate, for the picky eaters to ask questions about each dish, and everyone to get exactly what they wanted. Everyone was on edge and frustrated with one another. I don’t really like traveling in large groups for that reason. At the table I was sitting near a few people who were beginning to annoy me as they talked loudly about stupid topics and would complain about the food. When they began to sing the popular YouTube video song “Harry Potter Puppet Pals- The mysterious ticking noise” I lost my patience and snapped. I turned to them and with a stern voice said “I’m tired, hungry, and it’s hot out so I’m feeling on edge. You’re being so annoying and if you don’t stop singing that stupid song right now I’m going to punch someone. Please stop it.”
Their eyes opened with surprise and they stopped immediately. They sympathetically responded with “ok, ok, ok, we’ll stop and be quiet.” I’ve learned that because I’m not usually an outspoken person, when I am assertive people respond fairly quickly. I also noticed that they scooted away from me as much as possible, in case I decided to throw a punch.
After lunch we got to see Plaza Mayor, New Cathedral, Old Cathedral, and University of Salamanca. After two full days of seeing monuments I felt bad for our tour guide in Salamanca. All of our eyes glazed over and we were more interested in taking pictures instead of listening to her. Do we really have to talk about another sculpture of Jesus? It looks just like the last 50 sculptures we saw.
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