The cafe life

This picture was taken at midnight last night in La Plaza Mayor of Salamanca, a city of 150,000 people. Granted the Spanish take their vacations in August so there are a lot of visitors here. But, there were thousands of people in this square. The Spanish just love the cafe life! It is a fact that there are more cafés per capita here than any other country in Europe.

There is an enormous pedestrian-only zone surrounding the old university...very beautiful sandstone construction mostly dating from the 16th to 18th century.

I bought a SIM card for my IPad and have used it to Skype Gina on her cell phone..by far the cheapest way to call from anywhere. Unfortunately the phone store didn't have the nano SIM I need for my cell phone. I'm going to a different store tomorrow morning before I head across the border. The small village I'll be living in won't have a phone store with nano SIM chips...I'm hoping it has a cafe!

The Road to Algodres

I am feeling a little like Don Quijote, a man with an imbalanced view of the world and his place in it. A man of imagined adventure. I have signed up as a volunteer to help construct a stone entranceway to the Faia Brava nature preserve in northeast Portugal. I will be working there for two weeks with a group of 10-15 people, both Portuguese stone masons and international volunteers. We will be starting around dawn each day and quitting at 1 pm when the temperature is expected to be in the high 80s. There are four main tasks outlined in the write-up: collecting the stone from the surrounding hillsides, shaping the stones with hand picks, building the foundation and placing the rocks on the entrance wall. I am imagining myself as a burro driver, delivering the stones from the surrounding hills. I also foresee spending a lot of time picking at the granite rocks to shape them. I am trying to avoid the vision where I am lifting heavy rocks all day in the blazing sun but I guess there might be a lot of that too. I really would rather not think about my back at all.

I flew into Madrid today, rented a Peugeot Kangoo (two bikes should roll in without taking the front tires off) and drove west to Salamanca. This is a university town. The university here was established in the early 1200s and has been considered one of the most prestigious schools for centuries. Salamanca boasts a Plaza Mayor that rivals Madrid in size and grandeur, as you can see. The historic buildings are built in a beautiful tawny sandstone.

Of course I arrived in time for lunch. The Spanish love seafood and must have the highest per capita consumption of cephalapods in the world. They have perhaps a dozen different names for squid (mostly to distinguish the size, from less than an inch to 14 inch monsters) and eat cuttlefish and octopus regularly. I enjoyed a plate of chiperones a la plaincha for lunch and couldn't resist taking a picture of them. Life is good with a plate of grilled squid in front of you. These were so tender, perfectly grilled.

I have to start work on Monday. I'll let you know how the burros are behaving.