Salamanca and Those Americans

Today, I made the three-hour bus trip from Carceres to Salamanca. We crossed over another chain of mountains in passing from Extremadua into Castile y Leon. The day was cold--in the low 30s--and light snow swept across the road and dusted the peaks. We moved from olive trees to oak and onto rolling plains. In Andalusia and Extremadura, it´s purning time for the olive groves. Row on row of trees line the hills, and here and there smoke rises as the grove tenders are pruning the trees and burning the gathered branches. How they decide which branch to leave and which to cut is an art or a science that I cannot fathom. The opposite of a bonsai tree which is trimmed to create a perfect shape and balance, the olive tree seems hacked and whittled on so that the end product looks like a broken old man. It´s a millennial tree; that is, it can live for hundreds of years. Some of the ancient plants I passed today were bigger around than two people might have reached. They frequently have multiple trunks or have great rotten holes in the mid-trunk large enough for a person to step through. Some have just a semi-circular husk of a trunk remaining, yet silver leaves and the promise of another year´s fruit still cling to the twisted branchs.

And then there´s Salamanca. I´m going to run out of hyperbolic phrasing before this trip is over. In the late Medieval period, there were four great universities--lights in a dim world. They were Oxford, Paris, Bologna, and Salamanca. Founded in the 1200s by Alfonso IX, the university still draws scholars from all over Europe. I saw the two cathedrals today--simply stunning. The older of the two was built in the 12th century, and the ¨New Cathedral¨ was begun in the 16th and took 200 years to complete. There are also four Romanesque churches of note, but they´re only open during mass. I went to one at 6pm, and will visit the others tomorrow (yes, I´m going to be in mass three times tomorrow). More on the city later.

Both Carceres and Salamanca are populated by a substantial number of Americans. College students. Boy, I came to Europe to get away from college students, and what do I find? The University of Extremadura in Carceres has an articulation agreement with Iowa State University, so I kept running into Cyclones (the ISU mascot, in case you didn´t know). Several American universities have agreements with the University of Salamanca (I met students from St. Bonaventure, the University of Deleware, and UMass to name just a few). One of the students I met today is working on a Master´s Degree in history while teaching English in a local high school. What a deal! So, where do you meet Americans off campus? I´m sitting next to four of them right now. All you have to do is find the local internet cafe or cyberbar, and those Americans will be hanging out. If this fails, stop by the Burger King or a MacDonald´s--most of the larger towns have one of each. When is Tarrant County College going to start its ¨study abroad¨ program? Sign me up!