Day Five - The Exploring Day

I started this day with very different plans than I ended up following through on. Most of the students last night were from a program called Erasmus - it's an educational program set-up by the European Union which allows students to move all around different schools in the EU, building and consolidating a sense of pan-European culture. This Erasmus group had scheduled several events throughout the year and today was to be one of them - a trip to Segovia, a city near Madrid which is famous for its massive Roman Aqueduct, well-preserved and functional after 2000 years. Try to imagine that time frame for a moment and you'll be in awe. It's been standing since a little after the time of Jesus through the Christianization of the Roman Empire, through the fall of Rome and Germanic invasions of the West, through the Muslim invasions of Spain and France, through the Crusades, through the 100 years war, through the discovery of the New World, through the Reformation, through the American Revolution, World Wars, and your lifetime. Ancient beyond words.

So I got home at 5:00 AM, set my alarm for 8:30 AM, woke up and 8:30 AM, blinked and it was 10:30, I having missed the 9:15 rendezvous. So I developed other plans for the day.

First I went shopping. Care to come along?

The view from my apartment's stairwell.




The street nearby. Not awesome, not awful.




At the grocery store, I found this awesome contraption. It's like a standard handheld basket for groceries, except the handle can fold up about three feet so that you can push or pull it around like a normal cart. Mark, if you're reading this, get some of these for Wal Mart.

After returning I made some lunch - spinach in cream sauce which I had bought at the store, along with some mushrooms and bread. Not bad. After dinner, Weronika and Dominika, my two Polish flatmates, decided to go to the nearby Salamanc neighborhood of the city to explore. We took the Metro there:

Ended up seeing the bullfighting stadium from the outside:


Then we wandered by another massive El Corte Ingles:


And eventually wandered by a monument honoring the most important and lasting legacy of Spanish Civilization. Flanked by massive statues, beneath the undulating movements of the largest Spanish flag in the world, lies this modest stone, and on it is carved a copy of one of the most important things ever written:


"Beyond the Tropic of Capricorn lies a most beautiful haven; it is the highest and most noble part of the world. That is to say, the Earthly Paradise." - Diario de Cristobal Colón (Diary of Christopher Columbus), 1492

Don't forget how much of the modern world we owe to Spain.