Salamanca day 2

First full day in Salamanca and I had to make the most of that card. I was up early and headed into Plaza Mayor for breakfast and coffee. Inside the square there was a brass band warming up and they were shortly joined by more. Within about 30 minutes there were about 10 bands lined and one at a time they marched out of the square through the streets playing their instruments and dressed in their very elaborate and colourful uniforms. There was quite a large crowd and quite a bit of competition for prime photo locations. It was like the running of the bulls except there were bands instead of bulls. People would stand directly in their path and snap away and remove themselves at the last possible second. The whole spectacle was unexpected which probably added to the pleasure.

What I did fail to do the previous evening though was record the hours of opening for the various places, my well planned route became a number of cross town journeys and even then I only managed to use the card on three of the locations as the rest were either free or ones in which I had no hope of making because their hours of opening were too short and clashed with higher priority locations. I had managed to squeeze about the half the value of the card before the bloody siesta caught me out again, and of course being a Sunday the places did not reopen, oh well an expensive souvenir.

At 2.30 it was time to find a bar to watch the Liverpool game, unfortunately I could only find the Spanish games being shown in the bars and by now the blisters on my poor old right foot were getting a bit painful so I trudged back wondering what the result of the game would be. I stopped at the bar around the corner from the hostel for a coffee and saw they were showing the game I wanted, unfortunately I had spent so much time looking in other places it only had 30 minutes left, but that was enough to satisfy me for a while, in two weeks I get to see them live.

Earlier when I walked around I noticed that there were floodlights. In the paths around the more grand buildings. A walk around at night confirmed that and the various cathedrals and plazas were lit up which made for a some great photo opportunities. After that is was back to the dorm to upload photos and get some sleep for my trip to Madrid the following day.

A young lady from Madrid was the only one left that evening, Stephanie is originally from the island of Sardinia and speaks Italian, Spanish and a little English, she was doing work experience in Madrid and was in Salamanca for a weekend away. She spent the day touring a town near the Portuguese border. When she saw the photos of the brass bands marching through town she exclaimed hoy! In Spanish hoy means today, it is pronounced exactly the same as an Aussie would say oi. Oi is used to get someones attention, oi you! In Spanish you would use oiga, which literally means hear me. Even though my Spanish is improving every day I still can only think in English which means I then have to go through a translation process in my head then speak the words. When I hear someone speak I have to identify the words familiar to me, translate them in my head and piece together something meaningful, I very rarely understand the entire sentence but I get the gist of what they say. Which is of course a long way of saying that I thought Stephanie said oi which was a strange response until the wheels in my head did a few laps and I realised she said hoy in a surprised voice because she did not realise that was happening that morning in the Plaza. We also had a good laugh about sir snore-a-lot and were quite happy that he was on a plane to Germany, over there they call it yodelling.

There was time for one more unexpected event in Salamanca. At about 2 am I again heard snoring and immediately blamed Stephanie, in with the ear plugs and it was then a broken sleep frequently disturbed by the snoring of Stephanie, or so I thought. Sometime in the night, and it was after midnight as that is when I went to sleep, a new guest managed to sneak into the room and claim the bed in the corner near Stephanie's, it was that chap who was impersonating a drove of pigs. In any event I left for the bus stop prior to either of them waking up so I left Stephanie in the room with the drove of pigs and went to the bus stop to go to Madrid.