On the Streets of Salamanca

"Living as we do in the age of the baseball cap, it is rare and refreshing to discover a genuine hatter – one that provides a generous selection of elegant and practical hats not only for ladies and gentlemen but for shepherds, farmers, amateur aviators, adventurers, jungle explorers, and nostalgic crooners." – Peter Mayle, from Provence A-Z









It seems reasonable to say, after spending only a few days in Salamanca, that to visit is to love it. What do we seek in travel? Sunshine that runs high and clean and that washes across a brightness of architecture that is naturally golden anyway. Labyrinthian roads that are so narrow barely a small BMW can nose along its cobblestones. Mammoth wooden doors chiseled out to fine art. Food at every turn and every back alleyway. Pleasant people. Adventure. In a word Salamanca is an adventure for the eye. Although we spent our first day here in a wild dream state, post jet lag, and that  in that state of mind the entire city looked like a Cezanne, the city had quietly and comfortably become known to us, located as we were right along the Paseo del Rector, no more than two blocks from the Puente Romano, itself a bridge that still shouldered original Roman handiwork at some 26 archways. Underneath the bridge, a bike path that split into both directions and at either end. The American, as he begins to eye up a city, especially in his home state, continuously awaits to stumble across patches of the city that should not be trespassed due to safety concerns, but Salamanca brightens and gratifies once more on this front, and has a sense of a quaint village filled with, gasp,

happy people at virtually every curve in calle. We had stationed on our schedule a bike tour through our tour guide and walked up along Calle Vera cruz past Universidad de Salamanca to the bike shop where we met three bikes parked on an uphill. We assumed that the guide would be English speaking only because our drivers and guides to this point had all been Spanish but spoke English certainly far better than we could Spanish, but our guide did not. She was exceedingly kind and offered to do the tour anyway with her slight ability as she said with English. What most certainly could have become a pitfall in our tour became one of the more memorable two and a half hours of our entire trip because it was our best and only forced interface with the language. At certain spots we would stop to take a look at a view of a building, the bridge, a cathedral, and by exchanging back and forth our comments in our respective language we were able to work out the context of what we were trying to say. At one point she showed us the backside of a manufacturing facility, quite old, dilapidated, and something to do with such factories not doing so well in this region right now and I asked what it produced. There was no way for her to say the word in English and so she quickly looked it up on her phone and it turned out it was fertilizer that was produced there, not the most elegant product for the outskirts of such a dazzling city, but nonetheless understandable. We had a short laugh, and she called out, "ok, c'mon" and we launched out to our next stop down the path.