Day 6: Salamanca

Today we explored Salamanca. When we first woke up this morning the sky seemed a little grey and it wasn't terribly hot outside. It was still warm enough (for us) to wear shorts and t-shirts, but the sun wasn't beating down as it had been yesterday afternoon. We saw some of the locals walking around in coats and jumpers! Our apartment is so conveniently located that we didn't have to go far to see what a beautiful city Salamanca is. In fact the only problem we had was that although it was well past 10am by the time we ventured outside, the people of Salamanca were still in the process of setting up for the day and we had to dodge around delivery vans and trucks to get any decent photos.

It's hard to complain though when just walking around the corner from the apartment gives views like these...

The most impressive sight in Salamanca is the gothic cathedral. The building itself is so large and the carvings on it are so ornate that it is difficult to capture more than a fraction of it in a photo. From some angles it looks more like a fortress than a cathedral.

From the cathedral we walked along the main street in Salamanca, towards the city's main square. The day was starting to brighten up a bit by this stage, with bits of blue sky becoming visible between the clouds. The buildings looked so much more beautiful with blue sky behind them that we later retraced our steps and retook some of our photos of the places we'd already visited, including the beautiful square in which the cathedral and several university buildings sit.

When we got to the main square we were amazed by how huge it was!

From the square we headed out of the old town towards the train station, because we wanted to investigate the best way of travelling to Madrid. From the timetables online it looked like there was a train some time after 9 on Saturday morning, so I was a bit concerned when we consulted the ticket machine in the train station and it only offered a train at 4am! Fortunately there was a helpful man at the ticket counter who confirmed that there were other trains and sold us tickets for the one we wanted. We went to the bus station after that to investigate the possibility of a day trip to a town called Ciudad Rodrigo. Again, it was a frustrating experience because we can't find any such thing as a timetable of departures from the bus station; the buses are run by a myriad of companies, all of which produce their own small timetables, and so before you can consult anything at all you need to work out which company (or companies!) operate buses to your desired destination. It seems so inefficient that I can't help thinking we must be missing something through not being able to speak proper Spanish.

That aside, we had a lovely day and by early afternoon the sun was so hot that we had to seek refuge in the air-conditioned apartment to cool down. Salamanca is a beautiful place and we would definitely come back