Aka. "Destination Anywhere", "The Boy and Girl from County Bavaria"... After a very intense year in Würzburg (Germany), I'm back in Salamanca. I probably won't have that many experiences to write, but there's always an excuse to post a new entry!

After the nice time in Ciudad Rodrigo, we decided to go for a one-day trip somewhere nearby. The girls in the Tourist Office recommended us Alba de Tormes. On the other hand, some friends of mine had already been there and told me that it was very boring. Nevertheless, we decided to have a look... Maybe it's just because it was a pretty grey day, but I felt there was something depressing in the air in that place. Catholicly depressing. When we visited the Tourist Office, we got a small map telling us what to visit - churches, churches and more churches. There was also a castle (the big tower you see in the picture), which was now an Art / History museum, and a half-destroyed cathedral. In any case, we decided to go to the town centre. This is the Main Square. I personally loved it, even though it's ridiculous compared to the one in Salamanca. But before that, there was another small square surrounded by churches and museums, and this was our first stop. One of them was a museum dedicated to Saint Teresa of Ávila, in which you could even see the cell where she died, including (what I like to think of as) a figure of the saint. But that was not the creepiest thing we saw there. What really shocked me was to see her HEART and ARM, being kept in that museum as important relics. This is something I'll never understand... As it was forbidden to take pictures there, I don't have any images of neither the heart nor the arm to show you... luckily or unluckily. The next one we visited was another museum dedicated to Carmelite missionaries in Africa. On the ground floor there were some relics they had found there, as well as a couple of figures of two of the most important saints in that order, while on the first floor there were some disturbing images of third-world children, leppers and so on. Don't get me wrong - I really appreciate their interest in helping people from those countries, but some of the images were really shocking... However, lunchtime was coming and we soon felt hungry (amazing!) I have to say that it was pretty difficult to find a restaurant, there didn't seem to be many, and some of them were even closed. We ended up in "Manolín", near the Main Square. It also was both a cafeteria and a restaurant and looked rather elegant, but this time it was not that far beyond our reach ;) The food was excellent, we really enjoyed it (god, those were the best fried potatoes I had ever had in a restaurant!) Of course, after lunch we went for a coffee... that's how it's got to be, isn't it? We were very suprised how cheap it was (don't remember the name of the bar, but it's on the Main Square, that's where we took the pic you see from). Then we had to choose between the castle or the church next to the Main Square, which was supposed to be interesting and looked pretty nice in the brochures. As you can imagine, in the end we went for the latter. And yeah, certainly there were a couple of interesting things... First of all, in some parts of the inside you could see the red brick it had been built in. And secondly, there was a scale model of what the cathedral was supposed to look like... apart from that, the rest of it was packed with creepy images of saints. Then we took the bus back to Salamanca, thinking that there was only one possible word to describe Alba de Tormes: BOOOOOOOOORING!!!