First up, we’re safe and sound in Spain still. Far away from the horrible attacks in Brussels. We’ve seen quite a few heavily armed police around keeping an eye on things.
It’s been a while since the last post and we’ve been to lots of places since then: Salamanca, Segovia, Avila, Toledo, Madrid, El Escorial & Cuenca. Since leaving Seville there has been a general pattern of moving north and to higher altitude, so we’ve been chasing the winter. It’s been getting colder and colder and we think the coldest place was Avila where it didn’t make it above 3°C when we were there. But it did make Madrid seem nice and warm at 14°C. But that’s enough of that since no one in Australia will be giving us any sympathy.
Salamanca is an university town, the university there is over 900 years old, and the university buildings are pretty fancy.
The entrance to one of the uni buildings has tiny frog carved into it and the legend goes that if you find the frog then you will pass your uni exams. We spotted it after 10 minutes so that seems like a much better time investment than actually studying.
Click here if you want to see the full size picture to try and find the frog. (You can see it but it’s a bit blurry, blurrier than the shot below)
Segovia has a castle that was the inspiration for Cinderella’s Castle in Disneyland. It’s the photo at the top of this post. It also has a fancy cathedral which was nice and close to where we were staying. Well it was nice until we realised that the bells ring every 15min which makes sleeping a bit difficult.
Toledo probably has to be the most toursity place we’ve seen in Spain. Probably because it’s an old medieval town a short train ride from Madrid. I don’t think there’s one place you can stand in the old town without seeing a souvenir shop, ads for the Templar & torture museums, suits of armour, swords and shields for sale, and strangely enough Lord of the Rings memorabilia. LOTS of Lord of the Rings stuff.
It does have a cathedral with a long history and some very impressive marble sculptures.
The huge bell in the bell tower is a good story about when things just don’t go well. The bell is the largest in Spain. It took 2 years to make it, then once it was finished they realised that they didn’t have a method for hoisting it up to the belltower. So they took another 2 years to figure that out. Then once it was finally installed in the belltower it cracked the first time they rang it.
We’ve seen a lot of medieval towns in this section of the trip, so I’ll leave you with just one more photo of a medieval town, Cuenca at sunset.
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