It is hard to beat five weeks in Spain. Shanti and I spent the first week travelling through Castilla y Leon and Asturias, where we walked in the Picos de Europa.

We then went to Salamanca, Spain's Oxford, where Shanti spent a week and I spent a month studying Español at language school Isla.

Of course, we did a bit more than just study Spanish.

La corrida, con quatro toros grandes.

The rest of the class at Isla.

Carmen Llorente and her family, with whom I stayed.

A day out mountain biking.

When we weren't studying, we generally went out drinking and dancing to terrible Spanish music and not much better Eurodisco. Anyway, here are some photos of the more sober moments. (I did say *more* sober, not sober.)

Johannes with a porron - a litre of beer that is supposed to be drunk at arm's length. It will come as no surprise to anyone that most of this beer gets poured straight down the drinker's shirt, up their nose and all over their face.

Still, it is great fun, and a fixture of Isla's Friday night tours of the tapas bars. Well worth trying, as long as you don't value your carpet.

Yes, I tried it too. And no, I'm not horribly sunburnt, just lit badly and completely covered in beer from my cack-handed attempts to drink from the porron with a straight arm (in the photo I had obviously wimped out, but I have very clear memories of beer pouring up my nose...).
 
 
 
 
 
 

This is an amusing club that actually played some decent music, instead of the usual diet of Raul and the like (although they played that too, of course).

Dancing here are Christian and Katya, although much of the rest of Isla are in the background as the club gets completely taken over by the school early in the evening (ie about midnight) before the Spaniards start arriving at three or four in the morning.

Christian is, of course, a killer dancer, although he only just made it into the maquina de bailar club.

Outside Isla: Katya, Ulrike&Stefan, Pepe y Juan.

Ulrike and Stefan got a bit much towards the end. The gossip is easy, and is anyway recorded in these photos, so it does no harm to put it in context (Ulrike: flames to my e-mail, please...). When they turned up on day one Ulrike was engaged to be married, and had even fixed a date.

That is, engaged to be married to someone else who had stayed back in Germany. But it turns out she wasn't really ready to wed, so when Stefan presented his charming but unsmiling face (his trip to Spain being partly to learn to smile more) she fell for him pretty quickly.

It actually took them two weeks to get it together, while Ulrike wrestled with her conscience. But they made up for the short time they had left in Spain together by being horribly touchy-feely, with constant PDAs which made everyone else gag. Still, quite sweet really, as the photo shows.

Salamanca itself is a pretty romantic place, though. This is a pic from the swimming pool, where we spent a fair amount of time.

As you can see, Juan and Pepe spent lots of time working on their tans.

Unfortunately it took us almost two weeks to discover what a pleasant place the pool was -- although it wasn't heated -- and although we went every day after that, it wasn't enough.

The pools all shut for the winter starting from the Fiesta de Salamanca, despite the fact that it is still perfectly warm.

Down by the river we had a barbeque one day, in a very pretty location. Pepe was the only person organised enough to bring proper glasses, so the rest of us were drinking wine out of plastic cups while watching daft dogs dig holes in a treestump.
 

The food was, frankly, nasty.

As a vegetarian I stuck to just bread, but the others happily cooked sausages (despite the fact that they looked as though they were off) and wasted lots of beer in what they assured me was traditional German cooking: pouring it on the sausages. Struck me as a silly tradition, but what do I know?

This was also one of the few times when David (seen here with Katya) came out with the rest of us. We never established where he went the rest of the time - including a whole week when he disappeared from class.

He missed many of his classes anyway, again for no apparent reason. Katya, currently training in Berlin to be a medic, also disappeared occasionally, but she always had the excuse of very heavy drinking for being late at 8.40am classes.

Here she is with Pepe in a bar. Fairly normal.

Anyway, we finish for now with me and Clara, for no particular reason.

More photos are to come, when I have finished the film and had it developed.

¡Hasta la proxima!