¡Hola! I'm Katie, I'm a senior now, and last spring I spent a semester at the University of Salamanca in Spain. I got home in May and I've been meaning to make this page ever since, partly because everybody keeps asking me about it and partly because I'm afraid that if I don't write it down I'll start forgetting the little things, like the sound the storks make on the cathedral towers (a clacking, like castanets) and the exact color of the stone at sunset. So here it is. It's long. I'm sorry. I'm not sorry.

Salamanca is a small city about two and a half hours west of Madrid, and it is basically made of a golden-colored sandstone that glows in the late afternoon. The university was founded in 1218, which makes it one of the oldest in Europe, and the whole old town is a maze of students, plazas, churches and bars. It's the kind of place where you walk out your front door and 800 years of history is just there, and you're late for class.

I lived with a host family, the Alonsos: Señora Carmen, her husband Don Julio, their daughter Bea (who was 19 and became my best friend in Spain), and a very old, very grumpy dachshund named Pepe. They had a fourth-floor apartment (no elevator) about ten minutes' walk from the Plaza Mayor, and I had a small room with a window that looked at the building across the street, where a lady watered her geraniums every morning at exactly 8:15.

Señora Carmen had hosted American students for eleven years and she was not going to let me speak English. Not one word. The first two weeks I understood maybe half of what she said and answered with nouns. By March I was arguing with Bea about music. By May I was dreaming in Spanish. That's the whole reason to do a homestay instead of a dorm. The family will fix your Spanish whether you like it or not.

Things I learned at their table: that lunch is the big meal and it's at 2:30 or 3; that you eat a piece of fruit for dessert and peel it with a knife and fork (I never got good at this); that tortilla means a potato omelet and not what I thought; that you should always, always have a second helping of the lentils, because Señora Carmen made the lentils and she is watching you. Don Julio taught me to play a card game called mus and I lost every single time.

I cried when I left. So did Señora Carmen. Bea and I write every couple of weeks and she's talking about visiting next summer, if she can save up the money and her parents say yes. Pepe, I'm told, has not noticed I'm gone.

I took four courses through the university's program for foreign students, all in Spanish: Advanced Grammar (ugh, but necessary; the subjunctive and I are now on speaking terms), Spanish Art History, 20th Century Spanish Literature (Lorca, Machado, and a lot of poetry I'm still thinking about), and a Culture and Civilization class that was mostly an excuse to go on field trips.

The classes met in the old university buildings, which means I took grammar quizzes in a room with a carved wooden ceiling from the 1500s. The professors lectured in fast Castilian and did not slow down for us. I filled three notebooks. The grading is different (everything rides on the final exam), which terrified me, but I got through.

The frog. On the front of the old university there's an incredibly detailed carved facade, and somewhere on it is a tiny frog sitting on a skull. Tradition says if you find it without help you'll pass your exams (or find love, or come back to Salamanca, depending on who you ask). Everybody stands there squinting. It took me eleven days. I'm not going to tell you where it is. Go squint.

Everyone who's been to Salamanca will tell you the Plaza Mayor is the most beautiful square in Spain, and I'm going to tell you too. It's a huge enclosed square from the 1700s, baroque, arcades all the way around, cafes under the arches, and in the evening it's lit up gold and the whole city is there: grandmas on the benches, kids on bikes, students with their books, everybody just walking around and around. It's where you meet people. "I'll see you under the clock" means the Plaza, and everyone knows it.

I had a lot of coffee under those arches. I had my first café con leche there my first morning, jet-lagged out of my mind, and I had my last one there in May, and I think about both of them a lot.

Other Salamanca things I loved and can't skip: the two cathedrals (an old one and a "new" one that's only from the 1500s-1700s, built right next to each other); the Casa de las Conchas, a house covered in hundreds of carved stone scallop shells, which is a public library now; the Roman bridge over the Tormes river, where I went to sit when I needed to think; and the storks nesting on every tower. Nobody warned me about the storks. They're enormous.

Okay. The schedule. This is the thing that's hardest to explain to people at home.

• Breakfast is tiny. Coffee and toast, or a pastry. That's it.
• Lunch is at 2:30 or 3 and it's the main meal, with a first course, a second course, bread, and fruit. Then, honestly, a nap, or at least everything shuts down for a couple of hours.
• Around 6 or 7 there's merienda, a snack, because otherwise you would die.
• Dinner is at 9:30 or 10 at night. At home. Ten o'clock. Something light, like soup and a tortilla. My first week I thought the Alonsos had forgotten to feed me.
• And then you go out. On weekends the students don't even leave the house until 11 or midnight. I'm not exaggerating. Bea thought it was hilarious that I was ready for bed at 11.

Tapas are little plates of food you get in bars, and in Salamanca a lot of places give you a small one free with your drink. The way you do it is you go to one bar, have a drink and a tapa, then go to the next bar, and the next, and it's a whole social thing. Things I ate and now crave: jamón (the cured ham, sliced paper thin; Salamanca's region is famous for it), patatas bravas (fried potatoes with a spicy sauce), olives, croquetas, and hornazo, which is a Salamanca specialty, a flat pie filled with ham, chorizo and hard-boiled egg. Traditionally you eat hornazo on Lunes de Aguas, the Monday after Easter Monday (April 12 this year), when the whole city goes out to the fields for a picnic. We did. It was cold and windy and perfect.

In March a bunch of us took the bus to Madrid for a long weekend. Madrid is big and loud and fantastic, and I could write a whole page on it, but the thing I want to talk about is the Prado, because I went in expecting a museum and came out different.

My art history professor had spent two weeks on the Spanish painters and now here they all were, the actual paintings. Velázquez's Las Meninas, with the little princess and the painter looking out at you, and you stand in front of it and you cannot figure out where you're supposed to be standing. Goya's The Third of May 1808, the man in the white shirt with his arms up in front of the firing squad; I'd seen it in a textbook a hundred times and it's nothing like seeing it eight feet tall. And Goya's "black paintings" in their own room downstairs, which he painted on the walls of his own house when he was old and deaf, and which are the scariest things I have ever seen in a museum. Also Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, which is Dutch, not Spanish, but the Spanish kings collected it, and which you could look at for a week and keep finding things.

I went back the next morning by myself before the bus and just sat in front of Las Meninas for half an hour. Best thirty minutes of the semester, tied with the Lunes de Aguas picnic.

Spain's money is the peseta, and while I was there it was running around 150 pesetas to the dollar, give or take a few depending on the week. So a café con leche at maybe 150 pesetas was about a dollar, a tapas-and-drink was 200 or 300, and the bus to Madrid was around 2,000 pesetas, or a little over $13. My trick was to knock off two zeros and multiply by two-thirds, which sounds hard but you get fast at it. The coins are fun: there's a 100-peseta coin, and a 500-peseta coin, and a tiny little 1-peseta coin that's worth less than a penny and that Señora Carmen kept in a jar for no reason anyone could explain.

The confusing part: the euro officially started on January 1, 1999, right when I arrived, but only on paper. Bank statements and some price tags showed both pesetas and euros, and the exchange rate between them was locked, but there were no euro bills or coins. Those aren't supposed to come until 2002. So everybody still used pesetas for everything and mostly ignored the euro numbers. Bea said the older people were going to hate it.

Budget note for anyone going: I brought traveler's checks and an ATM card, and the ATM card was far easier. The exchange places by the Plaza charge a lot. Use the bank machines.

I want to be honest about this, because the brochures aren't. About three weeks in, the excitement wore off and I was just tired. Tired of not understanding, tired of being the foreigner, tired of the cold (Salamanca in February is cold and gray, and the apartment had one little heater). I missed my mom. I missed peanut butter, which you cannot get. I missed being funny; you don't know how much of your personality is jokes until you can't make them. I called home from a phone booth with a phone card and cried, and my mom said "do you want to come home?" and I said "no" and I meant it, but I cried anyway.

It passed. It passes for everybody. What got me through: Bea, who noticed and dragged me out; the other American girls in the program, who were going through the same thing; letters (real ones, on paper) from my roommate back home; and just time. By the middle of March I was okay, and by April I didn't want to leave. If you go, expect week three to be hard. It's not you. It's week three.

Coming home was strange too. Everything was so big and so quiet and everyone ate dinner at 6. I kept saying "vale" instead of "okay" for about a month. My friends got tired of hearing about Spain within a week (hence this page). I get it. But I'm not done talking about it, so.

1. Go see your study abroad office NOW, sophomore year if you can. Applications for spring are due in the fall and for fall in the spring, and there's paperwork, and financial aid stuff, and your major advisor has to sign off that the credits will transfer. Mine did, but it took two meetings.
2. Choose a homestay, not a dorm with other Americans. I know it's scary. It's the whole point.
3. Take as much Spanish as you can before you go. I'd had four semesters and it wasn't enough for the first month. Six would have been better.
4. Pack light and pack warm. You'll buy clothes there anyway. Bring good walking shoes. Bring pictures of your family for your host family; they'll want to see them.
5. Bring a little photo album and a journal. I wrote in mine every night, even when it was just "tired, lentils again." I'm so glad I did.
6. Keep a jar of pesetas coins. No reason. It's just what you do.
7. Say yes to everything (within reason, Mom). The picnic, the bar, the bus trip, the card game you'll lose. The stuff you say no to is the stuff you'll regret.

If you're applying to a Spain program and have questions, e-mail me. I love talking about this, as you may have noticed.