The Fulbright mid-year meeting gave me a chance to get to know this charming town
"Salamanca" has been "the University" for a long time now. So it's a glimpse of what a nice little places like Williamstown or Amherst may be like in 600 years if they're lucky. (Adjusted for architecture, of course.)
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| Salamanca rises above the banks of the Río Tormes, just before a snowstorm |
As mentioned earlier, I am just back from the Fulbright program's "mid year meeting" in Salamanca, which ran from Wednesday afternoon to Friday evening. The commission put us all up in (two) hotels and kindly gave us all the option of staying Friday night if we wanted, so we had Saturday free to explore the city further, which I did. (There are 155 Fulbright grantees this year, in addition to the families of the some of the researchers, so we're a big group. Hence the two hotels worth.) The mid-year meeting itself was interesting, and involved a few small group sessions about how our research or teaching is going, and how we're adjusting to life in Spain (during which I sat and felt stupid while other people complained about the difficulties of cultural adjustment, because I'm completely happy and contented and haven't missed buying peanut butter or eating dinner before 8:00 PM at all - partly because I seldom do either of those things at home). There were also a much larger number of presentations by various Fulbrighters about either their research or their experiences in Spain mostly as English teachers, since the English Teaching Auxiliaries are the bulk of the program. (Everyone calls them the E.T.A.s which I think is funny. TA is a standard abbreviation for Teaching Assistant, but E.T.A. with the three letters pronounced stands for Estimated Time of Arrival for me. And it's just lucky for them that the members of the Basque separatist group ETA pronounced as a word here are called "
etarras.") The presentations were generally interesting, and deserve their own entry, as does the socializing with 100+ young Americans (one of whom in a breakout session described his vision of cultural ambassadorship as "a kind of passive ambassadorship, just by being a decent human being so people know there are Americans who are"). My brief conclusion (to be expanded on at more length): the United States is
incredibly less uniform in culture than I usually think of it being, and certainly less uniform than most Europeans believe. But for now, I think Salamanca itself deserves an entry on its own, especially since we were brought there to get to know a new place, and it really is a pretty place, for a lot of reasons. (See pretty pictures after the jump.)
