Thursday, 9 June
On this day we left Astorga to travel south to Salamanca. The journey was long and involved a change at Valladolid. The driver on the first journey was, to put it charitably, a miserable git. What little joy he had in life was gained from blasting his horn at innocent drivers and cyclists. He also admonished us, saying curtly that eating was forbidden on the bus.
The grumpy driver had detected that we had food in our plastic bag. Indeed, this bag contained a package from Ines Rosales, a brand of tortas. We have both eaten these in the UK – at great expense. In England, such things cost about 5 of her Britannic Majesty’s pounds in an expensive specialist wine store. In Spain, they cost €1.80 in the supermarket. Tortas are large crackers containing copious olive oil. In this case, they were flavoured with anise (both essential oil and seeds, oddly) and sesame seeds. They are then topped with a sugar coating. The resulting cracker is crunchy, nutty, sweet and aromatic.
In England, we paired these crackers rather well with a robust cheddar. Here, ironically, I bought a totally dud pack of pre-sliced cow’s cheese, viejo in the hope of balancing the sweetness of the tortas. Alas, the cheese was stale and mousey. Not a mistake to be repeated! Nevertheless, we ate the crackers on their own. Tortas work very well with more tortas.
At the back of the bus, we nibbled our tortas like delinquent school children. Once at Valladolid, I was sent from the bus station to find some wooden cutlery to eat our second item, a salad. I failed to do this after asking a couple of the stalls in the bus station. The first query was met with a flat ‘no,’ and after the second told me to go and buy metal cutlery in the ‘ironmonger’s shop’ over the road. This wasn’t really what I had in mind…
On our next bus ride, the landscape got drier and the soil got poorer. The majority of the greenery in this part of Spain is fringed with electric yellow: broom. In Asturias, there seemed to have been a similar effect brought on by gorse flowers (another Cornish parallel).
Eventually, we arrived in Salamanca and stepped into the roasting heat. The city centre was impressive but rammed with tourists – presumably from surrounding areas, though, since they all spoke Spanish. This latter fact was a little odd given we were out in the peak of heat: siesta hours.
Excellent advice from our jovial hotel receptionist lead us in the opposite direction of the centre, further north into the modern outskirts. He drew a firm biro circle on our free map around a set of streets including Calle Van Dyck. (Some street awnings neglected their spelling and rendered the name of the 17th-century painter from the Low Countries as Van Dick, which did not amuse us at all.) Anyway, we settled ourselves at an admittedly rather unpromising looking place which served grilled pork cheek, jeta, a local delicacy. This was immensely fatty and smoky. Wonderful.
From here, we were drawn back to the centre of town to a particularly well-reviewed tapas bar called Tapas 2.0. We were served by a man with immensely short hair, shorter patience and zero humour. He hovered over us, standing with his colleagues in a group by the door. Their attire was weird. All of them had cheap suit or jogging trousers, white shirts and shiny black ties, with black aprons over the top and back trainers on the bottom.
We ordered a delicious rectangle of compressed pig’s ears in sherry sauce. I think we expected ear to be rubbery, but it was essentially fat with an interesting texture and nice crispness (at least in this fried form). It was rather nice. Otherwise, though, the whole thing was spoiled by meanspirited portions and meaner service. We left after our plate of pig cuboid.
In our huff, we ended up exploring a bit of Salamanca at night. The city is dotted with medieval palaces, which one is tempted to call palazzi given their strong resemblance to the dark buildings that blot out the sky of medieval Florence. These are great to see at night, especially when the sun is turned off…
Rather than go to another tapas bar as (perhaps lavishly) intended, we headed home via a corner shop. A good highlight for the night was the imported Mexican food filling this place, with giant sacks of beans and chilis and huge leathery aloe vera leaves. We got the agua minerale we came for and went back to our room.
The hotel was a real relic. Real in the sense of authentic to a certain standard, not reál in the sense of royal. The standard in question was about thirty years out of whack. Moreover, the hotel adopted a laissez-faire attitude to smoking which would make Jean Jacques Rousseau proud. Our room smelt unavoidably of cigarettes. Regardless, we slept well enough to prepare us for the next day (with the help of a mercifully large fan!).
– Alfie