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Santander
Alissa at the start of our bike ride on Saturday Hola a todos,
Last weekend I visited Santander, the capital city of the region of Cantabria, located on the northern coast of Spain. For the 2010-11 school year I will be spending another year in Spain working as an assistant English teacher, only this time in Cantabria. I've not yet received my specific school placement for next year but I'm hoping to live in Santander because it's a lively city in a beautiful area on the coast. Cantabria as a region is small enough that most of the people in my program are able to live in the city, regardless of where they are teaching. I wanted to know more about the program in Cantabria and was able to get in touch with a girl in my program named Alissa who is living in the city this year and who will be renewing her position at her school for next year. I didn't expect it at all but she ended up inviting me to come visit her in Santander and offered me a place to stay in her apartment, which has an empty room!
I arrived on Friday night and Alissa met me at the train station and walked
Santander
the first beach we passed by...there were lots of sunbathers out! me back to her apartment. That night I met her roommate Zoe, a British assistant in our program and her boyfriend Javier. Alissa had just gotten back from an overnight field trip with some of her students (6 year olds!) to a coastal town in Cantabria called Santoña so she and I were both pretty tired from traveling and we went to bed not long after midnight.
On Saturday morning we walked around the part of the city near where Alissa lives and picked up some food to bring to a picnic later that was organized by the network of people in Santander that couch surf or host couch surfers. (If you don't know what couch surfing is, here's the Urban Dictionary's definition: "A cheap form of lodging used mainly by college-students or recent college-grads, where one stays on acquaintance's couches rather than in a hostel or hotel.") To expand on this definition a little, there are now a lot of networks of people all over the world that host travelers in their homes on their couches for free. It's become a really popular way to travel on a budget, meet cool people and experience the best of the
Santander
view of the Península de la Magdalena (you can see the tower of the Palacio de la Magdalena with the flags) places you visit because your hosts can supply you with all kinds of local knowledge and insight into their culture. For more info check out: http://www.couchsurfing.org/. During my time in Spain so far, I've crashed on a lot of people's couches (or extra beds) for weekends in various cities... including some auxiliares in my program that I've met through other friends briefly and hardly knew before my stay with them. I've made a lot of friends this way and it's been great! My weekend with Alissa has been the first time I've stayed with someone that I hadn't even met in person before my visit, however.
After making a fruit salad for the picnic we headed to the Puerto Chico area of the city and rented bikes. There are bike stations all over the city where you can pick up a bike to use for a few hours or all day and then return it to any station. You can subscribe to the service for a day, a week, or a year using a credit or debit card and it's quite reasonably priced. (This is something in a lot of European cities that is becoming popular on college campuses
Santander
by the Playa del Sardinero (means sardine or sardine dealer...hehe) in the U.S.) The weather in Santander, like on the entire northern coast of Spain, is often unpredictable and it rains much more than in the rest of Spain but Saturday we enjoyed perfect weather...it was sunny and beautiful! We rode the bikes for a little over an hour, going from the port to some of the beaches and then looped back, leaving our bikes near the Parque de la Magdalena where the picnic was going to be.
It took awhile for us to meet up with some of the couch surfers for the picnic (because not many of us knew each other) but the picnic turned out to be a great success and by 3 pm a lot of people had turned up. Alissa and I met up with her roommate Zoe at the picnic, as well as her friend Abby, another auxiliar in Santander this year who is from North Dakota. We had lots of good food and I tossed a frisbee around with some of the guys after we ate. We also went down to a little cove later in the afternoon to dip our feet in the FRIGID water of the Cantabrian Sea. Zoe's boyfriend
Santander
this park with the tulips was really pretty Javier and another guy actually totally dunked themselves and were swimming around but I think I would need to wear a wetsuit to swim in that water! It's all what you're used to...
After the picnic Alissa, Abby, Zoe, Javi and I went over to Abby's apartment and made Coke floats. Alissa, Abby and I (the Americans) were craving root beer floats towards the end of the picnic and as root beer is pretty hard to come by in Spain (except for in specialty stores in Madrid) we had to settle for Coke. Zoe and Javi had never had a float dessert before and didn't end up liking it that much but I thought it tasted really good of course.
After our dessert break, we went back to Alissa's apartment to rest for awhile and take showers before going out on Saturday night. We met up at 10 pm to begin our pinchos crawl. (Pinchos are tapas that come on a piece of bread often with a toothpick stuck through them.) There are a lot of good bars in the historic center of the city around the Plaza de Cañadío which is where we wandered around. Alissa and
Santander
Alissa near the Playa del Sardinero I called it an early night and went back to her apartment around 2 am because we were pretty tired but it was a fun night!
On Sunday we slept in and finally left the apartment around 3 pm. We met up with Adrian, a couch surfer (and a surfer incidentally) visiting Santander for a few days. He had been living in the Lisbon area for about 9 months and was now traveling along the northern coast of Spain checking out the waves in each place and hoping to pick a place where he could live for awhile and surf. We took a nice long walk around the park and golf course on the Península de Mataleñas. Towards the end of our walk, just past the lighthouse we stopped at a cafe with outdoor seating for a snack and then headed back to Javi's car. It was about 6 pm and I had to meet someone at 6:15 to get a ride back to Guardo that evening. Paz, the history teacher that I work with is from Cantabria and returns every weekend to a pueblo outside of Santander. It was really great to be able to get a ride
Santander
towards the end of our bike ride back to Guardo with her....saved me a lot of time and money! The trip in car only takes a little over an hour and a half but by public transport the easiest way to get from Santander to Guardo (due to the schedules) is to take a train all the way south to Palencia and then take a bus north to Guardo... a route that forces you to go way out of your way and takes over 3 hours!
So my weekend in Santander ended up being a blast. I met so many cool people and it was great to meet Alissa especially, an auxiliar who will be teaching in Santander again next year when I'm in Cantabria too!
Besos,
Dana
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Tio Buck
non-member comment
another great expedition~
Dana, you are having too much fun! How will you ever adjust to life in the US again? Or do you plan to? Bert and Davey leave for Paris about the 23rd of June, if I can get tickets. They will spend a few days with Eric and then go visit their grandparents, pick up Maya in Vicenza and go down to Macerata to work on Giorgio's farm. See you the end of June! Tio Buck