Comillas

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Our last full day in Cantabria started once again with breakfast, but this time we were afterwards bussed to the Fundación Marcelino Botín. Being a foundation started by the owners of Banco Santander, the foundation has a lot of money and seems to have set up tons of organizations in the city of Santander for the promotion of language, culture, and whatnot. There we heard from the Director General and sat through two presentations by ETAs discussing our break-out session experiences. Finally the conference was closed.

From there we were transported to Comillas, a northern municipality where the Fundación Comillas, which is dedicated to promoting Hispanic culture worldwide, has taken control of the former Jesuit Pontifical University. We first had a tapas-esque lunch of fish "pudding", squid, a goat cheese salad, flan, and copious amounts of wine. The main structure was gorgeously posed on the hilltop overlooking the town and is currently under construction to serve as an offshoot of the University of Comillas in Madrid. Unfortunately we were not able to see other sites in the town, such as Gaudí's "El Capricho", one of his smaller and less-well-known structures.

After figuring out an unfortunate ordeal where the sister of one of the Fulbrighters disappeared, we headed back to Santander to freshen up (though I obviously wasn't going to be overly fresh given my still-non-existent luggage). We then headed out into the city for a delicious tapas dinner of items such as an intense ham and aioli spread to pork loin with a chestnut-coffee-esque sauce. After a round of beers in the main plaza we decided to call it a night since we once again were only going to get 4 hours of sleep before our departure the following morning.

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