How does one even attempt to answer the question: What was your favorite day abroad? Does she focus on her first time ordering a café in Spanish, nerves mounting and clogging her throat to the point where it seeps out as a mere whisper? Does she talk about her first walk around Salamanca with Pepita, panicking that she has made a stupid decision to come to Spain when she can barely understand 10% of what her host mom is telling her? Does she refer to the first song she sings with La Clerecía international student choir, where the simple, cheerful notes of the completely foreign melody are the most familiar thing she has heard in weeks?
Any of those questions, if answered, would provide sufficient evidence that they each were, in their own way, the “best” day.
However, after perusing my beat-up handmade journal in search of inspiration, I came across an entry labeled (and I kid you not!): Best day so far in Spain.
Casa Lis
The day started out like every other Saturday in Spain: cathedral bells tolling beneath the bright, chilly December sun, lukewarm coffee at the ready on the little two-person glass table in the kitchen. Pepita was perched on the edge of her white plastic stool, dunking a María cookie and a small plain muffin into her mug of coffee. I sat down across the table from her, still wearing my collared, blue striped “man-j’s” (wanted to make sure I was as modest as possible in these less revealing men’s pajamas) and chatted with Pepita in my slightly less broken Spanish about the day’s errands. She needed to pick up some casanueces, gomas para la cafeteria, and some bacalão.
So off we went to buy some freshly roasted chestnuts from the street vendors on Calle de Zamora, a new rubber ring for the coffee percolator from a ferretería west of Spain’s most beautiful Plaza Mayor, and some fresh Portuguese fish at the Mercado adorned with Christmas lights spelling out Felice Fiesta! We stopped at Plaza 23 on our way to the umbrella repair shop to indulge in some bacon-mousse tapas and café before inquiring whether the umbrella repair shop could fix my umbrella, purchased from the beautiful Casa Lis art nouveau and art deco museum (unfortunately none of the hundreds of leather handles crammed on the walls in the cramped shop could be fitted to the cracked grey handle of my 15€ umbrella).
Because Pepita also needed hair dye (número 6, mind you), we stopped at the farmacia next to our apartment on Gran Vía before lunch and the famous siesta. A little Saturday afternoon studying ensued at our favorite little dive, Café Corillo on Calle Meléndez, endearingly referred to as “The Jazz Café.”
Universitarios Católicos de Salamanca
After an hour or so of reflection and prayer at La Clerecía (there really aren’t words to describe the incredible feeling of calm and awe that washes over you when you sit on the creaky wooden pew, stare up at the chipped golden-plated sculptures of María y Jesús and the many saints surrounding you, and smell the stale incense from the evening’s Misa that ended about an hour before), I walked out onto Calle de Serranos to meet up with a Spanish amigo who was escorting me to an early potluck-style Christmas dinner with our fellow choir friends, in honor of my leaving five days later.
The house smelled of meat and potatoes, stuffed peppers, meatballs, and una tarta de Belén, a luscious homemade cake displaying a tiny paper model of the nativity scene. My contribution? Candy canes!
Sí lo he visto, “Yes, I’ve seen them,” said a friend of mine. ¡Pero nunca en mis manos!, “But never in my hands!”
The deepest, quietest part of the noche engulfed me as I walked home down Calle Jesús to Pepita’s house. I knew she would be waiting up for me (as she always did), Christmas villancicos playing softly from the living room where she would be knitting on the couch.
I looked to my right, down the normally tourist-filled calle towards the silhouette of the two catedrales, rising upwards into the starry sky that blanketed this captivating city.
Sopa del Día 
