and longing, and grad school, and falling in love

Salamanca, an old university city, was the second study abroad program-led trip I went on.

As if, at that point (early March 2015), I didn’t want to return to the US already, the university town made the longing to stay even worse.

An architecture fan’s wonderland, I was falling fast down the rabbit hole of love.

The city has two super famous cathedrals, several historical noble residences, and more beautiful moldings than a girl could manage to be anything but dazzled by.

There is a library of forbidden entrance on the city’s famous university campus, filled with books so old they cannot be handled in normal air, the handlers wearing respirators, gloves, and lab coats. The library’s door has a room of glass built around it, so only a few people can step in and look at the library at a time, unable to truly enter. It sparked my curiosity something fierce. I daydream about being allowed to look closer at those books. What would I have to do to don a pair of latex gloves and touch one?

That very desire, to stay and look closer, called so loudly ¡MIRANDITA, VENGA! Run away to Salamanca.

I’ve been looking into grad school lately, and as I scroll through the admissions pages of Kansas University and Boston College, I keep thinking about the room on the Universidad de Salamanca campus, draped in red, housing antique chairs with plush cushions and wooden arms, where master’s students presented their thesis. I can’t do anything but want to be a part of something so grand, knowing full well my Spanish isn’t that good, and I could Never afford it.

Then there was the chapel in the uni with the illuminated altar. Imposing and alluring. Catholicism, so fascinating to a mouthy girl who grew up an Evangelical Christian in a small West Texas cow town, beautiful in it’s demand for reverence. Here it was dark and striking on the grounds of a university I was salivating over.

The chapel just deepened the STAY message ticker-taping through my brain. A chapel that students, former and current, get married in. A chapel students have been attending services in for longer than my family has been in the United States. The history and drama as intoxicating as the Caterpillar’s smoke. I truly felt like Alice, so lost in this strange land, but I had no desire to make it home. I wasn’t being taught a lesson about being content. I was being show a bright world where there had been queens, and knights, and grave consequences for dalliances with the local ladies of the night*. I was falling in love with a country that felt like home, where I was engaged and lit up. I wanted to follow the white rabbit of fascination around forever in Spain. I’ve been thinking about that a lot again.

*this ancient edifice, an entry to the university, is a 1500s code of conduct for the university. It forewarns students against using the services of the only women really in the city at that point- prostitutes. I’ll have to do a whole post over this someday, it was wild interesting.