We didn’t have a lot planned for today - we’d done quite a bit the previous day, and Salamanca is small, at least compared to the other places we’d been; there just wasn’t that much to do. Plus we needed to do some more planning for Madrid, which is big and where we’d be back to the full-on level of touristing we’d been doing earlier in the trip.
What we also had to do was laundry - as I mentioned in an earlier post, you’ve got a few options for this: machine in your apartment, machine in your building, laundry service or laundromat; in this case it had to be laundromat, ‘cause we were in a hotel with no machine, and we couldn’t find anywhere in town that would do it for us. Wait, that’s not entirely accurate - the hotel did have a laundry service but, like almost every hotel laundry service I’ve ever encountered, the prices were offensively high.
We’d had a bit of a walk around our area and found a handful of laundromats and decided we’d go to the closest one - it was clean, looked very easy to use, and (very significantly) had a machine to give you change from notes. I was overjoyed by the presence of the change machine, since I’d had a difficult time getting coins on my 2019 trip when I was in Brussels.
So, we bundled up our laundry and hauled it up to the laundromat. I was right when I said it looked easy; there were digital displays that gave you all the options, and you could even set it to English. A few screen taps later and some coins in the slot and it was underway. Rochelle had theatre stuff to do so she went back to the hotel while I stayed there and amused myself by listening to a podcast for a while and then reading.
Once the washing was done I dragged everything from the washer to the massive dryer and checked everything after one cycle and put it in for another. After the second 95% of everything was dry so I hauled it out, thinking we could just leave what was still a little damp out in the hotel room and it’d be dry by the evening when we needed to pack. I message Rochelle to meet me to carry it back to the hotel.
Fun fact: it cost us €8 all up for what I’d consider to be two loads of washing (the machine I used was the smaller of the two, but still a big one, 14kg); that’s literally what it would have cost to have just one pair of trousers cleaned through the hotel service. Underwear and socks it would have been cheaper to just replace.
Anyway, with that done we were free to head out for lunch. We wandered around for a while and found that most places were busy, but we eventually got a table at a cafe and sat down. After the usual attempts to determine what was on the menu (excluding what we’d had somewhere before) we ordered a few things - and for once we hadn’t inadvertently ordered way more than we needed. And it was all great, and very reasonably priced; the most expensive thing we got were the soft drinks. Then it was back to the hotel for a short while before we headed out again.
Next destination was the Cathedral. Our tour guide had explained to us there was a new one and an old one, and they were next to each other but connected via an internal door and you could see both (plus the old cloisters) on the same ticket.
We’d seen what we thought was the entrance opposite the Casa Lis when we were there yesterday, but that turned out to be the gift shop so we trudged up the hill a bit to where the actual entrance was and joined a quite long line of people waiting to go in. It ended up moving pretty quickly, though - handily, because it was getting on to 5.00 pm and, since the cathedral itself closed at 6.00, that’s about when they’d stop letting people in.
Once inside we found that, because it was a Sunday, entry was free - but we saw there was a donation machine that took cards and donated €10, which is half what it would have cost us if we’d been charged. We also paid €2 for an audio each, but while better than the downloaded ones at Sintra or the Guggenheim, it was still not of a very high standard. I suspect I was spoiled on my first trip to the UK where the audioguides were almost always excellent, especially Westminster Abbey (narrated by Jeremy Irons) and the Roman baths in Bath (Bill Bryson).
It’s a fairly small cathedral compared some others we’ve seen, but still had some interesting (by which I mean creepy/disturbing) religious art. We happened across a religious celebration of some sort; we later found out it was maybe called the Procession of the Virgin - but I can't guarantee I'm remembering that correctly. We'd be seeing them again later on.
The old cathedral is worth visiting as well, since it goes back to the 12th century. And then the religious building tour continued on to the Convent.
It was getting to the point where we wanted to go up the towers of the cathedral (a separate visit from going inside the rest of the cathedral) as the plan was to be there at sunset to take pictures (again, advised by our guide). This turned out to be way more than we expected, since it also meant going inside the cathedral, only now it was empty - which felt very strange. The views were very good, as was the sunset.
We wandered around looking for a place to have dinner and found one that had paella, which we hadn’t had since Valencia and therefore decided we wanted. We ordered some other stuff as well, and (of course) got a much bigger serve of something than we expected; this time it was the wedges. We left room for a serving of flan, though.
Our hotel had a rooftop bar, so we went upstairs for a drink. It wasn’t much of a bar, though, as it didn’t serve cocktails other than mojitos. So, we shared one of those before heading back down to our room to finish packing.
The laundromat.
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