Christmas Eve was lovely.  The hotel we were in in Salamanca did not have a restaurant, but they were kind enough to email us the week before we arrived to ask if we would like for them to order dinner for us from a nice restaurant and have it for us that night.  All the restaurants and tourist attractions closed around 2 pm that day (Thursday), so the hotel manager knew we wouldn’t have any other options.  Very sweet.  So Eric ordered lamb and I ordered chicken.

We wandered downstairs to the dining room around 8:30 and found that we were the only people who had taken the hotel up on their offer!  It was sweet though.  They had set up one table in the corner with a candle on it and insisted we have some wine.  The meal was fine…nothing amazing and not so much worth the price, but we were grateful to have a big warm(ish) meal on Christmas Eve.  We started with bread and jamón serrano (shocker!), then had some kind of crab soup with another kind of bread.  Because I had been sick in Tangier and my stomach was still not quite right, I didn’t want to risk any gluten or dairy, so I’m sure that’s most of my feeling that the dinner wasn’t fabulous.  The crab soup was really good, but creamy, so Eric did me a favor and ate mine too.

My chicken was good, but not as interesting as Eric’s lamb.  They brought out the entire leg, including the hoof.  I couldn’t even stand to look at it, but Eric seemed to enjoy it, particularly when he decided it was appropriate to take it down like a turkey leg at the State Fair.  Hilarious.  Dessert was nice, but again, lots of dairy, so I left most of mine on the plate.

After dinner, we had the pleasure of Facetiming with Eric’s brother and sister-in-law’s family, his extended family up in Maryland and with my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and niece (just one of them, the other had already gone to bed).  And actually the Facetiming started because when we came back upstairs after dinner, we saw that Eric’s sister-in-law Jennifer had posted this year’s Christmas video of our niece, Rylee, and our nephew, Tyler.  Each year, Jennifer takes pictures and videos of the kids making Christmas cookies, then does a gorgeous job of setting it all to beautiful tear-jerking music.  This year, they made cinnamon ornaments instead, but the effect was just the same.  Stronger, perhaps, than in years past because of the awesome interaction between Rylee and Tyler.  Big smiles, hugs, teamwork…it was beautiful.  Between the touching video and the feeling of being so far away from family at Christmas time, Eric teared up and we immediately called Ray and Jennifer and the kids.

I had imagined that we would be too sleepy or just plain exhausted for midnight mass, but after the uplifting visits with our families, we decided to go for it.  The service was from midnight to 1:30 am in a cathedral that was built in the 1200’s on a 35 degree night.  And it was beautiful.  The cathedral itself inspires a certain degree of awe, as you might imagine, with its 53 painted panels of scenes from the Bible behind the altar, gothic arches, and lofty dome.  But add that to the families that gathered in their winter attire – many with shiny gold, sparkly, or fur coats – the incredible voices of the choir, and the fact that the bishop was there (hat and all!!!), and it was almost overwhelming at points.  Poor Eric I know was sleepy and bored since the service was lengthy and all in Spanish, but I was so grateful that he was there with me.  It’s a shame; I really wish he could have understood the sermon.  The bishop had a sore throat and had lost his voice, so back-up priest gave it.  It was beautiful.  I wish I could remember enough of it to do it justice in a summary, but suffice it to say that a hopeful Christmas sermon in a beautiful Spanish accent by a sweet sounding old man fit the setting perfectly.  The service ended with the choir singing Noche de Paz (Silent Night), which always gets me.

Christmas (Friday, 12/25) in Salamanca:

Christmas was, in a word, peaceful.  We went downstairs for a late breakfast, then decided to exchange presents after returning to the room.  Well, actually, I was prepared to just give presents (aside from the ones that my parents had sent – thanks Mom and Dad!), as Eric had already given me an awesome bluetooth speaker as an early gift when a party we were having required its use.  We had only packed a few sheets of tissue paper, so I folded his gifts inside it (sans tape).  He insisted on giving me a tissue paper hat after each of his four presents.  After he had unwrapped three shirts and a new PS4 game from me, he gave me a new UNC shirt from my parents.  He then brought me another package, which I thought was going to be the scarf that we had bought in Tangier and kept wrapped as a Christmas present for me.  But he surprised me!  He had custom designed (on cafepress.com) a shirt with several silhouetted figures playing capoeira.  Evidently, he had found the images online and then spent several hours photoshopping each one to his satisfaction and positioning them on the shirt so that it looked like they were interacting with one another.  I was really surprised and touched.  A very sweet gift.

After gifts, we watched movies and napped for most of the day!  It was lovely.  Poor Eric was starting to feel sick, so it was good timing for a down day.  We Facetimed with my family for a while around 4:30 our time (10:30 am their time) and got to see Laine, the 5 year old, open her Star Wars movie from us.  She’s hilarious….she was so excited.  The girl is all Ninja Turtles and Star Wars.  Not surprisingly, she also loved my capoeira shirt!

We also got to see baby Summer eating some brunch and watch the rest of the family open a special surprise gift from us.   When Laine was probably four months old, I took pictures of her while I was babysitting, then surprised Jennifer (my sister) and Mom with collages on Mother’s Day.  Eric thinks it’s creepy the way I did it, but I saw the idea at a friend’s house and loved it.  I cropped nine pictures down into squares and each is a close-up of a particular feature – an eye, a nose, a foot, etc.  I love it.

So this year when we were in NC in October, I found the same dress that Laine was wearing in her pictures and dressed Summer in it while Jennifer and Drew were out.  Eric and Laine helped me take pictures, and luckily Laine didn’t mention the photo shoot to her parents.  I made a matching collage of Summer’s photos and gave a copy to Jennifer and Drew and a copy to my parents for Christmas.

So back to Christmas Day activities.  We finally got showered and headed out in search of food around 5:30 pm.  A lot more people were out than had been out on Christmas Eve.  Apparently it’s custom to have Christmas Eve dinner at home and then to go out to eat on Christmas Day…at least for a lot of families in Salamanca.  We made a quick stop at the University of Salamanca, founded in 1218 and still open to students today, on the way.  The façade of the main building on campus is extremely intricate.  There is a tiny frog sculpture hidden in it, and legend has it that if students could find it, they would pass their exams.  Other stories say that the frog represents sexuality and its location atop a skull stands as a reminder that distractions of a sexual nature can lead to death.  So there’s that.  Anyway, I knew where it was because I looked it up ahead of time.  And it’s a good thing because Eric couldn’t find it.

Plaza Mayor, Salamanca

Found the frog on the façade at Universidad de Salamanca

Christmas dinner!

We had tapas for dinner…again, shocking…then headed back to the hotel for a few episodes of Aziz Ansari’s new show and an episode of Homeland (our current favorite) to close out the day.  Poor Eric was feeling pretty puny by this time.