Higher Learnings

Now that I covered Swimming, Swinging bats at shells, and Soccer in Seville, I'm going to go back to History. The final city we visited was Salamanca and keeping with the "S" alliteration it was super sweet. Probably the coolest part of this city was the fact that it is home to the University of Salamanca. According to our teacher there are four key universities in Europe. Oxford, University of Paris, University of Salamanca, and University of Bolonia in Italy. Students at the University lived a good life. They were there for five years and their only test was at the end, but more on that later. The students had three favorite past times. They were:

1. "Hanging" out with prostitutes.
2. Gambling
3. Being in rock bands called "Tuna" (Kind of similar to Whitesnake I guess) Check out these Tuna's below.

Here is a picture of some of the Tuna's in action.

Now don't worry, college life here wasn't all sex, gambling, and being a rock star. Graduating from the school was not an easy task. This is how the graduation ceremony worked, after five years the student was supposed to be ready. The student was supposed to be well versed in over 100 subjects. The faculty would send this student to this little room where he would fast for 24 hours. No food, no water, just you and the stone walls thinking about if you spent a little too much time rocking out with your tuna group. Here is a picture of the old planetarium where people would study one of the 100 subjects.

After 24 hours the student would emerge and field two questions from the faculty. The questions would be about 2 of the 100 subjects they would know. But these were not just simple geography bee questions. Each response was supposed to be a "dissertation" so they were hard. If you failed this all the professors would scream at you and the students present would throw rocks at you as you fled through a door only used by the losers. Here is the library where people would study before getting locked away in the little room.


But if you passed the test, you were the BOSS! The whole city would celebrate you and then you would have this huge party all weekend. At the end of the party there was a bullfight and you would take the blood of the dead bulls and paint your name in blood on the walls. Why paint the your name in blood on the walls? CAUSE YOU'RE BOSS!


This concludes my summary of my traveling seminar. I'll now start posting about my life in Madrid. Stay tuned.