Day Trip to Toro and Zamora

I'm going to preface this post by saying that I did not take a single one of these pictures as I forgot my camera. So thank you to those people I stole these pictures from.

So. On Saturday, we took our second and last day trip of orientation. We went north this time to the town of Toro and then to Zamora. Toro is famous for its wine apparently, so we went to a winery! Being January and all, it wasn't a very active place, but we still had a tour of the "bodega" and a mini-wine tasting at the end which was more of a way to get 40 people to buy a bottle of wine from then than anything else. I may or may not have fallen for their tricks.

This is a picture of some of the vines next to the winery if that wasn't obvious.


Inside of one of the buildings where we did the "wine tasting" at 10:30 am. What an interesting breakfast.


Some of the barrels of wine in a basement. I may be missing some key vineyard vocab as I was taught it all in Spanish.


Different wines that they offered.


The next stop on our trip was to Zamora, the hometown of one of the IES staff members, David. It wasn't a very exciting city, but it had its cool parts nevertheless.

This is one of the plazas in Zamora that was filled with these trees that had been lead to grow together over many years so that it was one solid canopy on the top. It looked more like a sculpture in the winter than actual trees but it must look amazing in the summer when there are leaves on the trees.


I included this picture because it exemplified the town. In other words, it had a lot of old people and not much else. I also like the picture, but forget who I stole it from already.


This is part of a cathedral in Zamora. Not as cool as ours.


Another view of the cathedral. Its like a really really small version of Salamancas, or so we were told.


Zamora is known as the city of storks because, well, there are a lot of storks. The top of nearly every church in the city has a giant stork nest on it. Its pretty cool because they're just so freakin huge.


After we left Zamora, we stopped at an old wine cellar that has now been converted into a restaurant for la comida. The food was once again very good, but the restaurant was a bit too creepy for my taste. We had three courses of meat, ham to be precise. We started with a chorizo, then we had super thick bacon, then the main course was ribs. While they weren't the best I'd ever had, they were different than any other that I'd had before. After the meal, we had a delicious custardy desert that I already forget the name of followed by coffee and these "shots" that they gave everyone. I'm convinced that they were 99% sugar, but the combination of those and the wine they served with dinner got some of the girls pretty tipsy. The combination of drunks girls and the really creepy restaurant owner made for an interesting meal that involved said creepy man drawing obsene pictures on the table clothes and showing the group his collection of dirty diagrams and genital-shaped pottery. It was definitely an interesting experience and kind of surreal overall considering we were probably 30 feet or so underground, but it was still a lot of fun and filling overall.
This is the view outside of the restaurant. A series of private wine cellars.


The enterance to the restaurant. We should have known.


The ribs that they served us. Quite delicious.


Inside the restuarant/wine cellar. The best word to describe it would probably be "rustic".


Look! A picture with me in it! For some reason all the guys sat together so food was consumed much more quickly, but they just kept bringing us more, or we would steal some from one of the girls tables. So much food. Overall, a very nice day trip.