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My little travel alarm begins to play it's irritating high pitched melody. Shit, I fell asleep. Of course I knew I was going to fall asleep, otherwise I wouldn't have set the alarm. But it's 4:00 and I have a night train to catch at the insane hour of 5:00. Too late to stay up for and too early to be waking up
Cath Fest
James Taylor2006-08-23 11:58:05
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at 5 in the morning the temperature is on the wrong side of uncomfortably hot. I am sweating buckets but my bag is strapped on too tightly. I can't afford the five minutes it will take to undo everything.
I press on past the vast hospital complex where I had been lost at the peak of an unheralded and unusual downpour yesterday. I can't think of anywhere I hate more than Salamanca hospital at the moment.
I am in an unreasonably paranoid mood, probably born out of sleep deprivation, but not helped by the ceaseless annd unervingly monotony of Salamancas outskirts. Around here there isn't much variation on the 4 storey, concrete apartment-block theme.
Eventually reaching the older and far prettier part of town, I hasten through the public gardens, down a slope, past three wooden crosses used as props in the Easter celebrations and onto the cobbled road that the parade had mournfully shuffled down 14 hours earlier. Except for a few abandoned banners fluttering despondently in the breeze there is little sign of the sharply dressed brass bands or the multitudes of costumed marches with their eerily, hollow-eyed hoods that previuosly filled the street.
I pass the entrance to a late night bar. Still packed at 4:30am. At the moment I really don't want to be dragging this weight several kilometres across an unfamiliar Spanish City. I'm tired and lonely and would do almost anything to be
one of those returning bar-hoppers; stumbling home to a welcoming bed. In fact I would be sipping a cafe con leche in the welcoming embrace of one of the numerous cafe-bars that populate Salamanca city cantre.
I'm reaching the edge of the centre now and entering uncharted territory. Of course I was in the train station yesterday, I had to buy the ticket. But I only really found it accidentally by following the train tracks and I can't remember where the train tracks were.
I take a road which
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