Galician Galavanting

Hola mis amores!!!
We left for Galicia, an opportunity that we had thanks to Christopher Columbus. October 12 marks el día de descubrimiento (day of discovery) and we therefore had no Thursday classes (a delightful thought marred only by the fact that I will have to make up these classes this coming Friday…I will be spending 6 straight hours in class, without breaks). I found that the day before was actually my día de descubrimiento, when I found my address book and the pantyhose that I had bought before leaving the US stuffed in the toe of one of my boots. Now I kind of know how Columbus must have felt…discovering a new continent must make you feel almost as good as finding the pantyhose that you’ve been looking for for a month.
We took the 10:30 train, and we went first class (we’re very classy, sophisticated people). Let me tell you something. First class train seats to Santiago de Compostela are the most uncomfortable seats. They are not like first class seats on airplanes – they don’t even lean back like economy seats on airplanes. They give you a lot of leg room, but when you’re 5’4”, leg room is never really an issue. I immediately tried to go to sleep by putting my head on the seat and somehow arranging the rest of my body on the floor with all my leg room. Molly attempted to scrunch down and put her head between the arm rests. Somehow, everyone else managed to sleep contentedly (especially the man two rows up who seemed to be the engine of the train he snored so loud) without contorting their bodies into the most uncomfortable positions imaginable. We gave up on sleeping around 3am, and turned on Molly’s computer to watch Gilmore Girls. We also opened up a can of Pringles. This is where I noticed a major difference between Molly and me. While she was the kid (and still is the person) who politely eats Pringles one at a time, I am the kid (cause I still am a kid, even though I’ll be 21 in less than a month) who asks, “how many do you think I can fit in my mouth at once?!?” I feel like this says something about us, but I’m not sure what.
Around 5am, we tried to sleep again and I woke up with drool all over my jacket, so I must have been somewhat successful…
We arrived in Santiago de Compostela before 8am. This is in the north of Spain and let me tell you, we were not prepared for how cold it was. Gloves! I didn’t bring gloves to Spain! Why would I think that Spain is a magical place where gloves are not necessary?
We wandered around for a half hour, trying to find our hotel. When we found it, an adorable little place on Rúa Rosa, we couldn’t check in yet because we were too early (an anticipated event). The concierge was sooo sweet to us though, he took our bags and told us that we would be put in the first available room and then offered us breakfast, which we were not expecting. After raiding the hotel breakfast setup, we set out to see the city.
Santiago is a university city, so there is a great nightlife and a great atmosphere. It’s also a place of Pilgrimage (the people who come here walk the Camino de Santiago and are known as Peregrinos). So, as we were walking around, at 8:30am, the streets were almost deserted, except for a few groups of college students who were just coming in from the night before. WHEW! I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do that! We were stopped multiple times by varying degrees of drunk college men (it wasn’t dangerous though) and asked if we were German, Italian, Dutch, etc. I was pretty proud of us for not looking American, we have assimilated into European culture! There was also a guy who talked to us for quite a while, and then when he found out that we had just arrived and were still waiting to go to our hotel room, very generously offered his own bed to us, as a matter of fact he was going there right then.
We politely declined.
The people in Santiago are so nice! That’s not just sarcasm, the people in the shops are so nice and helpful, granted they want your money, but they pull everything out so that you can inspect it and they ask you what you’re looking for and where you’re from.
We found the Cathedral that morning, and walked around the town quite extensively. I tried the “tarta de Santiago” which is an incredible, amazing, fantastic almond cake that I will learn how to make. I definitely ate too much of it on this trip…
After walked around for almost 4 hours, we went back to the hotel to crash in the lobby until we could go to our room – neither Molly nor I are good at functioning on two hours of sleep. When we got there, the guy at the desk gave us a key, and we tried to explain that we hadn’t checked in yet, but he told us that the room was ready and our bags were already there. More in love than ever with our hotel, we went upstairs to take a glorious three hour nap (unfortunately, neither of us are good at napping either and we woke up a lot). Then we hung around the hotel for a while before going out to find food and entertainment. We ended up back at the hotel around 11, 11:30, with a pizza and a bottle of wine, with every intention of being good study abroaders and drinking alcohol in the hotel (we had already failed at our attempts to drink outside in the town, when we tried alcoholic milkshakes and gagged). Well…let’s just say that I need to practice opening wine. After I pulled out the top part of the cork and leaving the bottom still in, I decided to try to dig it out with a knife (we had bought a pocketknife with a wine screw just for this occasion…one of you will be getting this as a gift). When Molly saw what I was doing, she took the bottle from me and attempted to do it herself. Good news: she eventually got the cork out. Bad news: it actually went IN to the bottle. Around this time I decided to go down to a payphone and call my mom, who I hadn’t talked to in a while (who is coming in exactly one week!!!!!). This turned out to be a bad move on my part, because the combination of not sleeping and not talking to her for a while caused me to bawl for 45 minutes.
Oh to be a parent.
The next day, we got up leisurely and took a train to the nearby city of Coruña, which is on the coast of Spain. It was a beautiful little city, with a gorgeous town square and absolutely fantastic views of the ocean, but we found it a little boring. We found a restaurant where we ate very well for 6€ - that’s incredible, in case you haven’t eaten out in a while. Then we went back to Santiago for the night.
We decided to splurge on dinner and to go somewhere nice and get something that we couldn’t get anywhere else. We ended up at a very pretty little restaurant on one of the busy little side streets that I love so much in Europe. The waiters were all very nice older gentlemen, and the one that we had guessed that we were Italian. I asked him to explain what “arroz con bogavante” was and he took me to the front of the restaurant to show me the lobster that would be prepared for us paella style in a delicious rice dish that we ended up ordering (when I started talking about how bad I felt about eating the little guy, Molly goes, “They already caught it, what do you think, they’re going to let it go free if no one eats it?” so I stopped feeling bad). The waiter seemed really, really friendly to me, and I’ve decided that if you wear low cut shirts, you might get better service, but you also get some pretty creepy stares from old men who have been working in a restaurant for 40 years (it was a polo for crying out loud, it’s not like I went out in stripper gear). After we paid the bill, I pulled Molly outside immediately.
We then continued on our quest to be good study abroaders and not go back to the hotel too early (this was not difficult, because we didn’t sit down to eat until 11pm). We wandered around the busy streets, jammed with tourists, students, and Peregrinos with large backpacks and walking sticks. We ended up in a really fun little bar that had great music and beer for 1€. This was the cheapest thing, so it was what we got and I felt a little bad cause Molly hates beer (I happen to like beer and thought that this one was pretty good, especially for a euro). I had another drink and then we left to go back to the hotel. I ended up using my phone card again, but this time I didn’t call my parents…
We didn’t get to sleep until 3am, and then the next day we got up again to see a few more things. We returned to the Cathedral, where we saw the huge incense holder in motion. It was one of the most crowded masses I’ve ever seen – we could hardly move. In this Cathedral, they have an incense, oh man what is the word I’m thinking of?! You know what I’m talking about though…and it’s so big that 5 men have to get it to swing back and forth. The reason why they have such a big one is because of all the Peregrinos, who come from faraway places and pack into the Cathedral and create a huge stench.
I also got to “dar un abrazo al Santo”, which is to give a hug to a huge statue of Saint-Yago, (Santiago, get it?) who is the patron saint of Spain. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed of that.
Then we walked around, trying to find some new sites. There was a photo exhibit on terrorism and war around the world in a nearby park…I love photo exhibits, I prefer them to paintings. Some of the pictures were really graphic…there was a big section on Darfur, on the Chechynan war, on Haiti…and a big one on Iraq. Sometimes I forget how angry the world is over this war. The pictures from Iraq were sad…I will never condone war. But I looked at these pictures, of US soldiers trying to free people, and then I looked at the pictures of Darfur, of people so emaciated and hungry that they have to go to feeding centers to receive one meal…of men shot dead on the street in Haiti and people just walking by and I couldn’t understand any of it. It’s so hard to believe that this is all going on in the world, in my world, the same one that I’m living in, in my world, at the same time when I’m living in a nice apartment in Spain and writing to you about all the fun I’m having being a study abroader. I think that’s why I love photos…you can write, you can paint, but you are never in that person’s world until you look them in the eye and put yourself on that street, in that place.
We got tired of walking and went back to the hotel to play on the computer and wait until it was time to go to the train station. This time, we were in a sleeper car, which we were soooo excited about. It is a really cool experience, I would really like to do it again, but I want enough people to fill up a car. There are only four beds, but the other two were taken by…boring people. The one woman was the kind of scary grandmother that I hope never to be. Big scary hair, lots of make up, wearing a nightgown that was…umm a little too short for old lady legs? And she snored. Oh my gosh she snored. I really wanted to whack her with a pillow – I happen to have the philosophy that if I can’t sleep, no one will. But I decided that hitting her with a pillow was a little too obvious, so I tried coughing, whacking my ring against the metal bar that was preventing me from falling off the top bunk, and eventually texting Molly so that her phone would ring and wake this lady up. There was also a group of rowdy American guys who were really drunk…I hate noise when I sleep, I sleep with earplugs and a pillow over my head (well that’s actually because I learned that we swallow 8 spiders a year in our sleep and wanted to cut back). We got back into Madrid around 7:30am, and now I’m back in my house. Babis is home from Barcelona; it’s funny, but I really did miss her. I’ve broken my phone charger and now I’m wondering how I’ll get up tomorrow morning…
I have two compositions to write and a presentation to research so I guess I better get on that…
Muchos besos!!!