Pamplona

On our third morning we left for Pamplona. We spent the day there, poking around the cathedral, which houses a really stupendous number of virgin and child figurines. The collection is crammed into one room; blonde ones, brunettes, smiling, sad, round-faced and chubby cheeked, long-faced and serious. And one baby Jesus bore a more than passing resemblance to James Belushi.

We ended our day at an outdoor café perched on a cliff. From the terrace, the small city is obscured and you feel like you're in a chic café isolated on a mountain top, surrounded on all sides by farmland and, further on in every direction, mean-looking cliffs.

More Güesa

The area around Güesa was so small that as you took a walk, you'd stop and talk with each person you encountered along the way. One evening we crossed paths with a woman who had been Güesa's last schoolteacher. She lived in the schoolhouse until some time in the sixties. She left her pedagogical imprint on a good number of people in the town.

Güesa

The next morning we boarded a train to Pamplona. A friend of Ben's family picked us up at the station and took us to her country house in the Pyrenées.

Their house is in a tiny, tiny Basque village called Güesa. It has only one street, and no businesses.

Next door to Becky and Mikel's house is the old schoolhouse, now a cozy town social center where ice cream, snacks and drinks are sold at cost. You put the money in an envelope on the counter. There is a kitchen that's used for the town fiesta, Christmas meals and the like.

Thhe Pyrenées loom large above tiny Güesa. They are beautiful and cruel looking -- huge naked rocks that ooze greenery from giant fissures. There's something about the light, the distance, the weather - something - that makes the mountains glimmer a tiny bit, like the watery mirror landscape of a fijord. The shimmer gave me the feeling that at any moment the surface of the water would be broken and the mountains come crashing down.

We spent an idyllic couple of days taking trips to the swimming hole, a hike straight up a mountain to a small chapel where tradition dictates that those who reach the top ring the chapel bell, which rings out across the valley and lets the people down in Güesa know that you've arrived. We had big lunches and quiet siestas. At night we gathered on the lawn to watch the falling stars.

I spent some time alone by the river. I waded around, poked things with sticks, let the minnows nibble on my toes. It was the same kind of dreamy, constructive nothing I engaged in as a child.

Tapas

On our last night we headed out with the intention of getting a drink. It was about 8:30 and the city seemed deserted. We turned a corner on a small street and came upon a throng of people spilling out into the street from a bar. We gently pushed our way inside to find people drinking cuartos and eating immeasurable quantities of fresh potato chips that the bartenders were frantically frying in the small kitchen in back.

We ordered our drinks and waited for the chips... but none appeared. We eventually ordered a media ración and received more chips than we could ever eat.

Having eaten our fill of warm, shiny (well, greasy) chips speckled with red pepper powder, we left the bar with no particular destination in mind.

But just around the corner was another place, again with people spilling out onto the sidewalk. We got our drinks (dry rioja in bulbous glasses) and our tapa, thin ham on bread.

We continued in this manner well into the night, finally ending up chatting with the bartender at one of the cafés. He gave us something special to try... cow's tongue. And, it wasn't bad at all. Maybe it was the long night, or the comforting cushion of bread that supported the thin slice, or maybe the fact that it was smoked. I suspect it tasted good, though, because receiving it at all was a friendly, unnecessary gesture on the part of the bartender.

Day in Léon

On the first day we made our way through the rain to the cathedral. It was damp and musty inside and, although there was hardly any light, specks of vivid color pierced the gloom and stretched up and up, indicating just how high the ceiling was. A church with the soul of a kaleidoscope.

During our wandering we saw a stork padding his nest on top of an old column.

Later in the day we had an agua con gaz in a bar hung with bloody pictures of Christ illuminated by the blue glow of a TV set showing scantily clad women on MTV Europe.

Journal 8/10 - nights in Léon

In Léon we spent two nights in a hostal on a floor of a modern building in the new section of the city.

When we arrived, we thought the hostal was a small place presided over by one woman. It turned out to take up an entire floor of the building and be staffed by a small army of women. People were constantly moving in and out, entering through one door only to exit through another in this huge warren. The place seemed like a good setting for a play.

The hostal turned out to be a boarding house. Our room contained two single beds, a small sink below a cracked mirror, a musty wardrobe and a lot of empty space. The high ceilings and the tiled floor gave me a feeling of immense lonliness. The room seemed like a good place to look one's demons square in the face.

When we went to pay our bill, we did so in an enormous kitchen at the end of a long hallway. One of the women who runs the boarding house wrote us our receipt while stirring a big pot of potatoes coated with spicy oil the color of the sunrise. The residents of the boarding house -- mainly senior citizens -- sat eating at small tables in an adjoining room.

back from the dead

I've decided to finally finish my posts about Spain, and maybe add some more recent trips. I don't imagine anyone reads this anymore, but, well, that's OK.

journal 8/9

Yesterday the train pulled us smoothly though the galician countryside. We glided past lush farms, through forests and gorges and fast-moving rivers.

But it occured to me that if I'd been dropped off in any of the places I found so beautiful on the train, I'd be miserable. If I got off at the farm, I'd be stepping carefully between fenced-off plots of crops, enduring the suspicious eyes of old galicians. In the forest, I'd be lost without a trail. In the gorges I'd be stuck.

Food

Dave Rothstein requested a post about food here in Spain. So here goes.

Galicia has a strong maritime culture and therefore galicians specialize in fish and seafood. Especially octopus.

Restaurants in Santiago have glass cases in front displaying enormous purple octopus tentacles and tanks with somnolent lobsters and crabs and bags of clams and mussels and other shellfish that I can't quite identify.

But after two weeks here, I still have yet to go to one of these restaurants. Or go out for a big meal at all. And I keep forgetting to get the octopus in bars. I see other people eating it, though. It comes on a wooden slab and is usually seasoned with a red garlicky sauce.

I normally have one big meal a day with the family I live with. We have all different kinds of things:

• pasta or rice salad with olives, crab stick, carrots, corn...
• Pimientos de Padrón -- fried green peppers with sea salt. Padrón is a town nearby that's reknowned for its peppers. Most of them are sweet, but every once in a while you get an extremely hot one. So eating a plate of them is a little like playing Russian roulette.
• Tortillas españolas -- basically a thick omelette with potatoes inside.
• Sometimes we have a white bean soup made orangey with chorizo. Señora Matos says it's an Asturian dish.
• We had a dish of spaghetti the length of my little finger with tomato sauce and a purple, tentacled animal in the octopus family.
• Sardines fried and eaten whole, bones and all.
• Empanadas -- flat pastry with meat inside.
• For dessert we normally have peaches, sometimes ripe and sweetly dripping, sometimes hard and tart.
• We eat a lot of vegetables from the family's garden in the countryside. Right now, string beans, tomatoes and zucchini are in season.
• One memorable Sunday we had a homemade Tarta de Santiago. It's a cake made with 300 grams of sugar, 300 grams of ground almonds and 4 eggs. It's nutty and rich. In stores, it comes dusted with powdered sugar in the traditional galician sword shape.
• When I go out, the tapas are normally tortilla española, Iberian ham or chorizo on a round of bread, or small squares of empanada. But it depends on the place and the time of day. Sometimes you just get peanuts. In the late morning, if you order coffee you'll get churros (fried salty dough in a striated finger shape) or a small sweet baked good.

park - 8/1

We just got back from a park that used to be a cemetary -- there are big iron gates that lead into the park, and the paths form squares of grass. In one section, there are rows of sepulchres that form excellent acoustical space for concerts.

It was a hot afternoon and, like everyone else, we were lying in the shade on towels, napping. There's something odd about napping in a graveyard... you don't want to like it too much.

Mass 8/1/04

I went to mass today with Maria. It was a crowded, sweaty affair. We didn't manage to get seats, so we stood, subway style, at the back of the cathedral. An enormous old galician woman kept elbowing me until I was forced to step behind Maria. Then she started elbowing Maria. She's darn lucky we were in a church.

The highlight was of course the botafumiero, a huge censer held aloft in the middle of the cathedral by a long rope which hangs over a pulley on the ceiling. 5 men hold the other end of the string and swing the botafumiero higher and higher across the whole space, filling the cathedral with incense smoke. The clerymen who swing the botafumiero are treating like rock stars by the congregation, everyone claps and shouts when they step up to the altar.

Finisterre (7/31/04)

The name of the town means "The End of the World," and it sure feels like it.

The bus ride from Santiago is two hours of travel through small towns with frequent stops to pick up and drop off passengers. We wound through small fields dotted with the ubiquitous horreos, some with two crosses at either end, most with a cross on one end and an ancient phallic fertility symbol on the other. Very practical, those galicians of old. Just covering all of the spiritual bases.

When I stepped off the bus in Finisterre, I was assaulted by the smell of fish and wondered what I was going to do for six hours in a town that smells so bad.

But it turned out to be only an old lady passing by with a wheelbarrow full of fresh, shiny sardines.

We walked out of town and up a nearby mountain on a winding trail. It was hot and we were hungry by the time we got near the top. We finally stopped at a less than ideal spot at the side of the path for an ideal picnic lunch -- dried sausage, cheese, fresh whole wheat bread, olives, tomatoes, a pear... We talked about how there were as many people in Austria as the 5 boroughs and speculated about what it would be like if the residents switched places: New Yorkers spread out in Austria with the mountains and clear lakes, Austrians enjoying the attractions and conveniences of New York.

We hiked on, to the top of the mountain where you can see out into the Atlantic.

On the way down we stopped in a small 12th century church where a pilgrim was doing baritone voice exercises that echoed throughout the building.

Seagulls were everywhere, calling out loudly to one another. A little like the residents of Finisterre, who seemed to spend a lot of time standing far apart and yelling at one another.

On the way down from the church, the cool wind off the Atlantic bumped up against the warm air on the land, but did not mix completely. It was a little like wading in a lake, moving from cold to warm spots.

We stopped at a beautiful beach with clear blue water and lots of rocks to sit and sun on. The rocks were covered with barnacles and small mussels crowded together in the crevices.

We splashed around for a little while, then got back on the bus, damp and sleepy.

journal 7/31

As I was walking into the center of town a few minutes ago, I saw three kids tearing through the grass down the hill carrying laundry sacks with clothing peeking out of the top. Two of the kids were of South or Central American descent, and the other was most likely from Africa. All three wore ragged, dusty clothing.

When they got to the bottom of the hill, they tossed their bags into a dumpster and continued running down the hill right past me.

When they got close enough for me to see their faces clearly, I saw that they had huge, exhilerated grins on their faces. It was clear from the sacks and every element of their body language that they were doing something they weren't supposed to do and were thoroughly enjoying that fact.

And sure enough, as I crested the hill I saw two intent-looking guardia trotting in my direction. But the kids were long gone.

Museo do Pobo Gallego (journal 7/28)

I visited the Museo do Pobo Gallego today. A lot of people get the name (which is in Gallego) wrong and say Museo del Pobre Gallego. That would be Museum of the Poor Gallego as opposed to Museum of the Galician People.

And, in reality, the people who make this mistake are not far from wrong. The exhibits show every detail of an exceedingly difficult traditional galician life. Bending and scraping at wood to fashion instruments and shoes, digging huge holes to get clay to make pots and dishes, wresting fish from the sea for food, forcing string into a logical pattern to make lace and cloth. It's a museum devoted to documenting the imposition of stubborn human will on equally stubborn nature.

The best part of the museum is definitely the building itself. The centerpiece is a triple staircase -- like DNA, but with another thread. Picture forthcoming.

breakfast

I've been enjoying a breakfast ritual for the past couple of weeks. Every morning I sit in the kitchen and eat toast with jam and drink coffee. Señora Matos and I watch an exceedingly silly spanish soap opera and chat about it. It's a good way to practice spanish -- "Este chica está embarazada, pero su marido no es el padre del niño..."

big mistake

Note to self: do not go out drinking with Austrians.

Post-Xacobeo -- Journal 7/25

Today there were a number of religious activities as well as a tremendous nationalist procession through town.

The highlight of the religious stuff, for me, was watching the different spanish political figures kiss the statue of St. James in the church after mass. The king and queen (in a traditional mantilla, no less!) gave the saint sensitive kisses on the cheek. But President Zapatero just couldn't do it. He tried, closed his eyes, bent his face near the icon, then shook his head and walked away with a smile. I respected him for that -- he could have been a hypocrite and kissed the saint without having any religious conviction, but he was too honest with himself to do that.

The nationalist parade was in celebration of Galicia Day, which is always the day after St. James' birthday. It went from the south end of town all the way to the center to end in a big scary-sounding rally at one of the large plazas.

People carried a number of different flags and signs - the ubiquituous Nunca Maís, BNG (Bloc Nationalista de Galicia), and Galicia Nova (another nationalist group). There were also a number of communist flags and some national union flags in the mix.

The rally ended with a sonorous recital of the galician anthem, accompanied by bagpipes and tambourines. The anthem seems to be traditionally sung with both fists straight up in the air. Or, if you're holding a beer, one fist.

Xacobeo, part II

We spent the next couple of hours wandering through the streets, often accompanied by an extremely loud and raucous spanish style oompah band.  We passed by an ancient university building and saw musicians taking a break from playing traditional galician music.  This was the nationalist section of the festival.  A lot of hip-looking young people were milling around under signs for Nunca Maís (an ecological group dedicated to preventing disasters like the recent Prestige oil spill on the galician coast -- it's allied with some radical nationalist groups) and anti-ñ signs (a statement against the Spanish language, which has the ñ, in favor of gallego, which does not) carrying huge plastic bottles of cheap plonk.

We ambled to another plaza in time to hear the last couple of songs by the francophone Orchestre Nationale de Barbès.  They put on an excellent show.  They cobbled together traditional arab vocals and percussion with some more western elements, like long electric guitar solos and surreal coordinated back-up dances à la The Supremes.  They're final song was a french-accented version of Sympathy for the Devil.  Quite a choice for a saint's birthday celebration.

We started heading home at 3am, though no one else on the street showed signs of being tired.

Xacobeo 2004 (journal 7/25)

So last night was the big festival. We arrived at the enormous plaza in front of the cathedral about 1 1/2 hours early. We managed to get 1/4 of the way into the plaza before coming up against a wall of people. We did manage to secure a good view of the cathedral, though. And so we waited, hot and smooshed up against the rest of the crowd.

The mood was festive for the most part -- beach balls materialized and were tapped around the plaza. There were some attempts at cross-plaza communication. A person near us called out, "MARIA!!" and, with the voices of thirty or forty people near him helping, he succeeded in making contact. A group of people somewhere else in the plaza cried out, "JORGE!!"

The king and his family and President Zapatero arrived. Everyone got very excited when the king made his appearance on the highest balcony. The social classes were well defined. In a building facing the cathedral, there were two levels of balconies. The top balcony was sparsely populated by the royal family and the president and his entourage. The second balcony was packed with very well dressed people. Everyone else stood on the plaza, badly dressed and sweating.

Finally the fireworks began. They were amazing and lasted for about 45 minutes.  There were shooting stars above the cathedral, flames blasting out of urns on the church façade, huge explosions of delicate white sparks... it really defies description.  There was also apparently a ritual burning of a model of a mosque in Córdoba, but if they chose to do that this year, I wasn't in the right position to see it.

When it was all over, we were covered in fine soot from the explosions.  After the last firework went off, there was a long moment of awed silence before the applause and cheering began.

Vilgarcía de Arousa (from journal 7/24)

It's the day of the big fiesta and like seemingly everyone in Santiago, Maria and I decided to go to the beach.

Almost as soon as the train left Santiago, we were in the countryside.  We passed through thickets of evergreens, through towns where each house had its own plot of land with corn and (I think) squash.  Some had ancient horreos that are used to store grain and other things in a dry place.   Maria told me that long ago a new husband and wife would have sex for the first time underneath the horreo.  For fertility -- both theirs and the earth's, I'd imagine.  A sort of feedback loop of fertility.  Pilgrims with beaten wooden sticks wound their way through the small plots of land, headed towards Santiago.

I looked out the left hand side window as we rounded a curve and suddenly the forest opened out onto a glittering river.  The landscape did look sort of mystical, the way galicians always insist it does.  I looked out the right hand side window and saw a factory belching out turds of dark smoke.

We arrived in Vilgarcía de Arousa about an hour later.  After the beauty of the ride, the beach itself was a bit of a shock.  It was sort of like if there were a beach next to the part of the New Jersey Turnpike that's closest to New York.  On the left was what I think ws a cement factory.  On the right, along the shore, were enormous soviet-looking hotels -- grey cement with small windows and streaks of rust. 

But I forgot my camera.  Aren't you disappointed?

The sand had a fair amount of garbage strewn around and the water near the shore was choked with seaweed. 

But sunshine is sunshine, so we spread our towels on the sand, ate our lunch of canned olives and bread, and took a nap.  A little later Maria took out a book to read -- Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  A little light beach reading...

A little later I went wading.  You could see tiny, almost transparent fish darting back and forth, and live periwinkles clung to clam shells.  Further out, you could see larger fish glinting in the sun as they jumped.

We just arrived at the train station to find that the train we thought was arriving only comes on weekdays.  But that's OK -- we're eating juicy peaches and taking in the view of the mountains above the cement factory.

uhhhh

It seems like the official song of the big saint´s birthday festival here is It's Raining Men....

Red Button

Finally getting my luggage was quite a challenge.  Last sunday I called several phone numbers and rasped the ears of poor Iberia clerks with my bad spanish.  I learned, finally, that my stuff had arrived in the Santiago airport.

On monday afternoon, I called more numbers.  And more.  As some, there was someone to answer the phone, and they gave me more numbers to call.  At those numbers, no one answered.

I finally went to the Iberia office with my lost baggage receipt.  The lady there was very nice, and spent 20 minutes or so calling different numbers.  But in the end all she could do was give me another number to call when I got home.

So I called it.  The lady there had no record of my name or reference number.  So I took the advice of Señora Matos and launched into a whole tearful schpiel about how I don´t have clean clothes, how I've been wearing the same underwear for three days...  Just as I sounded as though I was about to become completely unhinged, the lady on the other end of the line miraculously found some record of me and told me that I would have to come to the airport personally to pick the bag up from customs.  This made me extremely angry, as they were the people who lost the damned things in the first place and promised to send it to my house.

The next day I took a bus to the Santiago airport, was in itself a bit of a rigamarole.  There's no sign for the bus, so you have to walk into shops you believe to be near where the bus stops and ask salespeople.  Who are invariably nice about it and point you in the right direction.

The bus was about half filled with dusty pilgrims and their sticks and rucksacks.  The other half were old men and housewives of all ages who live in the countryside that surrounds the airport.

Several older women pushed ahead of me onto the bus, shouting either at me or at each other in Gallego.

I arrived at the airport and went looking for La aduana.  I finally found a small sign with an arrow pointing towards the arrivals section.  But when I arrived, I saw only automatic doors that opened from the other side.  So I went upstairs and asked someone.  They said there was a small bell by the automatic doors that I needed to ring.

So I finally found it, a tiny red doorbell with

ADUANA

written underneath it.  I pressed it, tremendously excited at the thought of clean underwear.
But no one answered.  I rang again.  And again.  Still no one.
 
I thought of all that I´d had to do to finally arrive at this tiny red button in this tiny airport in the middle of the countryside.  I felt on the verge of tears.
 
I played the red button like an instrument, trying to convey my annoyance and desperation to the person I was hoping was on the other side.

Finally, the automatic doors opened and a short, squat man in an ill-fitting olive uniform covered with pins and badges told me that I needed to be accompanied by a member of the Iberia staff.  He reminded me a little of the Man Behind the Curtain in the Wizard of Oz.

So off I went to the Iberia office, was directed to a second, smaller office where after some probably incoherent explanation on my part, a grave woman in an Iberia uniform said something into her walkie-talkie and slowly walked with me, keys jangling, to the Aduana where the doors opened on the first ring 
All three of us walked solemly into the terminal.  The Aduana unlocked the door to a small room and beckoned me inside with a wave of his hand, as though he were a hotelier showing me a room.
 
And there it was!  My bag, finally, covered with stickers and papers.
 
After a few questions -- when did you arrive? when did your bag arrive? do you have your baggage claim stickers? -- followed by some incomprehensible mumbling between the aduana and the Iberia functionary, and I was free to wheel my bag away.

schoolmates

I´m in spanish class with people from all over europe.  Without exception people here are very smart.  It's a tiny tower of babel where people draw on all of their linguistic resources to communicate with one another.

• I live with Maria, a quiet economics student from Austria.  We tend to communicate in Spanish because her english is bad and my german is non-existent.  This morning she told me about the organic farm her parents run in the austrian countryside.  ("We haff... uh... pollos... and... vacas...")

There are two rather culturally schizophrenic Italians.

• One is the son of italian parents who own a restaurant in england.  He's a born-again Christian who plans to spend the next 10 years in Andalucia.
• The other grew up in Italy the son of an Italian father and a Bermudan mother.  He's currently living in Strausbourg, France and working as an engineer for Johnson & Johnson.
• Julia is from Cardiff, Wales.  She´s one of several language teachers who have chosen to spend their summer as students.  She´s a thin vegetarian with long, long brown hair and wine colored lips -- half the time from vino tinto and half the time from lipstick.
• A pair of goofy dutch journalists.  They live in Brussels and work as EU correspondants.  The male half of the couple is the only Dutch person I´ve ever met with bad English.  This includes includes homeless people lying on the streets of Amsterdam.  He looks a little like a more northern version of Roberto Benigni.  He has that same sort of village idiot look -- hyperanimated hands and face.  It´s hard not to smile when you see him.
• An Austrian legal intern. He´s a little boring, but spent 15 minutes or so yesterday telling me how he´d like to study hebrew so he can study the caballah in the original.
• Ursula is an enormous German woman who works as a chaplain in a cancer ward.  She´s on a year-long sabbatical and spent the six weeks antecedant to her arrival walking the camino de Santiago. 

special interests

It occurs to me that if you're really into bagpipes and octopus, Santiago de Compostela is your kind of town.  The local specialty is squid in every incarnation imaginable.  And there is a very old Celtic tradition here that manifests itself in modern times as strolling gangs of students playing bagpipes.  They look sort of similar, octopi and bagpipes...