Well in advance of the trip, Heather and I made a googledoc and started planning--deciding where to go, booking housing, dealing with the wishy-washy mass transit system of Spain (seriously. is making a timetable and then following it too much to ask?).
Apparently it is, because Heather's bus from Madrid to Lugo did not follow the schedule or even the route listed on the website. So, bundled up and book in hand I waited at the bus station, where I made friends with a lost-looking Portuguese guy who was in the same boat so to speak. I had a slight moment of panic when an ALSA bus (ALSA is, I think, the largest bus company in Spain) showed up at the time when Heather's bus was supposed to arrive, but no Heather appeared.
"Oh, no," I thought. "What if she fell asleep and doesn't know the bus is in Lugo and she wakes up in Ferrol or A Coruña or Fisterre groggy and jet lagged and lost in the middle of the night and gets attacked by a crazy homeless person as she's trying to sleep in the bus station at the end of the world?"
As I stepped forward to get on the bus and explain to the driver that I needed to search the bus for a sleeping American, I saw a sign on the window of the bus: Santander --> Lugo. This was when I made friends with the equally confused Portuguese guy. I don't know anything about Portuguese busses, but I figure it's safe to assume they're at least slightly more reliable.
Anyway, Heather's bus did make it eventually, and we trudged home to the piso in Lugo.
The next day was my last day at Fontem Albei (the school where I've been working) and it was a sadder goodbye than I'd been expecting. For the past few weeks at school, I'd been thinking a lot about how I just wasn't going to see these people anymore, these people I'd become accustomed to seeing, who I had come to know over the past school year.
I think like a lot of people, I don't like goodbyes. They're sad and difficult in the way finishing a good book is. While you can look back and appreciate the adventure, the relationship, for what it was, you're always going to be left wanting more no matter how good the ending was. But a bad ending, a cliffhanger with no resolution will always hurt more, especially when there may not be a sequel.
But I'm getting off topic.
As a little goodbye present, one of the English teachers presented me with some Fonsagradiño earrings and had me say a little something to all the teachers. I managed a little strangled Galician (along the lines of 'thanks for being so nice') and had to blow my nose between hugs.
Once I got home Heather and I went off to explore Lugo a little, see the sights as it were. So we took a peek at the Cathedral...
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| I'll explain this interesting angle later |
We did try to go to the House of Mosaics (Casa dos mosaicos), which I hadn't been to before. It turns out that underneath Lugo there are a bunch of Roman ruins (who'da thunk it, right?) and recently some quite well preserved mosaics were found beneath a shoe store and a coffee shop, a Don Leon I believe. The only problem is there are several thousand tons of building on top of them, so they're a little hard to get at. You can see a small fraction of the mosaics from the shoe store through a hole in the floor, but the rest is accessible only through a tiny crawl space. So instead of sending tourists to crawl on their bellies underneath a local coffee chain, they hired someone to go through with a video camera to make a little movie about it.
Unfortunately, the video was out of order at the time.
I suppose I'll leave off here and share with you the rest of our adventures later. I have zero plans for the weekend, so we shall see how productive I can be.
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