Holy Week Part III: Cliffhanger resolved

Oh no! The bus was full! So instead we had to catch a different bus in the afternoon, with like 3 hours to kill in Vigo. It was kinda miserable since it was raining and windy, but we went and had coffee and acquired an umbrella. I didn't mention before, but I also bought my first ever umbrella in Vigo and I still feel... conflicted. The Pacific Northwesterner in me tells me to tough it out, it's just water, wear a raincoat dammit. But the cat-like creature of comfort in me says f*** water, it's cold and wet. 

Anyway, after a little trial and error we found the hostel which was in a refurbished old house from the 19th century. Our room had a little balcony that looked out on the Rua Santa Catarina, a pedestrian street full of shops and cafes.

Check out the paving for the sidewalks.

Being frugal travelers, we bought some veggies and made stir-fry in the hostel then went to THE FANCIEST MCDONALDS EVER in the plaza by the town hall for icecream.

The Imperial McDonald's. Do you see the chandeliers inside?

Now, if you know me at all, you should know that I am not a fan of fast food in general. It's low quality, bad for you, bad for the environment, and bad for small businesses. But when you're traveling, sometimes it's just easier than trying to navigate a new restaurant with a confusing menu and you don't know if you seat yourself or you wait for the waiter or you go to the front to order or when you pay... 

Anyway, we couldn't find a bar so we settled for McFlurries. 

To my surprise, the place was absolutely packed. Kind of like the mall in Vigo, I would have thought that in a place with so many special, unique, and frankly more cultural places to go the locals wouldn't be so enamored with Micky-Dee's.

The next day we got up early and caught the free walking tour provided by the hostel. Normally it's a group of hostels that go together, but there were so many of us that we split into smaller groups, and Laura and I ended up with five or six other girls from our hostel, so our tour was a little more quiet and personal than the big 20 person groups. 

Our first stop was in the big plaza in front of the town hall building, both of which were absolutely enormous.

The long narrow plaza, dominated by the town hall building put me in mind of grand revolutions, with some charismatic speaker riling up the masses filling the plaza, watching the speech on screens, the speaker too small and far away but at the same time larger than life. Traffic stopped, flags flying from the balconies of the ancient buildings that have seen revolutions come and go before.

Okay, so I'm prone to daydreaming. Anyway, here's a picture of me with the thing.

We wandered for a bit, through narrow busy streets and irregularly-shaped plazas and the guide gave us little pieces of history and stories, though I don't remember most of them now. One that I do remember was that JK Rowling was living in Porto when she first started writing the Harry Potter books, and some of the places are based off of things in the city. Namely the library at Hogwarts and this bookstore near the university.

It's not allowed to take photos inside the bookstore, so I'll see if I can paint a picture in words. The bookstore is called Lello e Irmão (Lello and Brother), located in the University district. It is a tall, narrow building lit from a single huge skylight with a pattern of blue and gold stained glass around the edges. The whole place smells like damp wood and new books and there is a business that seems out of step in a bookstore. 

A huge twisty-curvy staircase dominates the downstairs, like a double helix that got pulled apart and tangled up again. You can tell that people tend to take the right stair and not the left because the red paint is worn thin in the middle of the stairs, showing white, and then brown underneath. Upstairs there are more shelves to browse, and a little giftshop/cafe where you can watch the tourists try and sneak photos while the employees aren't looking. I sat for a while in a deep cushioned chair reading Richard Dawkins in Portuguese until Laura came to fetch me saying that the tour was moving on.

I could see why Rowling got inspired.

From there we saw a plaza dedicated to some Portuguese prince who died of typhoid and was a benefactor of the arts.

The dedication says "To D. Pedro V. For gratitude. The Portuense Artists. In 1862" There are also some spikes on his head and shoulders to keep the birds from landing on him. And for me, I will always think of this plaza as "Typhoid Plaza."

The next notable thing we visited was the bridge and the river. Did I mention that it was truly nasty out by this point? My pants were heavy with water and no amount of hitching could make them stay up. But we carried on, intrepid tourists that we were. I think our poor guide would have rather gone home. I'm glad we didn't though, because this was the part of the trip that made me fall in love with Porto. All the crumbling ancientness, like jungle ruins of a long fallen empire, with bits of modernity springing up through the cracks.

This post has already turned out longer than I anticipated, so I'll leave off here. 

Holy Week Part II: One Bad Thing

It is my belief that on every trip of any length, one bad, unplanned-for thing is going to happen. A snafu with the plane tickets, an injury, a broken car... Okay, maybe not every trip, but most trips, and if you hold in the back of your mind that your bad thing hasn't happened yet, you're gonna be less shocked and incapable than you would be otherwise. A sort of mental preparation. 

But I'll get to the Bad Thing later. (it really wasn't that bad)

So, like I said, Sunday in Vigo was eerily quiet. Judging from how things are Sundays in Lugo, I kind of assumed it would be that way, and had planned to spend the day at the Islas Cies. 

The Cies

The Cies are part of a national park off the coast of Galicia and according to some, has the "best beach in the world." You can only get there by boat, but there are ferries from Vigo and Pontevedra during the tourist season, which starts during semana santa.

Unfortunately, the weather was too rough to warrant a trip and the ferry wasn't running.

whitecaps

With the original plan not an option, we did what the guy at the hostel suggested and took a different ferry across the estuary to the town of Cangas, which made for a fun trip despite the bi-polar weather system moving through. The photo above is from the ferry ride. I don't know if you can see, but there's a tiny little white triangle off near the horizon, which is a sailboat! Probably part of the same classes I saw the day before.

Look! Sailors! Enjoy the breeze, kids.

Highlights of Cangas: 

• Boats
• Cats
• Winding little streets

View of Cangas from the breakwater

So many kitties!  Laura was not nearly as enamored with them as I was. So what if some of them were a little diseased and gross.

And then it rained.

This little guy was pretty upset about it.

Not much more to say about Vigo, but here's a couple interesting things we saw.

I know, this thing looks kinda boring and gross at first glance, but it's actually kind of neat. It's an old communal clothes-washing area, still in use today judging by that sock. It's easy to forget that modern conveniences like clothes washing machines are really a super recent thing.

And this sculpture in the middle of a roundabout. 

Oh yeah! the Bad Thing.

In all the time I've been in Spain I've never really had a problem with the busses. Maybe they're not as frequent or as fast as I would like, but they're still pretty good. Better than back home at least. Normally what works just fine is getting to the bus station 5-10 minutes before the bus leaves, buying a ticket at the window or just from the driver, and going on your merry way. 

But this time was not destined to be like all the other times when the lady at the ALSA window told us that the bus to Oporto was full. Dun Dun Dun. (go click that link again.)

Holy Week Part I: Under Construction

This week is the Semana Santa, so I went on vacation again, with my fellow Auxiliar Laura from Ireland. 

I recently learned that there is like a holy day for every day of the week, but for some reason, they are not all the same week, but separated by Lent. They are, if I remember correctly (starting with Tuesday): Fat Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday. I guess towards the end the creative juices started to run dry.

But I'm not going to talk about Catholicism right now. Instead, I'm going to talk about Vigo!

Look at all the red tile roofs!

Vigo (pronounced BEE-gho) is the largest city in Galicia, located just north of the border with Portugal on the Atlantic coast and famous for having a Citroen factory. 

In planning the trip, I was surprised to find that there were very few listings on Hostel World, and most of those were outside our price range in the too much direction. So, we took a risk and went with a hostel that had zero reviews. It looked good in the pictures and claimed to have the things one looks for in a hostel--breakfast, towels, helpful people...

Saturday morning we caught the bus to Vigo in the drizzle, rode through the rain and arrived in the torrential downpour. We acquired a map (maps are one of the best things ever. Not only are they usually free and super helpful in getting around a new city, they also give you ideas for things to do/places to go and make awesome souvenirs and wall-coverings.) and checked in at the hostel, which turned out to be brand new. Very brand new. As in they were still installing lights and things in some of the rooms.

The guy at the desk was super friendly though, and told us all about how he had gone on a huge europe-wide hostel tour before opening up this place, and how it had, until recently (la crisis...), been an office building, but now it was going to be a hostel, one of only a couple in Vigo. That would explain why I hadn't seen anything on Hostel World.

The view was fantastic as well.

For lunch, we went to a pizza place recommended to us by the guy at the hostel, which happened to be in the shopping center/mall that was down the road a little way. (opposite direction from the awesome view) To my surprise, the food court was packed. Absolutely packed. Every single restaurant had a waiting line to be seated and we ended up waiting a good twenty minutes or so before we got a table. Apparently the mall is the place to be in Vigo on a Saturday afternoon.

From there, we headed toward the city center and ended up wandering around a big park on a hill overlooking all of Vigo and the Rias Baixas (the estuary on which Vigo and Pontevedra sit). The park was named for a castro (see "Visiting History" if you don't remember what a castro is) that had once stood there and there was a neat info board that pointed out all the other castros that could, once upon a time, be seen from where the park is now.

I watched the boats (hike, hike! you're not flat!) through the telescopes at the miradoiro (lookout) and checked out the floating platform things on the other side of the estuary. I think, if I understood correctly, that they are a sort of aquaculture for growing mussels, which answers some questions I had about where in the world the Spaniards get all their mussels since they eat a lot of them. Galicia is supposedly one of the top mussel-producing regions in the world, and now I believe it more.

At the top of the park, there was a sort of a castle/castro kind of thing, that was a memorial for 138 men who had been killed there fighting Franco in the civil war. I've lost the photo I took of the placard, but here's the memorial part of the park.

Non vamos esquecer.

After that we made some duckie friends, found a crazy cat lady, then went back to the hostel and sallied forth for tapas with our hostel roommate, Katrina from Manchester. This was one of the things I really enjoyed about this trip--meeting new folks in the hostels. Last trip we either didn't have hostel roommates or we just didn't associate with them much. But this time, all our hostel roommates spoke English and were generally pretty friendly. 

The next day was Sunday, but not just any Sunday, it was Palm Sunday, and everyone was dressed nice and carrying little bits of branches with them everywhere. Or at least in the morning, because by the afternoon, everything was closed and abandoned-looking. 

I don't want to overload the post, so I'll leave it here and talk about the islands we didn't go to tomorrow, and maybe the first part of Oporto as well.

Ata logo!

A Paisaxe (outra vez)

Two things: I went on another hiking field trip with my school today, and "paisaxe" in galego takes the feminine article, unlike "el paisaje" in castellano.

This trip took a more difficult route than the last one, so even though it was shorter and we finished sooner I was much more tired by the end. I'm also less fit than I'm used to, and that probably had something to do with it.

We couldn't have picked a better day though. Sunny and windy and absolutely gorgeous.

View from the starting point

About 40 students decided to go, accompanied by the PE teacher (Manolo), history teacher/computer guru (Carricoba), math teacher (Laura) and myself, plus a mysterious woman called Inez who I think is also a teacher, but I'm not sure what subject. Our destination was some remains left from the castro culture, less well preserved than the castro at viladonga, but still pretty neat.

"Gallol Trail
'The Castle' castro, 1mi"

The castro was more of a lookout or fort than a settlement, and sat perched on top of a hill near the meeting point of two rivers. Inez explained to us that the castro people had similar structures on hilltops throughout the area, which (as far as I understood) they used to warn villages of invaders through the use of signal fires.

The lookout point at the end of the trail

The castro ruins (the rocks on top of the hill)

From there we took the carretera (road) back to Vilardiaz, the village where the bus had dropped us off about 5km away.

road

village

Some of the kids had a little assignment from their biology class to make note of the different plants they saw, so I picked up a few new vocabulary words. My favorite is "uz" (pronounced "ooth") which is Galician for a scot's broom kind of plant. I forgot to take a photo and what the Spanish word was. Here are some pictures of plants.

Fenos e arbustos e arbores e musgos...

On the way back to Fonsagrada, we stopped at another little village called O Trobo (or was it O Tromo?) to see the church and a natural spring called "o fonte de marques" or something similar. The fountain of the marques. There was some story behind it, but I didn't catch what it was. I was too busy taking pictures. (I am a tourist.)

Group photo

O fonte

There were some animal attractions too--goats and dogs and chickens which were just so picturesque in the spring sunshine that I had to take pictures. Of course, some of the teachers had to tease me for this, "Oh the american girl, never seen a chicken before, jajaja" 

PICTURESQUE, DAMMIT.

Also I got sunburnt.


###############

And now, because I don't want to make a whole nother post, here are my travel plans for semana santa:

Vigo, Islas Cies, Oporto.

I had been thinking of doing more of Portugal, maybe going all the way to Lisbon, but the busses were complicated and Lisbon is farther away than I thought. (further south than Madrid) That and various people have told me that I need to see the Islas Cies (a national park off the atlantic coast) so that is what I will do.

E agora vou a fazer um repaso do meu portugues. 

Student Life

So, it's been a while since I've posted anything again. Not much is new, but things are gradually progressing. There's flowers on the trees and the threat of snow is almost gone. The weather is pretty much exactly like back home--rain and clouds and drizzle, with a few hours or minutes of sun and blue sky that trick you into thinking you don't need to wear a hat and coat when you go outside and then you come home feeling like you fell in the river.

Cherry tree outside my building

Spring break (semana santa) is fast approaching, and all the students have tests between now and then. The teachers are especially worried for the 2nd of Bac. kids (equivalent to grade 12 in high school) who have their college entrance exams soon, and are behind in their material due to the snow. They've missed about 2 weeks so far from snow and ice, but hopefully they won't miss any more.

As for me, I've started taking Castellano/Gallego lessons (clases particulares) from a private teacher in Lugo. The grammar review has been nice and has really made me realize how much trouble I've been going through to avoid certain tiempos verbales as well as some of the differences between the American Spanish (in the most generalist possible meaning of "American") that I learned in college and the variety of Spanish spoken in the north of the peninsula. Here's a video that really demonstrates my sentiments.

We haven't done as much with the Gallego however, and I have the feeling that my teacher is more used to teaching Castellano than Gallego. 

I've also had some less pleasant scholarly interactions with Western. As you may know, the real reason behind me coming to Spain in the first place was to complete my practicum for my TESOL cert. And in order to complete the practicum, I needed to 1) register for the practicum online while, 2) concurrently taking the online seminar. If I had done it in B'ham, there would've been a real sit-down class to attend. But I'm not in Bham, which seemed to be a difficult concept for the people at the registrar's and admissions offices to understand.

Me: I'm in Spain, trying to register for X
Office: Well, just stop by our office and fill out the paperwork during office hours.
Me: I can't, I'm in Spain.
Office: If you can't come in during office hours, you can print it out and drop it in our box. Be sure to stop by the cashier's office to pay.
Me: I am not in Bellingham. A continent, an ocean and nine time zones stand between me and the cashier's office. I can't stop by between 10am and 4pm weekdays.

Anyway, the seminar/practicum duo is offered in the spring and fall, but since I didn't want to have to deal with classes on top of getting settled and acculturated (thanks for that word, TESL 421!) I decided to wait til spring. And didn't think about it again until registration time started a few weeks ago. oops.

It turns out that since I graduated, I'm not really a student at Western anymore. (I'm an alumnus) And therefore I couldn't register for classes. So, I spent a frantic week and a half trying to finagle my way into the course. So many emails. So many. But it all worked out, more or less. Now I just gotta pay for the thing and actually do the work.

On an unrelated note, I just finished the most recent Song of Ice and Fire book. So much boobs and blood, but so good. Like ham-flavored potato chips, it's almost impossible to stop until you've finished the whole bag and feel kind of sick. George RR Martin, please don't die before you finish the series.