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!