Pazo de Oca

Continuing my spring break car adventures, Noé, Chelsea and I went on a little morning adventure to Pazo de Oca and Pico Sacro just outside Santiago. The Pazo (Galician for palace) is about a half hour drive outside Santiago, or maybe less since we had some difficulty finding and staying on the right highway. 

In the past, pazos were something of a noble's house and local government center combined. It was where the local lord lived and from where he ruled over his villages. There are some pazos that are still private residences to this day, but many have opened their doors to the public. Or at least the gardens, as is the case at Pazo de Oca.

These Camelias were all over the gardens

On the way back to Santiago we stopped for a mini-hike at Pico Sacro--the highest point for miles around, as far as I can tell. You can drive almost to the top, where there is a parking lot and a little church. (Sacro means "sacred")

path up the hill

All the little towns carved out of the woods

Galicia Profunda: part III

Monday was our third and last day in the Ribeira Sacra, and we left the casa with one final map from Manolo showing us the way out of the Mencía-growing Ribeira Sacra region to the Albariño-growing Ribeiro region. Our first stop (after a couple more miradoiros overlooking the Río Sil) was the Monastery of San Estevo--a huge old monastery that has since been converted into a high-end hotel. They also had a pretty cool art exposition going on, commemorating the time when the monastery had been a sanitarium.

Cheap beer and caldo gallego for lunch in Luintra

The next stop on our journey was a very unique church/monastery---the aptly named San Pedro de la Roca. The original building was carved from a single huge rock set into the hillside, and was at its height home to thirteen monks. The tour brochure played it up as an ancient lost wonder, but according to the lovely museum next door it was really only lost and "rediscovered" within about twenty years in the early part of the 1900s. 

That night, moved perhaps by the spirituality gained by visiting all these places, or perhaps because we found a really good deal online, we spent the night at another monastery-cum-hotel. We killed what was left of the afternoon poking around Carballiño, a biggish small town nearby, close to the smallish small town (that was actually really gross) where the monastery was located. It turns out the Carballiño is one of a very few unbanalities in northern Spain to have a Jewish quarter, so we had a good time wandering around and getting as lost as you can get in the old part of a small town.

By the next day we apparently still hadn't gotten enough of old churches and went a little out of the way to check out the Mosteiro de Santa María de Oseira. The 13th century monastery was abandoned in the 1800s, only to be restored and rebuilt in the early part of the 20th century. Today it is a functioning monastery, complete with monks, a tour guide, albergue for Camino de Santiago pilgrims, and a shop where you can buy cookies and alcohol made by the monks. Inside you aren't allowed to take photos, but if you do go in (or google image search) you can see some pretty impressive works of architectural technology for the time. 

From there, we headed west to the Rías Baixas for an afternoon on the beach before heading home to Santiago.

Galicia Profunda: part II

Do you guys remember when last year, during Carnaval I went to Amsterdam and did the most touristy thing ever and it was fantastic? Well, I managed to repeat the experience in the small town of Doade. This is a town so small that nothing shows up when you search for it on Google Maps. I managed to find it anyway. 






So, Chelsea, Noé and I took the tourist train that trundled us among grapevines and along canyon walls, between thousand-year chestnuts and crumbling villages to one of the many vineyards in the area. 

Terraces on the slopes

After the little train (can you really call it a train if it doesn't roll on rails?) dropped us off in Doade again we got back in the car and set off for the points of interest indicated on Manolo's map:

This tiny hermitage, the name of which I have forgotten

This lookout where Noé did not drop his camera

A waterfall

another walk by a stream with muiños and some neat aquatecture

This path that did not lead to a castro. This was the second time we were unsuccessful in finding a castro--they probably don't even exist anyway.

The 9th century Santa Cristina Monastery, now abandoned

On the way back home to the casa again Chelsea learned how to drive stick, taking advantage of the empty country roads. Minimal stalling occurred. I tried my hand at it the next day, with less encouraging results. It seems that knowing when to switch gears on a bicycle does not help very much, while being experienced at driving an automatic does. No one got hurt however, except for the car's clutch, but it was a rental anyway.

More pictures coming soon!

Galicia Profunda: part I

For those of us living in Catholic countries, this week is Semana Santa--the famous Spanish holiday where the faithful fill the streets, carrying wooden floats of saints and wearing Ku-Klux-Klan-like robes and pointed hats. We also get the whole week off from school, so I took advantage of the time to do a different sort of traveling.

Bright and early Saturday morning I walked down to the car rental place to meet with fellow auxiliar Noé from California and pick up our freedom-mobile, a little gray four-door Fiat. Once the car was loaded up with backpacks, groceries and board games we hit the road to Ourense to pick up our third partner in crime, Chelsea from Oregon. 

A few weeks previously, the three of us decided that we were sick of the usual European hostel travel. It had gotten sort of formulaic. Arrive in a city, navigate your way to the hostel you found the night before on Hostel World or Booking-dot-com, acquire a map and a list of destinations to see: a church, a museum, a castle or palace, a park and a restaurant... Rinse and repeat. So instead, we hit upon the idea of renting a car and a casa rural (see number 2) in the Ribeira Sacra. 

The Ribeira Sacra is a Denominación de Origen (DO), a sort of geographic certification of quality created by the Spanish government that primarily covers wines. This means that only wines that are produced in this region and that possess certain characteristics (the kinds of grapes and style of production, among other thins) can be labelled as DO Ribeira Sacra. Sort of like how real Champagne can only come from a certain region in France for it to be called Champagne. 

While the wines were a big draw, the reason behind the wines for me played a bigger part: the climate and geography. The region we visited has a much more continental climate than Santiago does, and about half the annual rainfall. That plus the wandering courses of the Ríos Miño and Sil make for a beautiful part of the world.

Entrance to the house with Chelsea and Noé in the doorway

We arrived at the house in the early afternoon and after a snacky lunch, we met with Manolo the house's owner, who hand-drew us a map of places we could see within the afternoon. 

I think most of the rest of this post will be photos, so sit back and relax.

The town of Castro Caldelas with its castle overlooking the Río Edo

A walk by a stream with some abandoned muiños (water mills)

Our first view of the Río Sil

An abandoned church

A field I shot while Chelsea asked the locals for directions

Up to this point I haven't mentioned just how disorganized we were leaving Santiago. Somehow I managed to leave the house with a wide selection of board games, but no towel, and Noé was stuck with two different shoes for the entirety of the trip. Originally, part of the reason we wanted a casa rural was because it gave us the option of cooking rather than eating out the whole time. Unfortunately we forgot some of the key ingredients for some of our dishes and ended up eating a lot of junk. But we were on holidays, so it was okay.

More pictures tomorrow of some of the beautiful awesome places we visited the next day.

How I Spent the Day with Fifty-five Twelve-year-olds

This past week I got suddenly invited to go on a field trip with my school to the big city of Vigo for the day, to see a theatrical production of The Portrait of Dorian Gray in English. And so, at the crack of dawn (quarter past nine in the morning) I found myself on the bus out of town with the bus driver, two other teachers and fifty-five middle-schoolers. Oh, God.

waiting in line

The bus driver dropped us off on some main drag near in Vigo and a vague idea of where the theatre was. The timetable seemed to have allowed for some getting lost, because even after a couple askings for directions and doubling-backs we found the theatre entrance about a half hour before the doors opened. For lack of anything better to do, we herded the kids to a plaza across the street where they wouldn't be blocking the foot traffic, while the teachers snuck off one by one to get a coffee pick-me-up at the cafe next door.

The play was about what I was expecting it to be. Nice, but nothing to write home about (so why am I writing this post??). A couple Argentinian dudes with decent accents, a British girl, and a local guy to do the lights. There was a rather painful Q&A session at the end where the actors invited the kids to ask them about the play, English, acting... 

Silence. 

In the end the actors ended up talking about themselves anyway, and asked the kids some comprehension questions about the play. Which they were calling the Picture of Dorian Gray. I don't know if this was a problem with the English-->Spanish-->English translation, or simply the name of the theatre version of the story, but that asshole part of my brain really wanted to ask.

Now, it just so happened that the day of our excursion was a strike day, and there was a demonstration going on in the town center in Vigo. Right near where the theatre was. Because of the demonstration, police had closed down the main drag, and the bus driver couldn't get through. One of the teachers used this delay as an opportunity to buy ice cream for everyone, which turned out to be not the best idea, because we then had to go running around trying to get back to the bus, avoiding protesters, television crews and police blockades. In the process we lost four students, including one little boy on crutches with a broken ankle. Let's just say thank god for cell phones. 

For lunch we stopped at the little town of Baiona, unleashing our terrors upon the unsuspecting restaurant owners. I went with the other adult to a more secluded, pricey place away from the children, and played along with everyone else when we said that we would be on the road again in an hour and a half. 

Just short of three hours later we were counting heads on the bus, headed up the hill to look at some petroglyphs. The bus wound its precarious way through the one-lane track that lead into the mountains. At one point we ran into a truck wanting to go down into the town. The driver quickly changed his mind and backed up at full speed until a driveway presented itself where he could back into.

At the top of the hill we were met by a very Galician, very energetic man who, after getting various degrees in history, anthropology and goodness knows what all else, discovered he still wasn't really all that qualified for any jobs, and wrote a book about petroglyphs instead. 

Xosé, the author, told us a little of what he knew about the people who had lived here around five thousand years ago, picked up from the scant traces they had left behind--some carvings on stones, some burial chambers called dolmens, and perhaps a few linguistic remains left in the names of places and plants. 

The petroglyphs and the people who made them pre-date the Romans and the castro-building celts. They were most likely a stone-age society that had some concept of astronomy (many of the carvings look like solar calendars) and placed some importance on stags and the hunting of deer. They had horses and dogs and bows and arrows, and must have had some way to accurately cut into stone.

Xosé brought with him some butcher paper, and got the kids to make some rubbings of the petroglyphs, which I hope are in the school now, and not still in the back of the science teacher's car. 

It was getting to be dark out soon, so after making the rubbings we ran back down to the bus so as to get back to Baiona again before all the coffeeshops were closed. 

By this point I was getting to be overwhelmed by the seething mass of children and took the opportunity to go for a walk by myself and take some photos.

Now, it may have sounded like I don't like my students, or children in general, but that's not true. My students this year are (by and large) good kids. They are enthusiastic and happy to be in school, and I'm happy to be there with them. But fifty-five of them, for twelve hours... I think you get the picture.