Grand Tour Part V: On the Banks of the Guadalquivir

I love the name of the Guadalquivir, the river that runs through Sevilla. Like a lot of the more beautiful words in Spanish, it comes from Arabic, meaning literally Great River. Not the most creative, but this is coming from the girl who lived for a year in a city called place. (LUCUS [lat.: place] --> Lugo /'lu.ɣo/)

We arrived in Sevilla just as the sun was setting, sticky and tired and uncomfortable from the seven hour bus ride, only to find out that I had screwed up the reservations and had failed to book us a room for that night. Fortunately the guy at the desk was still there and ready to to his job, and the hostel had space available. 

The first morning in Sevilla we went on one of the free walking tours offered to the hostel goers. I am a huge fan of these tours. Besides being free (well, you're supposed to give the guide a tip, but it's up to you how much if any) they're a great way to get to know the city, meet the other folks in your hostel, and see the sights while someone tells you about them! Given the option between reading something and having someone tell me about it, I will choose having someone tell me about it 9 times out of 10. (whether or not I remember it is another thing)


After some delicious pizza (recommended by the tour guide) we went, if I remember correctly, to the Real Alcázar of Sevilla. This is the royal palace in Sevilla, and the Borbones (Spain's royal family) stay there when they're in town. The building is in the mudéjar style, which is a mix of Moorish and Christian styles of the era (13- and 1400's). I did get an audioguide, but it was quite vague and it was difficult to tell exactly what it was talking about and the order in which to look at things, so I ended up wandering around, snapping photos of the gardens and the palace with the rest of the tourists. 

I ended up getting lost in the gardens a little bit, but it was a nice kind of lost. It was also nice to imagine having something so grand and beautiful not as my main house, but as my extra, weekend-away house. Say what you like about the Borbones, but they've got style.

Awnings to keep the sun off

By the time Heather and I found each other again (did I mention how huge the place was? We must have spent more than an hour and a half just wandering around, and I'm sure I didn't see everything) we were understandably tired, even though the weather forecast did not pan out, and the temperature was well below 94 degrees (thank god), we were understandably tired and returned to the hostel for a siesta.

And so it was that we woke up at 9pm and starving. We asked the kid (he was at most 18) at the hostel desk if he had any recommendations and he, with an enthusiasm most cheerleaders would envy, suggested a restaurant near the "big mushroom/waffle thing."

It turned out that this was actually not his suggestion, but one of the top-rated restaurants in the Lonely Planet guidebook to Sevilla and was therefore absolutely packed with tourists. I went up to the waiter and asked how long it would be before we could get a table. There were just the two of us, and hell, we could eat at the bar if there wasn't a table. The waiter said, 'a while' and that I could put my name on the list. In part because we were tired and too lazy to find another place to go, we put a name on the list (why did I think "Meg" would be easier for a Spaniard than "Meghan?" It's not) and went and sat on a little railing/wall thing in the plaza across the street where another group of tourists was waiting.

We sat for a while and after twenty minutes or so hit the point of no return. We had waited this long, we were committed. Not long after hitting the point of commitment, a couple American men came over to ask how long we had been waiting for. We got to talking, and learned some interesting things. First, that our restaurant was in the Lonely Planet book, and second that our new acquaintances were from Gresham and Cascade Locks. One was a finance director (or some kind of city govt. person) of Gresham, and the other worked for a company making and selling and using carbon fiber windsurf parts, and that they were in Europe in part to go windsurfing. 

We ended up getting a table together and talked about Spain and watersports and the Pacific Northwest. One of the guys had an odd, creepy vibe that for a moment put me in mind of a certain acquaintance from freshman year (anyone else remember Jeremy?) and he seemed to have an eating disorder of some kind and left to go to the bathroom half a dozen times. 

It was a nice enough dinner (hake for me, chicken for Heather and ox for the windsurfer), reminiscing about the Gorge and the Eastwind Drive-in, even if Jeremy (that was not his name) pissed off the waiter by shouting terrible spanglish at him. 

Back at the hostel again we made a game plan for our next couple days in Sevilla: see the cathedral, the General Archive of the Indies, the Maria Luisa park and the Plaza de España, a photo exibit in an art deco pavilion, the bull ring museum and a scenic path along the banks of the Guadalquivir.

Grand Tour Part IV: Astronaut

View from the hostel window

From Gijón, we started our journey south towards Sevilla, stopping for a day in Salamanca. 

Salamanca, for those who don't know it, is famous for two things in particular: Being home to not one, but two cathedrals (normally a city is only allowed to have one cathedral), and being the number one destination for study abroad students. Between that and having a charming, sepia-colored old town, it has a healthy tourist population. 

Our hostel was actually right in the center of the old town, within shouting distance of the cathedrals and after putting together our beds and having another picnic lunch of ham sandwiches we went to go check them out. 

Since the cathedral(s) is(are) in the center of the old town, it's actually really difficult to get a photo that shows what the thing looks like as a whole, and not just artsy bits and pieces, so above is a picture of the scale model to give you a better idea of what it looks like. The new cathedral, which was completed in the 1700s is in the late Gothic/early Renaissance style and is deceptively big, hidden as it is between buildings and narrow pedestrian streets. The two cathedrals are built essentially one on top of the other, so that the old one is not so much a separate entity, but more like a parasitic twin. (photo of the old cathedral)

The details on the outside of the new cathedral are very impressive, having been redone within the last ten years (around 2007, I think) and make me wonder how long all that detail lasts, since on other churches, the artwork often seems rough. This could be due to modern tools, but I bet time and the elements play a part as well. The artist even showed some humor and added in an astronaut alongside the depictions of saints and biblical symbols. 

Besides the various museums (one art deco museum, one of religious art, and one with an exposition on children's depictions of war and another on the freemasons) we checked out the famous plaza mayor of Salamanca, which is treated like the living room of all the study abroad students.

See the students sitting on the ground?

And then we came back at nighttime, which was much more impressive.

It was at some point around then when Heather officially became enamored with clara con limon, which is the fanta-beer mix that I'm sure I've mentioned before. And with justification because it is delicious. If anyone back in North America wants to try it the recipe is: part light beer, part lemon soda.

The next day after getting breakfast at the hostel cafe and doing a little more poking around the old town of Salamanca, we trekked back to the bus station and embarked on the awfulest bus ride ever to Sevilla, almost dreading our arrival after seeing a high of 94ºf on the forecast. 

Grand Tour Part III: Going Downhill

Saturday after seeing Santiago, I checked off two things that had been on my list of things to do for a long time. The first was finally finish my TESOL online course. Somewhat hurried and half-assed, but done and with a passing grade. 

The other thing was go up the tower at the cathedral in Lugo. This was thanks to a friend of a friend (Sarah's Spanish friend Alberto) who arranged the whole thing. Unlike more touristy churches, in order to go up the Lugo cathedral, you need to get together a group of at least seven people and make a reservation to have one of the employees unlock all the doors and give the tour.

The upper level of the cathedral was packed full of art that had been donated to the church over the years centuries and gave an awesome view down into the nave. From down below there's not much to see, since much of what was once open archways and windows was blocked up with stone to shore up the building after an earthquake. 

From the upstairs you can then climb the tower, which gives some unique and beautiful views of the city.

It was kind of a nice little goodbye for Lugo, since the next morning we got up at the "ass crack of dawn" and caught the bus to Gijón in Asturias.

Gijón is a mid-size city on the coast of the Bay of Biscay, (or mar cantábrico in Spanish. Don't ask me why it's a bay in English but a sea in Spanish) and just so happened to be the hometown of the study abroad student Heather's family hosted. Unfortunately she wasn't there when we were there, but we had fun anyway. Doing things like: going to a medieval themed market, getting sunburnt on the beach, and trying not to get kicked out of a museum for laughing too loudly.

We bought some strange food here

Looking at the Cimadevilla, or the old town of Gijón

She´s saying, 'hey, man. How you doin'?'

I wish I'd had the presence of mind to remember who it was that created this great work of art.

We also poked around the old Roman Baths, which were actually really well preserved, maybe due to the fact that they were only dug up in the last decade or so. It's kind of surprising that it's only recently that we've (at least in the parts of the world I'm familiar with) started heating our homes through the floor. Romans were doing that millennia ago, and dang! they were pretty clever.

Just some royal turkeys

The first whole day we spent criss-crossing the old town, so the second day we decided to branch out a little and rented bicycles for the afternoon. We rode to a park in the east part of the city where we checked out an aviary and had a picnic of ham sandwiches, then followed a path by the river down to the university.

Along the way, we noticed a few problems with my bicycle. The mud flap couldn't hold itself up, and needed to be jury rigged with a screwdriver and a hair tie (finally some sailing skills coming in handy), the chain fell off (twice), and for some reason it just kept getting harder and harder to pedal. But you know, I'm out of shape and maybe I was just getting tired.

It was Heather who pointed out that my back tire was scraping against the frame. At that point I decided I'd had enough and was ready to return the bloody thing. As we rode back down the path, at one point we came to a little hill, at the bottom of which there were three things: straight ahead there was some vegetation and then the river, to the left some mud, and to the right the path as it curved to follow the shore. 

Now this was a steep little hill, and I bet you already know where this is going. When I tried to brake, (only the rear brake worked) the bike immediately started fishtailing and I could feel myself loosing control. So, unable to make the sharp curve of the path, I decided mud was the nicest option available. 

Grand Tour Part II: Ham Sandwiches

Heather in the Worker's Plaza

Friday Heather and I took a little day trip to my new home town, Santiago de Compostela, which surprisingly I don't think I've talked about in this blog. Seriously, I just looked through the whole thing and I don't think I've talked about it once.

Santiago de Compostela is the capital of Galicia, and home to about 95,000 people, with about 83,000 more in the surrounding areas. Like most of the major cities around here, it was originally a Roman settlement though most of the Roman stuff has since been destroyed or buried by centuries of construction projects. 

The city is far and away most famous for being the final destination of the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of Saint James. (popularized by this film which I still have not seen) The Camino is a Catholic pilgrimage with various routes across Spain and Europe that all come together at the site where St James is buried. For centuries, the Camino was largely unknown or forgotten about and only frequented by devout and penitent Catholics. But over the past twenty years or so interest has been increasing almost exponentially. 

The symbol of the Camino is the yellow scallop shell, which is what is used to mark the pilgrim's path. This stylized version is what you'll see on most signage, and I at first thought it was a representation of the different Ways all meeting in Santiago, but really the wide end of the shell is supposed to point towards the destination.

Really I could write an entire post about the Camino, but I'm still telling the story of my trip with Heather, so that will have to be all for now on the Camino.

Here, (right) in the Praza do Obradoiro (the Worker's Square) Heather and I saw a bunch of pilgrims sitting on the ground reflecting on their journey and the sacredness of the place, or maybe just resting a bit after having walked at least 100 kilometers.

And below is their destination, and the thing they are all looking at. The end of the Camino at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Heather and I, before going in, went around the corner to the Pilgrims Museum, which I figured would be about the pilgrims who made/make the trip, but in reality it was more about the Cathedral itself and some of the history behind it.

The Cathedral sits on the spot where, according to legend, the tomb of St James was rediscovered in the 9th century AD. The first church was destroyed by the Moors, and the current structure is what you get after hundreds of years of remodeling after the original was rebuilt in the 11th century. The current façade was built in the 18th century in the baroque style, and is featured on the 1-cent, 2-cent and 5-cent Spanish coins! 

This is the Botafumeiro, or at least a replica of it, and is the censer or incense expeller used during mass. The photo (which is highly edited because it was dark inside and none of the pictures turned out well) doesn't show very well the size of the thing, but it is quite large and it takes eight men pulling on the rope to swing it. I've heard that the reason behind the size is that they needed a lot of incense to mask the smell of the sick and dirty pilgrims. Once in a while (every hundred years or so) it'll detach itself from the rope and spew burning incense everywhere, but no one has been killed, apparently.


After seeing the Cathedral, we went and poked around the old town for a bit in search of lunch. Heather was at that point still somewhat jet lagged and nauseous, but you know what sounded really good? A ham sandwich. After a bit of searching we did indeed find ham sandwiches but, little did we know, that by the end of the trip neither of us would want to look at another ham sandwich ever again.

View of the Cathedral from the park

Grand Tour Part I: Hello, Goodbye

Where to begin? This trip seems so long ago now (it was what, like two weeks ago?) that everything is a whirlwind blur of excitement, emotion and food.

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...

And the Muralla...

I'll explain this interesting angle later

And not much else because there's not all that much tourist stuff to see. Don't get me wrong, I love Lugo, but it's not a tourist town. 

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.

posts pending

Okay, so breif update.

Heather and I said goodbye in the Madrid airport Thursday morning, and a 7-hour bus ride later I was back in Lugo and facing all the responcibilities I had been putting off. So I´m gonna work on those (moving, battling spanish bureaucracy, etc) before I start doing posts again. Also we've cancelled the iternet in our apartment so I have to either steal it from the neighbors or go down the street to the locutorio (iternet cafe).

This keyboard is sticky. I have to go wash my hands.

Thoughts on Tshirts

I wondered at first why so many Spaniards wear t-shirts with English words printed on them. I know a lot of these people don't speak English, and probably don't even know what their shirt says. But then I thought again about Americans wearing shirts with stylish Chinese and Japanese writing on it. Tattoos even. There's an element of mystery and hidden meanings and symbolism. I think these people don't really realize that there are normal, everyday people out there who would find that shirt cliché or uninteresting or at worst incorrect and ungrammatical. How many people are there who would get a big tattoo reading, "Faith" or "Luck" or something, in big Latin letters?

If we don't really understand what's being said, our imaginations are free to make shit up and create some deep significance that is perhaps not really achievable with words. But then we just look silly to those who really do understand.

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Aside from that, Heather is arriving on Wednesday. That's super exciting! And sorry folks, no picture today. My camera is out of batteries and I'm too lazy to buy more.