Feets Do Yo Stuff: July 7 to July 8, Santiago to Santiago

July 7 and 8: Santiago to… Santiago

Dave's voice

What to do? Some have ready access to feelings of accomplishment; others are only waiting for food to happen. Scout is Mary Tyler Moore arriving in Minneapolis. Dave is more Lou Grant. ("I hate spunk.")

We get up early, unable to do anything but, and, falsely confident that we know our way around, make for the Cathedral for photo ops before the unwashed masses (I.e., our peers ) arrive. Mission accomplished, we head further west to find a bar with coffee and stale croissants. Check. (They seemed fresher further East, even in small villages. City life stinks.) From there, it’s on to Oh Susanna park, a chapel and surrounding woodsy area celebrating Gale Storm’s biggest hit TV show of the 50s. (Told you the references would get more obscure. Can a William Frawley comment be far away?)

With the right light, sunrise over the Cathedral can be inspiring. For us…not so much. Still, we’re racking up mileage and it’s only four hours til lunch. On the way back to the hotel, we wander past a "Museo" sign and find ourselves inside the Cathedral, which seemed closed from the other side. Big. Not gargantuan/grotesque like some we’ve seen, the golden goose gushing out of each side room, but grand nonetheless. For a few of us pagans, it’s always a matter of "How many poor people could have been fed with the loot that went into this?" (Skip ahead if you’ve heard this comment ten or twenty times before.) Biblical scholars will, of course, note the numerous times where Jesus said "Build me big, big churches. Spare no expense." All that rich man through the eye of a needle stuff was an elaborate shaggy dog joke, evidently.

Inside the Cathedral, you can walk up and behind the altar to see the back of the statue of Saint James - but wait! There’s more! You can also walk under the altar to a spot where the bones of the saint are said to be stored in a silver, gold, and jewel-encrusted box. The faithful kneel here for a moment of silent meditation. Others take pictures. Every Tuesday, the bones are placed on a table so tourists, picked at random, can bang them against Jamaican-style steel drums to make a tune – usually a variation on "In a Gadda Da Vida." Okay, not really. They’re probably behind nuclear bomb-proof glass. Not sure why this is necessary if they’re important to an omnipotent Lord, but that’s just heathen talk. There’s room in a Cathedral for an innocent and honest faith and for P.T. Barnum.

On the way to the hotel, we again pass a busker and his associate. Today he’s playing a jazzy clarinet, yesterday it was a bagpipe. Skills like that are worth 0.50 €. A nearby beggar gets something, too. The Violinist is off in a corner and we don’t walk out of our way to give him a coin. So much for six years at Julliard.

Our spiritual and photographic needs met for the moment, we practice walk to the Santiago bus terminal and, as with other local spots, once you stop being afraid you’ll get lost (and be murdered by Galician separatists), stuff is fairly close together.

Then it was back to our hotel, the San Miguel Gastronomico (No kidding) and The Incident. This, like every day, being a laundry day, Scout washes our unmentionables in the sink and hangs them near an open window, which overlooks a lounge patio area. Since every day is also a shower day (we’re sooo not European), there’s also a certain amount of walking around naked in our room, though not near the window until Dave decides, as usual, to rearrange the wet laundry for maximum drying efficiency (Hey, this is important!). Not long later, an embarrassed young lady calls from the front desk to ask that we close our window for a while. Our window? Oh. Oh! (Okay, her actual words were: "What did that thing look like before it died?) The good part was, they offered us a discount if we’d check out a day early. Sweet!

From there it was another short trek to Oh Susanna park for afternoon photos of the Cathedral, a final stroll through the small part of Santiago de Compestola that we know about and back to our hotel. For those of you in Los Angeles, USC hereabouts stands for Univeridad de Santiago Compestola. It used to be a futbol powerhouse, but there were scandals and, well, you know how it goes.

Myth Busters! You all know the one about how Americans just wolf their food while, in Europe, dining is an art? Not quite. For one thing, service is slow, slow, slow. Eventually a menu appears. Later, a server does the same. The order is taken. Food arrives after a reasonably short interval and is consumed in the same. Then? Nothing. The victims of this ordeal sit, any of those under fifty perusing various hand-held devices while graybeards pontificate to no one’s interest, or simply stare into space. At fifteen minute intervals, a server returns to bring…a single bottle of Pepsi for one diner while the (older) others smoke cigarettes and wait until the ritual is completed. When the end comes, it’s a lot like a bullfight: the check appears and is dispensed with quickly, the diners leap to their feet and disperse. Voila, two hours will have passed and the slow-moving servers receive a gratuity for one group of diners, when they could have earned three times as much serving fast-eating American Philistines who just want to shovel it in and move on. Now you know.

The Camino means different things to different people, of course, but, for a few, it’s an experience that can be stretched out with a supplemental trip to Finisterra, about 40 miles west where Spain meets the Atlantic. Why anyone would want to do this is a mystery, since the main objective was to reach the place where the saint’s bones are (or might be) buried. Finisterra just happens to be sorta nearby and, evidently, has an effective Chamber of Commerce. Or, is there more to it? We’ll find out. But, that's tomorrow.