In Santiago!

Well, these last few days have been so different than I imagined. Since I last had access to internet, I have been through the city of Ourense, spent the night in a 16th century wing of a monastery, walked through Galician splendor, seen beautiful towns and churches, and wow, here I am in Santiago again!

Since my departure from Spain is set for Wednesday the 23rd, and I have a plane ticket to Madrid on the 22nd, I knew that if I walked a bit faster and covered more distance, I would have time to spend three or four days walking beyond Santiago to the coast, either to Finisterre (the end of the world, though the Portuguese would dispute that) or to Muxía, or maybe both. And I confess that I wanted to ditch a couple of people for a variety of reasons. So, a long day of 35 km meant that they were out of my camino bubble. And it also meant walking to a place that has a monastery, two bars, and three houses. The monastery of Oseira, started in the 13th century, has an albergue of sorts for peregrinos. There are about 40 beds in a huge room that would hold 200 if full, a bathroom and not much more. The room is quite similar to the albergue in Roncesvalles, but with only a fraction of the beds. There are showers, but you have to go to the monastery ticket office, where they take you up and around and finally you arrive at several shower stalls. I never really figured out how it fit into the architecture of the monastery. But the showers were hot, so no complaints. The room where we slept, however, was definitely not hot, in fact I'd say it was cold and clammy. There were two Germans, one francés, and moi, and since I was the only woman, I got the extra blanket that was hidden somewhere in the albergue.

Luckily, the nice monks who live in the monastery will provide blankets to peregrinos, so after about a 40 minute wait for blankets, some finally arrived (in the meantime, we kept seeing the same monk going in and out of the door where we were waiting, every time he asked us what we wanted, we said mantas (blankets) and he told us "No soy el encargado de las mantas." (I'm not the one in charge of blankets). But we finally got them, and even I wasn't cold during the night. But you have to see the pictures of this place to believe it, I think that many of my friends and family would not be happy sleeping there.

Though the weather has been rain rain rain, none of it, or very little of it, has fallen on me. I feel like I'm in a protective bubble or something, and I'm very happy for that. The weather changes from moment to moment, and lots of rain has fallen, but I have had only one day of intermittent rain and one day with some drizzle, so I am not complaining.

This Camino has not been one of immediate human contact, I don't know why. This is really the first Camino in which I have developed strong negative feelings about some of the more ponderous peregrinos, who have scolded me for many things -- I walk too fast, I visit too many churches, I don't wait for them, etc, etc. But Yolanda, the madrileña, is a very nice woman and I'm so glad to have met her. We will have a fine walk out to the coast.