Day 32 - walking from Fonfria to Samos ( 20 km or so)

It wasn´t raining as much today, but I was better prepared with plastic bags for everything in my back pack, my socks and my mitts. Most of the morning was spent going down hill going to Triacastela. I liked the name and suggested that I change my name because I know too many people with the name Katie. I was told that for short I would be called ´Tri´ and that Katie is not very common in Spain.

I decided to take the variant to visit the Monastery of Samos and found myself on another path that twisted and turned throughout the countryside and the clouds lifted for a little while so I can see a bit more of Galicia.

After I arrived I arranged to take a tour and had a few other pilgrims join me. I became the translator which was quite challenging because of the vocabulary and because I only more or less understood the explanations. I learned that the cloister is the biggest by dimension in Spain and I found really interesting the paintings on the walls on the second level that were done in the 1960s to show depictions of St. Benedict´s life. That evening we were invited to Visperas, the evening prayers that were sang Gregorian chant style by the small community of brothers that currently live in the monastery.

After that I somehow managed to find myself eating supper with a lively group of 12 from Saragoza. Friends from an Outdoor Ed club arranged to walk the camino and the meal became quite entertaining after they started drinking a ´romero´ liqueur and singing songs from their region. It didn´t last long because we had a 10pm curfew at the albergue.