¡Ha llegado la mochila ! the adventures of my travelling backpack

I burst into my appartment this Wednesday announcing the good news ´la mochile ha llegado´ or the back pack has arrived because at last after about five months of travels my small backpack had decided to join me in Lugo. The rather complex story starts when I left my appartment in Ottawa at the end of the October carrying two bags. One bag was for the pilgrimmage and the second smaller bag had various items I thought would be useful for working in Spain. Flying first to Paris I left the small bag with my friend Mary in her university residence room and I planned to return and pick it up after my walk. By the time I had finished the pilgrimmage Mary had moved into a new appartment and gone home to Canada for the holidays to visit her family. Then come the end of January I had started to work in Lugo and happened to be talking about Paris to colleague of mine at the English school and learned that she had a brother living there who was planning to come visit her during the next month. It sounded like a good solution, so he met Mary in Paris and started to look into dates for his trip to Galicia. First the trip was going to be in February, then in March and then he started a new job and the trip planning was put on hold.

During this time I made friends with a girl named Cristina in one of my Spanish classes and she had a sister living in Paris, but she also had a husband who was a truck driver and travelled to France every so often to make deliveries. On Easter weekend I learned that he was travelling to the outskirts of Paris on a trip and I tried to arrange for him and my colleague´s brother to meet up. Unfortunately it was a busy weekend for everyone and it was not to be.

At the same time my friend Stephan from Bilbao was travelling to Paris and I gave him the backpack´s host phone number in case he had time and shortly after I got a call telling me the backpack was now in Bilbao.

As the story was getting more and more complex I asked my friends to ship the bag to Lugo by bus. I wasn´t so much that I needed anything from the bag because I was starting to forget what the important contents were, but I thought it would be best to try and conclude the story. I was told the bag will arrive on an Alsa bus Tuesday at 8:15pm, so I went to the bus station to wait. I thought about making a sign ´Welcome Backpack!´, but instead I sat quietly on the bench and waited. My friend Cristina came and joined me. When we saw a bus which read ´Galicia - Pais Vasco ´ we jumped up and started taking photos. As the driver went around the side of the bus opening the luggage compartments I was right beside him with my camera to take an arrival photo, but sadly there was no bag. I asked the driver if he had seen a small grey backpack and he explained that he was actually travelling to Bilbao and not arriving from the Basque country. I sat back down to wait and two other bused pulled up arriving from Madrid and Leon, and no backpack. After waiting about 45 minutes and talking with just about everyone in the bus station I decided to go home to come back the next day.

Then at last Wednesday morning around 2pm ( I am in Spain remember) I went to the station and carried my heavy little bag home. Back at the appartment I announced that we were going to have a fiesta the next day and have a special lunch to celebrate the arrival of the bag. Only one of my housemate´s showed up because the other hadn´t thought I was serious, but the two of us had a very nice meal with the little grey backpack sitting at the table with us.

What´s in a name ? or the possible perils of tongue twisters

I have recently become very fascinated by names and it all started in an English class I rather innocently started by teaching the tongue twister about Peter Piper. To make it easier for the students to say it I started to explain the meaning of the words so it would make more sense. First I explained it was about a person whose first name was Peter and whose second name was Piper and that it is common for English last names to be associated with professions. Simple enough, but in Spain everyone has two last names, so which exactly is the second name? It´s a bit of a riddle to explain the Spanish name system because your first last name is your father´s first surname which in turn was his father´s first last name and then similarily the second last name is your mother´s surname which is her father´s first name and in short the paternal name is carried over to successive generations. These two last names never change which means you will not have the same surname as your entire family, nor your spouse. Explaining that in Canada people often change their last name and eve create new names makes me wondering which is more or less confusing. I was also told that is only recently that the laws in Spain have made it possible to change your first name. This has allowed a well-known man, now woman after a sex change operation to officially go by her new name Bibiana.

At this point I thought I would describe the meaning of my last name and I explained that ´McBride´ is an Irish name meaning ´Mc¨= son of and ´Bride´= follower of St. Brigid. In similar style I was told the ´ez´ suffix means ´son of´ for example Martinez means son of Martin.

The discussion on middle names didn´t last very long because they don´t exist in Spain, but I found learning about first names quite intriguing. For example when someone tells me their first name is Nacho I would not necessarily now that their real name is Ignacio because I more immediately think what a strange idea to name your son after Mexican corn chips. When I think about it everyone in my family goes by a diminutivee,so it really shouldn´t seem so strange in Spanish it´s just I never thought about it before. As it is common to be named after your parents, so is the usage of diminutives. Here is a short list I have collected: Manuel (Lolo), Francisco ( Paco, Quico), Fernando ( Nando), Jose ( Pepe, Che), Enrique (Quique), etc. Similarily longer names are abreviated: Maria del Carmen ( Mamen) or Jose Manuel (Chema). Really the stranger naming tradition now seems to be in Cuba where parents are creating names from a combination of the father and mother´s first name and sadly ´Usnavi´ (U.S. Navy) has also become popular from ships in the port.

To conclude on a slightly unrelated but just as curious note the name of Spain comes from the word Hispania which is believed to mean ´Land of Rabbits´ and stranger yet is that I have not seen any rabbits since I have arrived.

New Recipes

Moving to a new house has meant getting a new sense of bearings and I am learning more about Lugo everyday. (meaning I only got lost twice this week trying to find my new house) I have also now determined the location of the four nearest grocery stores: Gadis, Mercadona, Froiz and Carrefour. I visited them all on Monday when I had the idea I would try making Spanokopita. It wasn´t even a Canadian recipe, for some reason thinking Greece was closer to Spain I thought it would be easier. The problem was that in my head I was thinking in Canadian terms and I have to remind myself: ¨Katie you´re not in Canada anymore´. The biggest problem was Phylo pastry which I never considered trying to make, but since I couldn´t find it I decided to use regular pastry instead. This would mean making more of an Empanada Spanokopita. The spinach was easy enough, but the Feta cheese was not. I stood in front of an amazing selection of cheeses carefully looking for the Feta. I started to have a bit of a cultural moment looking and thinking ´how is it possible that they don´t have Feta cheese ?´Phylo pastry was one thing, maple syrup is another but Feta cheese is European. Taking a second look I eventually found a small package and all was back to normal.

Then the next challenge was using the oven. The rolling pin problem was easily solved with a wine bottle, but I could not understand the oven. Usually Canadian recipes use Farenheit and ovens here use Celsius and similarily the conversion from cups to grams is not so simple, but the problem here was that all the numbers had been worn off and really a better description is that they have been painted over with black paint, but I cannot think of a reason for doing that. When one of my roommates came home he explained how to turn it on by adjusting three different dials and said to put it about half. Creative cooking at its best and the result was edible, but not what I had been expecting.

My new housemates must think I am a little crazy with all of this because I get the impression they don´t really cook.

La alegria de una casa

I think happiness smells like the cuttings of Heliotropes that were sitting on the counter in my friend Teresa´s kitchen. When I was staying at her place Iiked to get up and smell them every morning. They were like me waiting to be planted.

It is such a relief to finally have a house again. My two weeks of appartment hunting mixed in a around a week of holidays were starting to get less exciting and more suspenseful. Options I thought I had were disappearing and I spent a few days running between house visits, classes and back again. I think I made in total about fifty phone calls and visited about nine appartments. There was a little while I didn´t feel like searching anymore and I was running out of ideas of where to look, but it was starting to get more urgent to find a place. After going through newspapers, websites, shop window notices, etc. my friend found the ad and made the call for my new house.

The appartment I am now living in is on a street called Ronda das Fontiñas and the front of the building overlooks the river Rato. My two housemates are two guys studying engineering that come from small towns on the west coast of Galicia and mostly only speak Gallego. The place is quite spacious and the windows overlook a park to the back of the building. I have a bed, a table and a closet in my room and I don´t have to live out of my back pack for a while. The funny thing about my room is that the walls are the same shade of blue as my room in Saskatoon. Feel free to visit anytime before July. Mi casa es su casa.

Living Easter

While Spain has some slightly strange rituals for Holy week which include dramatic street processions and re-enactments in which religious statues and displays are carried through the streets by robed figures (one might describe as Klu Klux Klan-like with their peculiar pointy hoods) I missed out on the show. Instead I joined some friends from my Taize trip to experience Easter in a number of small towns in the province of Burgos. We joined a group of about 40 young people in the town of Santo Domingo de Silos, a town known for its beautiful monastery and recently a hit cd made from recordings of the monks singing gregorian chants. We were there to participate in a project organized by Christians without borders which was to help nearby small towns which no longer had priests to celebrate Easter masses. Half the group went to a town called Santibañez and the other half to Quintanilla del Coco. I joined the latter group because I was intrigued by the name. The word ´coco´ has many meanings in Spanish which include coconut, the name of Grover from Sesame street in Spanish, a type of strange person and a type of insect. In our group we had two priests and my town´s group had a lively priest from Columbia which added another cultural dynamic to the celebrations.

If the idea was that we would share our faith with the town I think in the end it was the reverse. Arriving in the town I was absolutely delighted to meet a little old man who seemed to only speak in riddles and tongue twisters, and then when he came to mass he was almost another person arriving very solemnly and impecably dressed. If not by the detailed artwork in the church it was the reverance of the townspeople that showed us its importance in the town.

It was a very intense experience that I shared with some wonderful people. We had themed presentations in the morning, brief pre-mass preparation meetings, smalll groups, communal meals and a bit of tourism when there was time. Of those four days I want to share my favourite anecdotes.

First was trying to carry out my small task in mass which was to ring the bells. Oddly enough I think ´campana´ was one of my first Spanish words which you cannot help but learn when you work in the Peace Tower. When we got to the church the first thing I did was climb to the top of the bell tower. The small stone steps twisted and turned up to the top. To make the bells ring you had to give the rope a short, strong pull and then I realized there was the problem that from the top of the bell tower there would be no way to know where they were in the mass. That was when I noticed a rope going through a small hole in the floor and then when I went back down the stairs I saw the rope conveniently located at the back of the church. When it came time for the ´Gloria´ it wasn´t so much the bells you heard ringing, but rather the barking all of the dogs in the town. For the next mass I was given a small bell to ring inside the church for the ´Gloria´. Another simple task except that while I was ringing the bell it suddenly stopped and the handle became loose. I quickly found the small bolt inside the bell and twisted it back into place to continue to the ringing.

The townspeople treated us to cake, cookies, a thick chocolate drink and then cheese and meat trays on Easter Sunday. There is no Easter rabbit or eggs in Spain, not even an Easter bell like they have in France. In some ways Easter is like New Years and that was type of party we had after the Easter Vigil with lots of music, games and Champagne.

The most magical moment was the Easter Vigil mass which my group celebrated in another small town called Castroceniza. It is a town almost lost in the countryside and made up of mostly abandoned houses. About ten people came to the mass and as we walked up to the church on the top of a hill on the edge of town there was the most beautiful sky of stars that decorated the backdrop of the church that was lit by a small fire. Before we got started one of guys came out with a small head light and announced ´I am the miner´ and he got in place to light the book for the priest to read. It was simple mass in a small, cold church but it was full of life and it felt like Easter.

Adventures in Asturias

As the bus drove accross the border I could barely see the sign ´Principado de Asturias´ because of the white out conditions. The quiet rain had become blowing snow that painted the mountains white and I started wondering how many sweaters I had packed. My first destination was Oviedo, the capital of the neighbour Spanish region I planned to explore. Using the word ´planned´ is a little overstated because it was more of an early morning decision for my Semana Santa, Holy week or pre-Easter holidays. It is a time of year known as ´Operacion salida´ as almost everyone leaves or exits the city to go on holidays in the South. That is one of the reasons I headed North, or rather East. When I left, I was mildly concerned that the youth hostel was full, but I figured if I arrived early I would be able to fnd a bed for the night.

My strategy for shopping for accomodation is to circle the transportation stations and the main tourist sites in the city centre. While doing this I wandered onto a quiet side street and found a small pensione run by a family. It was perfect for me except for the lack of heating, but I am getting a little used to that now.

Next stop was the tourism office which is usually in the main square of the city centre, but with the medieval design of the streets in the old city it was a little hard to find. To adapt my North American sense of logic which instinctively reasons with square parallel streets I pick a landmark and try to radiate from it and then go back to it again when I am lost. I picked San Francisco park as my landmark and went from there. At this point it was only raining a little bit and I had hopes it would clear.

Tourism offices make me excited with all the coloured pamphlets and I usually leave them quite well-informed and carrying a collection souvenir papers and maps. While I was waiting to speak to an information officer I saw a curious pamphlet for a festival, and sure enough I was in town for the last theatre performance. To me it was a perfect find; free theatre about small town life in Asturias in the 1800s. One small catch was that some of it was in Asturiano or ´Bable´ as the regional dialect is called, but the singing, dancing and gaita (bagpipe) music made up for it.

The next morning I had lots to see so I got up and left the pension early. The night before the family had kindly offered to put my umbrella in the kitchen to dry, but unfortunately in the morninng the door was locked and no one was up. It was still pouring rain, but I figured I would tough it out with my rain jacket. Shortly after I was on a bus going to visit two of the pre-roman churches that are in the mountains on the edge of town. I was the only one on the bus, so I sat at the front to enjoy the view and have the bus driver tell me where to get off.

He asked me where I was from and I said ´Canadá´. In Spanish the word it has an accent at the end, which indicates the word stress and that is something I am still not very good at, especially when it is a word I often use in English and somehow he understood ´Canarias´ or the Canary Islands. Once that was corrected he asked me if it was a rich country and I said ´yes´. That question made me think of a conversation I had had a day previous about the idea that I should be treated in a certain way because I came from a rich country and I wondered if he was thinking that. Our conversation continued to be confused when I told him I was working in Lugo, which apparently is also the name of a small town near Oviedo making it strange that I did not know the bus stop. Then he asked me about why I did not have an umbrella and I explained. When we got the stop he insisted that I take his small black umbrella and that I could leave it with the bus driver on the way back. He told me his name was ´Jésus´ and I thought to myself that won´t be too hard to remember. Getting off the bus I felt thrilled by his spontaneous generosity and full of energy for my rainy hike up to the churches. (It´s so easy to write reported speech in English, unfortunately it is not so easy in Spanish)

After the tour I raced back into town for the Palm Sunday procession which I found by following the sound of gaitas. Just like in France, instead of having free palm leaves inside the church, there are people in the streets who sell bush branches for the mass.

Following that I went to find the folk song performance that a friendly woman sitting next to me at theatre the night before had told me about. Well it turned out to be another authentic experience, maybe even too authentic. I would re-name the event ´Asturian Idol´ because it was actually a competition in which mostly seniors were competing, singing traditional songs. I got to hear many variations of the powerful ´Tonada´ song which is a loud form of singing in which the singer sings or yells over top of an accompanying gaita. It sounded like the singing could have originated from people calling to each other from one mountain to the next. At intermission I decided it was time for me to pick up my umbrella and to catch the bus to Ribadesella.

Over the next few days I visited the beautiful towns of Ribadesella, Llanes, Covadonga and Conga de Onis before catching the bus to meet some friends in Burgos.