Santiago de Compostela
We were unprepared for our trip from Paris, and furthermore we cut the time too close and made our train with three minutes to spare after a two-train Metro crossing of Paris, so we were all agreed we didn't want any more rushed departures.
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industrialized Spanish north |
Our hotel obliged us with a partial breakfast and we were on our way to the station dragging our luggage over the early-morning deserted streets. When our train pulled in from Irun and we found our seats, we were bummed to find our window obscured with moisture, and a nasty spoiled brat in the seat in front of us. There ensued, despite our best efforts to prepare, a hellish train ride, eleven long hours. |
The most memorable feature of the second-class train ride from San Sebastian to Santiago de Compostela was a miserable little boy and his equally miserable mother. We can only speculate what mischance had banished them from San Sebastian, but whatever it was, they were both sour and unpleasant. Add to that a vile rail car with assigned seats -- squalid bathrooms, windows obscured by grime and condensation, a lazy and unfriendly train crew; the stuff of travel legends! |
some pretty countryside along the way |
Someone had carefully outfitted the little boy with several electronic devices intended to make noise or incidentally programmed to make noise. The mother apparently didn't like the little boy much more than we did, but was nevertheless indulgent and permissive. Her manner said "I know he's an asshole, but he's my meal ticket."
I should digress for a moment on our observation on European parenting styles. We are unbelievably relieved to be out of Great Britain, home of the world's whiniest children. We never could quite put our fingers on why British children whinge so much -- could it be the weather? -- but their parents seem either to be deaf to that particular range of sound, or actually promote it, as if it's a means for expressing their own dissatisfaction vicariously. As a result, the children don't seem to pay much attention to the world around them, but wallow in their own needs and discontent. There didn't seem to be quite so many whiney children in Belgium, and Amsterdam seems to be a nearly child-free zone, but the children we saw definitely conformed to the British model. And herein lies the first clue: for some reason there aren't many children in the British Isles and northern Europe, possibly because of the success of birth control programs and an intense and communally shared sense that the land has overshot its carrying capacity.
France seems to be a special case, partly northern, partly southern, with the result that there aren't very many children, but they're consistently quiet, cared for, interested, and well-behaved. Here, however, we began to see the pattern of boy-child dominance. In a typical family of three or four, the youngest invariably a boy, the girls under the vigilant care of the mother were well turned out, solemn, attentive, helpful, and somewhat subdued. The youngest child, the boy, loosely supervised by the father, was relatively rowdy, rumpled, unresponsive ... and indulged outrageously. Of course I over-simplify to make a point, but it was quite remarkable how often this pattern was repeated.
Spain and Portugal take this pattern and exaggerate it. Again, one factor is clearly the great reduction in couples having babies -- this is still a child-oriented culture in the sense that when a child appears, everyone defers to it. This is emphasized now by the rareness of families. In Iberia, the boy child apparently can do no wrong, while the girl children -- the cause of all the population problems, of course -- are kept firmly under their mothers' thumbs.
In the case of the particularly obnoxious little butt-head that made the trip from San Sebastian to Santiago hellish, it was clear from the start that he would be allowed and even encouraged to run rough-shod over anyone and everyone he encountered in the train. While some children might take this indulgence and turn it into opportunity, this boy -- or possibly devil's spawn -- took it as a challenge to find limits. The only silver lining we could find about him was that we were able to leave him behind at Santiago, but his poor mother was doomed to many years more of his pestering ...and she was clearly his principal target. Someone -- probably the sperm donor that had engendered him upon the sack-shaped woman in a moment of drunkeness -- had wisely turned the sound off on his game boy, and so he soon lost interest in it, as his purpose in life seemed to be to irritate anyone nearby. He shifted to a more primitive but still sound-enabled game, a space invaders, with an especially obnoxious and repetitious introductory sound track which, he discovered, could be made to interrupt and repeat itself by the simple expedient of opening and closing its cover. Mom covered her ears, never once reprimanding or shushing him. Then he found he could achieve the same effect simply by pushing the start button over and over again. Sadly for him, he was completely incompetent at the game itself, and the "game over, you're dead" sound wasn't sufficiently irritating, so he played the starting fanfare easily 500 times. At first we tried to be kind to him by showing him a map, playing hide-and-seek with him, but it soon became obvious that he had no idea how to accept positive attention. For me, the fuse blew when he tried to stick his hand inside Rochelle's pack -- he didn't get far, because it was closed and because about the time he was firmly committed, I hit the pack near his hand sharply. His hand recoiled like a snake and he settled so quickly back into his seat that his mother was alarmed and asked him what happened. Apparently, he told her I'd abused him, so she looked at me angrily. I returned the anger with a bonus, saying he was touching my property. Interesting conflict for them: boy children apparently are never struck, but it's also a not-too-distant part of their tradition that thieves had their right hands cut off. After seeing how his mother took his part and howling in make-believe pain for a couple of minutes, the little fraud subsided for the quietest three hours of the ride, then resumed his deviltry without giving me the pretext I wished for, alas. While he was quiet, an elderly woman on the train came and gave the mother advice on firmer discipline, but she was ineducable. And as I already noted, she got the booby prize, in that she had to go home with the miserable little jerk.
Meanwhile, there were a couple of dozen other perfectly lovely folks in the car, including several quiet girl children, all of whom treated the boy and his mother like the pariah dogs they were. Nevertheless even without the nasty boy and his hopeless mother, the ride was slow, hot, bumpy, and not especially pretty. |
the view from the back of the train |
pine plantation in the northwest |
The Cathedral |
Santiago de Compostela is a top-of-hill town famous for its cathedral and the tradition of pilgrimage from points all over Europe starting in the 10th Century, when the bishop of Santiago received a revelation that led him to the bones of Saint Diego "hidden" in a nearby field. I apologize for not being up on my hagiography -- who is Saint Diego anyway? Apparently an apostle whose dead body was for some unknown reason transported from the Holy Land clear across Europe and the Iberian peninsula and "hidden" in a field some nine centuries before. And if you believe that, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Plenty of folks do, right down to this day. And it's been big business of Santiago for going on a millennium now, with no sign of stopping. Our day in Santiago was a Sunday, and there were non-stop services in the cathedral for the salvation of the faithful. Apparently the pilgrimage isn't as arduous as it was in earlier centuries. Now one arrives by train or, more likely, air conditioned bus, checks in at a local religious curio stand and buys a pilgrim's staff with a tassel and a seashell with a swordlike cross stenciled on it, and then hikes over to the cathedral, confesses, takes communion, and Bob's your uncle! Pilgrims who are unsure about what to do can go to the Pilgrimage Office, a special purpose Tourist Information (and, most likely the oldest TI on the Continent.) |
Even while I doubt the efficacy of the pilgrimage and its underlying belief, I must say that the Cathedral at Santiago is gorgeous. While there on Sunday afternoon, at the end of the offertory, the organ started playing and the congregation started singing, and the fur on the back of my neck went up from the sheer beauty of it all. |
from the Alameda |
Sienna and I prowled around the outer aisle, behind the altar where Diego's bounce supposedly came to rest in a gilt-and-glass crypt with a special hole for the faithful to put their hands through to touch the box. At the far end of the cathedral there's a pillar that the faithful also lay hands on and say special prayers. Seeing the evidences of this unbroken stream of faith is touching and instructive. | |
Santiago is built entirely around the tourist industry. For those faithful who, like us, wanted a day or two to catch the spirit of the place, there are abundant reasonably-priced hotels and pensions -- pilgrims apparently don't require five-star accommodations. Most pilgrims are able, however, to get in, do their devotions, and get out in the same day with nothing more than a quick lunch in town -- after communion, of course -- and a short crawl along one of the streets that sell memorabilia to take to the folks back home. For the faithful, a trip to Santiago is like a Moslem's trip to the Qaba -- and what a superlative tourist gimmick THAT is! |
street scene |
one approach to the Cathedral
A service inside the Cathedral
"the Treasure" |
fountain in the Cathedral square
Eye of God watching over the service
the paseo in the Alameda |
We had one very strange meal in Santiago -- our waiter was wholly unversed in the art of communicating with tourists (he must have been from out of town) and the menu, mostly seafood, bore names unrelated to anything Spanish we'd ever seen. For those of us who felt somewhat competent at ordering dinner in Spanish, it was an unsettling experience. I ended up with one large scallop swimming in spicy tomato sauce in a large shell. Chad ordered a "tortilla" and got a quarter of a round disc-shaped object about the radius of a frisbee but the thickness and consistency of a hockey puck made of eggs and potatoes. Rochelle ordered daringly, and ended up with a whole fish staring at her from a bed of french fries. Sienna took the wildest chance and ended up with lovely little cockles, proving once again that risk-taking in foreign restaurants is not always a bad idea.
The next night we felt like real bozos, but we chose a restaurant because it had an English menu. |
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