Europe Journal 1999

Galicia & the North

Two days of travels, edited down. Again, feel free not to read this if you don’t want. Things are still going well, and I am sending this from Sylvia and Heinz’s place in Spain, which is really beautiful.

-Tony

October 9

This morning we woke up in Santiago and decided not to stay another night, but to head up instead to A Coruña, since Santiago didn’t hold that much interest for us and our lodgings were not so nice.

We then made an honest attempt to see the Cathedral. First we were thwarted at the front (? – or at least the lower) plaza by some kind of special event involving military men in silly hats. The hats they wear are patent-leather helmet-like things with a strange flat ridge along the back.

And so we had to walk the long way around to the back (? – or the upper) plaza, where we found a line stretching around the plaza to the side and down the stairs. So, we decided not to do it. Too much trouble.

There were pilgrims everywhere – they carry special staffs with either a gourd or a shell attached. You can buy these at souvenir stands, but I suspect most of the people we saw were pilgrims. I gather that if you complete a certain minimum of the trail (100km, maybe?) you get a certificate of some kind from the church, and your time in purgatory is halved.

We hit to road for O Grove, in the Rías Baixas region, which was remarkably hard to find. We didn’t take the tollway, and so it took a long way, though it was quite beautiful. We listen to Radio Galega on the way, which is the Galician language radio station, and I found that I could understand it better than Spanish, and really almost as well as Portuguese from Portugal. Over the radio I heard a little blurb about the Festa do Marisco (Seafood Festival) that we were going to: today was the biggest day of the whole festival (11 days long or so), millions (or maybe they just said thousands) of tourists from all over including outside of Spain were descending on O Grove, and the hotels were all almost completely full. Oh, no, we thought, but we went anyway.

It was great! It was about 3pm by the time we got there, and it was crowded, but not too crowded. There were two big tents alongside a building around which was a sort of counter/booth-like space. You would go up to a counter where some specific kind of seafood was served, and buy a ticket from one person, and then hand that to another person in exchange for a plate of food. It was cheap – I’d heard on the radio that it was subsidized and that prices were much lower than what you’d normally pay.

First we got meixillons con salsa picante – mussels in a spicy sauce – for 350 pesetas. Delicious. Then rodaballo a plancha – turbot steaks sautéed – for 850. Very nice, though the bones were troublesome. Then we had almeixas a marinera – clams in a lightly spicy tomatoey sauce – for 800. I think that was my favorite. Finally, we had arroz con mariscos – rice with seafood, sort of like a paella – for 600. This had mussels, baby sea scallops (bibichos), octopus (pulvo), and shrimp (camarons – though we didn’t get any shrimp in our serving) with green peppers, green onions or leeks, and yellow rice (with turmeric or saffron – we couldn’t tell). It was very tasty. We ate all of this with viño e pan – a bottle of wine and some bread – for 600 pesetas. The wine was Ribeiro, a local white wine, which was nicely refreshing and complemented the food very well. The bread was really a perfect bread. The inside was wonderfully soft and tender – when you bit into it it squooshed, and then slowly regained its shape. The crust was crisp without being hard, so it didn’t cut the inside of the mouth. It was cut into big chunks, and I ate a lot of it soaking up the sauce from the clams especially.

So in total we spent 3200 pesetas – $21 – for a nice lunch for two. We ate until we were full, and then stopped. And, we got a souvenir dish, which the rice was in. We didn’t realize at first that we could do that, otherwise we might also have kept the dish from the clams (the others were in plastic plates). The dish will be useful to us, and it says “O Grove Festa do Marisco” on the bottom.

We headed out of there and found the tollway, which we took to A Coruña. Upon arriving there, however, we realized we didn’t have any reason to stay there. It’s just a big industrial city – not that interesting. One interesting thing was the window that many building had – on the street facing the port there were several tall buildings (10-stories, perhaps) all lined up with lots of multi-paned windows covering the whole front. They looked to be metal casings, and the effect was of lots if little panes covering the fronts of these big buildings.

The guidebooks said that A Coruña was a good base from which to explore the north – the Rías Altas region – but we didn’t need a base from which to explore, we needed a nice place for the night. We hope to make it to Bilbao tomorrow, and a nice little place on the way would be better. So, we began to explore the coast. The northern coast of Galicia is truly beautiful. The hills (almost mountains, as in Portugal) are lush and green, covered with trees or grass, and there was a mist all around. We trekked on for quite a while through little towns, catching some of a spectacular sunset, and finally (at 9:30) stopping in Ortegueiro, a little town which appears in guidebooks only because it has a Celtic festival every year. We thought that would be a good bet for a hotel room – they probably have enough rooms for the festival, and certainly have enough rooms in the off season. We found a little hostal on the man road, which is cheap (as little as last night’s) and really nice. We don’t have our own bathroom, but the rooms are new, we have two double beds, and a little sink. Plus we have a view of a bay (or lake?) out our window, and we can see the steeple of the town church. This is really much nicer than staying in A Coruña.

We ate dinner at the restaurant next door – a small bar-mesón – and we had each consommé with sherry, and split two small dishes of Galician ham and asparagus with mayonnaise. Eric had a desert of a local style cheesecake, which was much lighter than its American counterpart. It was white and fluffy, rather like a combination of whipped cream and fresh cheese, and it was served with a dollop of preserves. All in all, a pretty nice meal.

October 10

We woke up a little early today – not very early, only about 8:30am, which is only early when you're on vacation – but it felt very early because the sun was just coming up. We caught the pinky grays of dawn over the hills and water. It was very beautiful. We had coffee at the bar downstairs (part of the hospedaje), had a short conversation in Spanish with the proprietor (at least, I had a short conversation, and Eric listened), and hit the road at about 9:40. The proprietor had suggested that it would take about six hours to get to Bilbao, so I drove like a bat out of hell (and people still passed me – what a country!).

The road was twisty and turny for a long time, since there was no autopista for that section, and there were mountain/hills to drive around. But it was extremely beautiful – lush and green with high rolling hills and blue ocean, misty valleys and sandy beaches. I thought it was as beautiful as it could possibly be, but then as we continued eastward, it got more and more beautiful. The hills, practically mountains already, became mountains proper, some with bald tops or outcroppings of rock. Some of the valleys became steeper, and others more layered. The hills and mountains in northern Spain end right at the ocean, sometimes stopping just short and leaving a small area of flatlands for towns and beaches, sometimes stopping just before the beach, forming little coves, and sometimes disappearing into the ocean themselves, little half-islands shaped like gumdrops. I
some places you see a combination of these: an valley reaches the ocean as a triangle of flatlands, and on the edges the steep green hills rush down into the water, forming points and headlands.

The beauty of the area continued from Ortegueira in Galician all the way up to Bilbao in Viscaya – though the factories, refineries, and pollution of Bilbao weren’t so attractive, in spite of the natural beauty. But more on that later.

We stopped for lunch near the eastern edge of Asturias, in a town called Ribadesella (or Ribadesello?). The restaurant was Restaurante el Puente de Pilar, which I think was the name of the very old low bridge behind the restaurant. They were very friendly there, and we had a lovely full lunch, lasting an hour and a half (but we didn’t eat too much). We began with a simple salad each, then I had stuffed potatoes (peeled and boiled potatoes, holes cut into them and stuffed with ground beef and red peppers, corked with another piece of potato, cooked in sauce and served), and Eric had stuffed onions (onions hollowed out and stuffed with tuna and green peppers, cooked in sauce until the onions were very soft). We traded each other an onion for a potato, and both were really delicious. For desert I had Almond cake (like a coffee cake), and Eric had cheesecake (like yesterday’s, but richer and thicker, with a cake crust, and the preserves on top). Eric drank the house red, and I had bubbly water.

We got back on the road, heading into Bilbao. Eric read from the guidebook, which described the city as the “Chicago of Spain” (HEY! What does THAT mean?), and then proceeded to paint an ugly picture of a poor industrial slum land. The trip into Bilbao is, I’ll admit, like the trip into Chicago from the east – but that’s because you pass though Gary and Hammond, which are both in Indiana, and are not a part of Chicago. Chicago’s industry is now mostly hidden away in the far south side, and the city itself is beautiful, especially if you know where to go. But enough about Chicago. Bilbao is in a valley on a river, and the mountains around it are truly beautiful. They are steep enough not to have all been built on, and so just outside the city you can see the beauty of nature. However, in the city – especially the edges – you see poverty and filth, and the place stinks of twenty kinds of air pollution. (OK, I admit Chicago has its share of poverty, filth, and stink; however, I judge, as objectively as I can, that Chicago is a much nicer town.) Toward the interior it is nicer, and there are some nice buildings. At the first stoplight we came to, an sad old man with tumors on his face tried to sell us a newspaper. At the second, and dirty boy approached our windshield with a squeegee – thinking of New York, I emphatically signaled “no” while trying to turn on the wipers, succeeding only in making them go once. The point was received, though, and the boy stepped back, and then walked to the front of our car, I think to check our license plate. The letters on our plate give it away as a car of Madrid origin, and judging from his face, that seems to be what he was looking for. But the light turned green, and we continued on to the only reason we were stopping in Bilbao – the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa (note: Museoa, not Museo or Museum – this is Basque Country). Not all of Bilbao was a pit, I must say – it’s just that the pit part is most salient in my mind, along with the museum.

The Museum stands out along the river front looking like a shining flower of curvy swooping metal. It is beautiful. It is, in itself, a work of modern art, both from the outside and the inside. Yes, despite it being just past 7pm on a Sunday (the trip took seven hours, not including lunch), the Museum was open! They are closed Mondays, so it’s good we didn’t try to put this off. We went inside. Some of the exhibits were very good, and some were just okay. The exhibition spaces are very good – as good as the best museum spaces – but nothing there is as interesting as the building itself and it’s inner atrium, and curved walls, and elevator column surrounded by a convex wall of windows in metal frames. We spent only about half an hour there, bought some postcards (of the building) and moved on.

** I pulled this paragraph out so that anyone with no interest in languages could skip it:

As we crossed from Galicia into Asturias, I wondered if I would see any traced of Asturian Spanish. I had read about it. Unlike Galician, which is considered a dialect of Portuguese, and is recognized as a separate language in Spain, Asturian is considered a dialect of Spanish. It’s a dialect that predates the reconquest of Spain from the Moors (14th century?), and I know little else about it. Where in Galicia, you see road signs in two languages, in Asturias the only official language is Spanish – Castilian Spanish (or more properly in Spain, Castellano). Well, thanks to the linguistic road warriors, we did see traces of it on road signs which had been altered by spray paint. The names of places were changed, and on some signs the words “na Asturianu” were written (“in Asturian” in Asturian, I presume). Here are the changes I remember:

And then generally, j’s became x’s, some i’s were inserted after e’s, some o’s became u’s, l’s were crossed out in the article “la”, and some l’s were doubled ( I don’t recall an example of the last one). To me, this was very interesting. The j > x thing reflects, I think, Asturian preserving a sound in Spanish which changed just within the last few hundred years (“sh” became “kh” – Jerez used to be Xerez, pronounced “sheh-race”, which came into English as “sherries”, which became sherry, the wine). I’ll have to try to read more about Asturian later. Maybe these linguistic road warriors have a web page.