I had trouble falling asleep last night, so when my alarm went off at 5:15 in the morning, I firmly told it, “NO.” It ignored me, and I got up, the perfect picture of undeserved suffering (I even groaned) (there was probably a faint halo around my head). The streets were not completely deserted, as I’d expected them to be; a few party-hardiers were still partying (if not so hardily), but I took a cab anyway, which is usually against my principles. I made it to the lonja by 5:30ish, identified myself at the desk, feeling supremely important, and was given Visitor Badge #2. Then I went to the fish sale room, which was enormous and full of crates of dead fish and the people inspecting them. Guillermo and his wife were nowhere to be seen. After walking around for a few minutes (sharks! octopi! monster from the deep with a mouth as wide as a basketball! and many smaller fish – I’ll post pictures tomorrow), I decided to ask an official-looking woman how I might find them, and she said, “Oh, they’re one of our boats! They didn’t unload this morning.” Well shoot – no escort. I decided that the best thing to do was to play the Unobtrusive Game, because there were men with large hooks running around and people with determined auctioning glints in their eyes standing at the ready, and I didn’t want to get in the way of either of those.
This is how the fish auction worked: At about 6:10, a bell rang, and immediately a number of men spread throughout the room started yelling at the top of their lungs (“!Congrio! !Congrio! !Congrio! !Pulpo! !Pulpo! !Pulpo!”). When people started gathering around their crates, they started naming prices per kilo, counting down: “6 Euros! 5.90! 5.80! 5.70! . . .” At some point one of the buyers would imperceptibly signal the auctioneer to stop (the auctioneers must have a sixth sense), claim a crate or two by putting a little colored and labeled paper in it, and move on to the next type of fish. The auctioneer would start to yell again. By the time I left at 6:40, most types of fish in the room had been up for sale, and there were little colored papers in most of the crates. The guard asked me, “Well? Did you learn what you wanted to learn?” And I said, “Yes” but in my head I was celebrating my Unobtrusive Game victory – no hooks for me! On Tuesday I’ll go back; until then I’ll sleep later than 5:15.
Simon and his girlfriend Almudena picked me up at 10:30, and we drove two hours to Noia, which is on the western coast of Galicia, and then on to a spot near Baronha with a partially restored Celtic village – circles of stones on a grassy outcropping covered in big boulders. Their friends Sylvia and Juan, with their almost-one-year-old daughter Julia, met us nearby, and we all walked to the village and had a picnic lunch together on the rocks. Then we clambered – up and down the boulders, to the edge of the sea (cold!), to the top of the hill, around the Celtic circles, through some narrow gaps in the rocks, under the big blue sky . . . preposition the adjective noun. It was wonderful. We drove to a small park to see a dolmen, the type of structure made famous by Stonehenge (large vertical stones topped by a large horizontal one), took a rest under the shade of a tree, and then drove to a natural preserve that has a big dune in front of the sea. The sun was potent, so we had drinks in the shade until around six, when we ventured in search of the sea (hidden behind the big dune!). We found it (surprise!) – a very wide, very flat beach, with clear water that was almost too bright to look at – and got our feet wet. After returning to the little café for post-adventure drinks, we parted ways, and Simon, Almudena and I stopped at a sightseeing point on the way back to A Corunha. We saw all the way to the Illas Cies, which are near Vigo – things in Galicia are so close together. It’s like Mary Poppins’ purse; I don’t know how it all fits. Simon and Almudena marked on my map which places are the most interesting for fishing, so now I have concrete destinations (rather than “the coast”); figuring out transportation is the next challenge. Back to the city at 11:11 (we made wishes!) and then I was too tired to write this whole entry, so I’m finishing it the next day and cheating by changing the time in blogspot so that it looks like I wrote it on Saturday.
The places we visited were glorious, but the best part of the day was spending time with Simon, Almudena, Sylvia, Juan and little Julia. They are wonderfully kind people, and I am so fortunate to have met them. I told them about my project in detail, and we had a good conversation! Juan is a geologist and Sylvia studied a bit of geology in college before turning to biology, and I asked them how they made sense of the ages of things, ones that were in millions of years. They said that they thought in terms of processes – they see a spiky mountain and know that it is young because the top hasn’t been eroded yet, and they imagine something like a fast-motion video that focuses on the important parts (the key moments of the evolution). Sylvia also said that having Julia had changed her perception of time because she was watching a life develop so quickly – it was a wonder that Julia was growing and learning at the rate that she was, and it made her look at her own life differently. Almudena drew me a picture of time – a little dot with double-headed arrows all around it. She wrote: “Everything influences time and time influences everything. Time in itself doesn’t exist; it is a human invention.” And Simon told us that he thought about time in terms of calendars, but they form a sort of ring – January through May are a line, then June, July and August curve up (because they are summer months), then the rest of the months go back around. It doesn’t form a perfect circle, but it is a sort of cycle. We talked about how interesting it was that January 1st feels different to us – a new year! – even though it is just another day, and how humans are capable of putting imaginary boundaries on something so intangible as time.
I’ve put new pictures up on my photo blog (went a little trigger-happy with the uploading), and now I’m going to go explore again! Alfonso lent me his bike, and perhaps I’ll take it along the coast! My plan for Monday is to get to the Portinho, a little port with just a few boats far outside of the city, and talk to people there. On Tuesday I’m back at the docks, and on Wednesday afternoon I’ll probably leave A Corunha for A Guarda, far to the south. I’m sure that something will go wrong sometime soon – otherwise I’ll be upsetting the cosmic balance.
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