A walk around the city and a plan (La Corunha, Spain)

(I promise that my entries will get shorter.)

I did not take several thousand pictures yesterday afternoon, but I made up for my sloth today (taking at least 20 – at this rate I’ll have over 7000 by the end of the year). To my great surprise, I woke up past noon, and only because the girl in the room next to mine started moving around – my room has no windows. It’s okay, though; the sun doesn’t set until around ten, so I had plenty of time to explore. My “exploration” was really just a long walk on a path well-trodden – the Paseo Maritimo, which goes, literally, around the city (ha!). I saw:

1) Fishermen on boats! I didn’t approach them, though. That’s for Very Near Future Irene, who will go to the docks tonight at sunset and ask if she can get on a boat. Or talk to someone.
2) Fish in the water! Schools of little silver guys and a solitary few big silver guys.
3) A man fishing on a dock! He told me the names of all the fish, and that he was a ninety-year-old ex-fisherman with grandchildren my age. When I asked if I could talk with him longer, though, he said NO (more politely than that). My first rejection! I’d better get used to it.
4) The Castelo de San Anton, which is now an archaeological museum housing artifacts from many centuries. This island fort (now connected to the mainland) also served as a prison. Now the top of it is a pretty garden.
5) Half-naked people. They are everywhere. There are boulders all along the water’s edge; there are half-naked people on every boulder. The sandy beaches, too, are covered with them. They remind me of nesting birds, because each family has set up their little bunch of towels at a set distance from all the other families’ (~6 feet) – some sort of maximum density law.
6) Baby Stonehenge (of modern-man making and whose purpose I have yet to learn) and the Casa de las Palabras, an open structure with Muslim architechture that serves as the burial ground for soldiers of Muslim descent in the . . . war against the French in 1809? PERHAPS.
7) The Torre de Hercules, a lighthouse built by the Strong Man himself (not). It is the oldest functional lighthouse in either Europe or the world (superlatives are always so tricky).
8) Fish in tanks! At the Aquarium Finisterrae, which was more of a museum than a menagerie. (This is good, because paying to ogle at captive animals always makes me feel rotten.) I struggled to read over the yells of several dozen children, which were so penetrating that I thought they were coming from within my own head (“Oh God, I’ve gone crazy!”). The woman giving them the tour gave me a “shoot me” look as she walked by, so I wasn’t alone. I guess that I am pro-education, though, so I’ll give a belated cheer: yeah little kiddies learning about the little fishies! I’m worried about what they’re learning, though – I saw two interesting exhibits, one of them answering the question “Are the oceans rising?” and the other answering the question “Can all the fish in the oceans disappear from fishing?” The answer to the first one was (in more words) “Yes, but the oceans rise and fall periodically.” No mention of global warming and the melting of the ice caps. The answer to the second was “No, because, just like humans have learned to farm land animals, we are learning to farm sea animals.” Not that fish farms are very damaging to the environment, and not that the fish kept in them live under awful conditions.

Speaking of fish: I decided a while ago to suspend my vegetarianism for this year, so that I can fully enjoy the cuisine of the countries I’m visiting (i.e. eat more than bread and chocolate, which is my usual diet – now I’ll eat bread and chocolate and meat!). I haven’t eaten seafood here yet, but I will soon.

Last night I cuddled up in bed and made a (tentative tentative) plan for the rest of my three months here:

I’ll stay in A Corunha until June 24th (so that I see the bonfires of San Juan on the night of the 23rd – they cover the entire beach!), when I will go to A Guarda, at the southwesternmost tip of Galicia. I’ll either work my way up the coast or spend a lot of time in one or a few places (depending on how my “research” goes), but I will at some point reach Vigo and visit the Illas Cies, an island nature reserve. I’ll go to Pontevedra and take a detour to Santiago de Compostela for the big celebration on July 25th. Then on to the Costa da Morte (ominous) and back north to Betanzos by August 14th, to be there for the festival of San Roque/ Os Caneiros, which lasts until August 25th. I hope to be in Viveiro on the 23rd, though, for the Romaria do Naseiro, and on September 13th I want to be all the way back west in Muxia for the Romaria da Nosa Senhora da Barca. (I got all excited about festivals after finding a guide on them.)

DOABLE?! Who knows? I may end up staying in one village for weeks. But if Restless Irene prevails, I’ll try it.

Now I’m off to eat dinner (fish?) and go to the docks. Wish me luck.