An addendum (Santiago de Compostela, Spain – but really Cambados, Spain)

I didn’t want to steal Asmus’s blog thunder, so I’m adding something Santiago-related a few days after the fact. On Saturday, we went to the Museo o Pobo Galego, which had excellent exhibits on Galician fishing (yes!!), music, architecture, art, etc. One of the halls that we walked into had an introductory board that caught my eye; here it is translated from Gallego (be impressed!) (but not too impressed – written, Gallego and Spanish are very similar):

The practice of measuring time was imposed by the need to organize quotidian life. There exist two ways of understanding time: as something that repeats periodically or as something linear that does not repeat. Traditional societies conceive of time in its cyclical form, based on natural occurrences: every year there are the same seasons, the same solar movements, and the same agricultural cycle. In this cyclical conception of time, the unit of measure is the year. To organize the different temporal rhythms, one needs to put markers on time. These markers are the festivals.

There are religious festivals, defined by the liturgy of the Church, and secular festivals, which revolve around seasonal labors. There are also cyclical festivals that are celebrated in all parts of the same region, albeit with local particularities. Among them are fixed festivals (Nadal, Reis, San Xoan, Defuntos), which always fall on the same day, and variable festivals (Entroido, Semana Santa, Corpus), which depend on Easter, which is fixed according to the lunar year. Other types of festivals are the patron saint festivals, celebrated in honor of the titular saint of a parish, and romarias, which consist of a pilgrimage to a sanctuary.

The distribution of labors and festivals is not uniform. In the spring and summer the good climate and the longer days make them the seasons in which the most work is done, agricultural and maritime. For the same reasons, it is in the summer that most of the patron saint festivals and romarias are celebrated.

It’s my project! The exhibit went through the stages of life of 19th-century Galicians – birth, childhood, young adulthood, adulthood, wise old age, death – and duties and special events associated with each. But the reason I was so excited is that I have already participated in several of the summertime festivals (most notably, the Muros party-hardy with Pepita and Candida and the festival in Santiago de Compostela)! And they do make summer special – several people have said to me, “Oof! In the summertime there’s always a party somewhere! Summertime is party-time!” Maria of Muros, who is apparently responsibility-free until the school year starts, had adopted a totally nocturnal schedule, and slept all day long so that she could dance all night long. (Her mother, Mariloli, didn’t seem to understand this mode of existence, and always woke her up in the early afternoon to inform her that it was daytime – surely Maria appreciated the update.)

Something else exciting is brewing: housing possibilities in Mexico and Norway! In those two countries I’ll be staying in the same town/city all three months (Angangueo, Ocampo, Donato Guerra, or Tlalpujahua in Mexico and Tromso in Norway), and a few days ago I thought, “Irene! You should get on this housing business!” I wrote to the director of the WWF monarch program in Mexico (the only non-hotel e-mail address I could find) and posted a message on CouchSurfing – and already somebody has written back to tell me that his aunt used to work in Angangueo and “knows people there.” Yes! That is exactly what I want! People who know people somewhere! The Norway possibility was even more a matter of chance. On Saturday night, Asmus and I got together with Fabio (Brazilian), his friends Richard (NORWEGIAN!!) and Chris (German), and Chris’s friends Thomas (German) and Christanne (German), to watch a bagpipe band at the Praza da Quintana and have hot chocolate. (We know how to spend our Saturday nights.) Well, I gave it away with “NORWEGIAN!!” – I told Richard about my project and future stay in his country, and, after making a mysterious phone call at the café, he came up to me and said, “You might have a room in Tromso!” Providence is plopping should-be real estate agents all over the place. Obviously neither the room in Mexico nor the room in Norway is final yet, and I have to do a lot more research before showing up at the door with my bags (student housing in Tromso might be a better idea) – but it’s fun to start fantasizing.

Now I am in Cambados! Yesterday afternoon Asmus and I wandered along the coast and through vineyards and farm fields, and today I got up early to go to the docks. Since it’s Monday, there was little activity (early morning is when the nighttime boats come back with fish – but they don’t go out on Sundays), but I did meet Rosa, who works at the lonja, and Vieito, who was going out to gather clams. This afternoon, after exploring Cambados with Asmus, I’ll go back to the docks to watch the fish auction, which starts at 4:00, and make fisherman friends.

Official Cambados blog entry forthcoming.