A busy few days (Vigo, Spain)

Oh, mensch! I have been a busy woman this week! On Monday afternoon I did end up meeting with Francisco (who has been promoted from “brother of a friend of a friend” to “friend” – shooting up the ranks!), and he gave me the royal tour of the Vigo port. He works in the Port Authority, so he didn’t just know the names of things, but also numbers that were attached to them (e.g. “All of the cars on this dock are made by the Citroen factory here in Vigo, which produced 250,000 cars in 2008, 80% of which were shipped through here.”). Ouch, that parenthetical note makes the tour sound mind-numbingly boring, but no! It was fascinating! The port (the largest in Galicia and eighth or ninth largest in Spain) has so much flowing through it every single day. We saw:

- refrigerated buildings that hold fruit, like big grapes from Chile, on its way into the country
- giant cubes of rock waiting to be exported (pink and gray Galician granite) and imported (greenish-black, dark pink, and deep gray rocks from places like Finland, India, or Brazil)
- large hills of Galician salt, which is used to make a supersaturated saline solution that is taken aboard the large tuna fishing vessels to preserve the tuna in the holds after it is caught
- wind turbine parts (Galicia produces the most wind energy of all of the Spanish Autonomous Communities)
- dry cement reservoirs and trucks being loaded with the powder
- aluminum ingots (lots of, and very shiny)
- various kinds of wood
- and one dock full of containers (5000 of them, Francisco told me).

At the fishing docks we saw boats of all sizes, including tuna ships, which are grand, beautiful, high-tech things. There are several lonjas in the Vigo ports. The most impressive of them is the Gran Lonja, where fish from all over the world are sold. The auction takes place in the wee hours of the morning (I was told to arrive at 4:00 if I want to see the ships unloading and the fish being labeled – oh absolutely sure! I want to see everything) and fills a room . . . I don’t even know how big it is. It’s enormous. Probably the size of a small country. There are separate lonjas for mollusks and non-fish catch, and there’s another lonja for the local fish.

We passed ships that had been impounded for drug trafficking, and ships that were being repaired, and ships that were being built, and ships that were being painted . . . And while we were looking at the ships, an interesting bit of physics came up! Since the salinity and temperature of water affects its density (saltier and colder = denser) and therefore the buoyancy it can provide, ships will sit lower or higher in the water in different regions of the world. There is something called a Plimson (sp?) disk which is painted onto the side of a ship (we saw these on the grand, beautiful, high-tech tuna ships) so that the people know how much they can load onto it. It looks like a circle with two horizontal lines, the top one labeled “E” for equatorial and the bottom one labeled “R” for something else, but we couldn’t figure out what. If a ship is traveling to a region with denser water from a region with less dense water, it can be loaded up more that it would normally be allowed to, because once it gets to the new region, it will sit higher up. The same things (salinity, temperature) affect the magnitudes of tides! Wooooowoow!

The port as I am seeing it is not the port as it was two years ago. The international economic crisis has caused port activity to decrease by 44%, and the city’s metalworkers have been striking for several months now, which is taking its toll on shipbuilding companies (they are losing current jobs and future business). But I still think a whole lot is going on, and I find myself wanting to understand it all! Ports are complicated creatures.

On Tuesday I had an excellent experience with the Spanish medical system (I’m not sick; wanted to know if I should worry about my moles because I’d much rather die by asteroid or alien invasion than of undiagnosed skin cancer). Zoulaikha, my immensely kind CouchSurfing host (also promoted to “friend”), took me to the medical office in the morning, where we went up to the receptionist. I told him that I was an American tourist, and that I had international health insurance; he scowled at me and my international health insurance cards and told me that I wasn’t covered by the Spanish national plan (which is free for everyone! but slow-moving for non-urgent conditions). I must have looked devastated when he told me how much an appointment would cost, because he softened up a bit. “Okay, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You know a man named Juan Toro Fernandez?” I said no, and then realized that it wasn’t a question (he probably thought, “IDIOT.”). “He’s your brother. When you come here for your appointment, tell the doctor that you forgot your ID and just present this receipt.” The receipt said, “Irene Toro Fernandez”, and I had an appointment at 1:00. Playing the system! At 1:00 I went back, waited just a few minutes before my turn came up, met with the smiling doctors in a private room (“I’m sorry, but I forgot my ID.” They probably thought, “IDIOT.”), and left comforted and educated. My moles and I are on speaking terms again.

In the evening I met with Tonio, the friendly man from the park, at the San Gregorio docks, and he badgered his friend Amable (who is, indeed, amable) into taking us out on his sailboat, even though one of the sails was broken and he had to use the motor the entire time. Uncomfortable -- Amable clearly didn’t want to go out, and Tonio clearly never takes no for an answer, and my presence added pressure to the situation (my presence caused the situation!). But: the ride was lovely, and Amable invited me to go for a real sail with him and a group of people who build and ride traditional Galician vessels on Thursday. Then – THEN – Tonio took me on what I thought would be a short tour of the neighborhood where he grew up. We walked to the beach at Bouzas, where we greeted his wife and children and he introduced me to the in-laws and anyone else who happened to be around as “la chiquita,” then we went along a path around the Bouzas dock, then to an art exhibit at a social club, then to watch the city’s rowing team practice, then to his church (he named all of the saints for me and told me about the processions during which they are carried down certain paths, sometimes through water), then all around his neighborhood, to his childhood home (where his sister now lives; she graciously accepted our unexpected visit), to the apartment where I’m staying, up the stairs, into the living room, where Zoulaikha and her flatmate Juan were sitting – I thought, “Hmm.” He had been talking non-stop the entire time (= four hours) – this was great, because I learned a lot about life in Vigo now and several decades ago – but I realized that he didn’t know how to stop. No pause button. Juan patiently listened to him for half an hour, and then Zoulaikha and I said, “Well, time to get empanadillas!” We parted ways with Tonio the Talker when we went downstairs. If I had recorded and transcribed Tonio’s hours-long monologue, I could publish the definitive history of the neighborhood of Bouzas in Vigo!

And then it was today! I spent the morning wandering the docks (I have snuck in several times now, and successfully communicated with a Portuguese fisherman in Spanortuguese), read in a park, and then met Francisco again. My official port authorization has failed to materialize (bureaucracy! it hates me), but it doesn’t matter – I’m going to the fish auction tomorrow at 4:30 in the morning, and if they kick me out, I’ll have seen at least a few minutes of it. Francisco took me on another wonderful excursion, this time to La Guia, a mountain/big hill (the distinction is unclear to me) topped with a small church, and then to the Monte Alba, where I wished I could fly. We listened to excellent music.

This is what I have eaten the past three days: chicken empanadillas, bacalao empanadillas, shrimp empanadillas, shellfish empanadillas, chocolate, bread, creamy cheese. Multivitamin, iron supplement. More chocolate. My tastebuds are in heaven. And I’m so glad that I have a stomach of steel. And friends! Zoulaikha, Juan and Francisco are on my List of Cherished People – I will miss them when I leave Vigo.