A long walk with two Germans (Camarinhas, Spain)

I am writing on a bed in a hotel room – oh no! My strategy of inquiring about available rooms in bars failed here in Camarinhas (it was bound to sometime, I guess). The upshot is that there is a giant column about two meters to my left, right in the middle of the room, and I feel a little bit like I’m in Greece.

Camarinhas is larger than Muxia, and there are more boats in its port! However, since it’s a weekend, there’s almost no activity until Monday, and even then it will be slow compared to Tuesday (the night fishermen will go out for the first time on Monday evening). The main type of fishing here is sardine fishing, and, as I understand it, boats sell the fish directly to buyers, who load their trucks at ungodly hours of the morning (even more ungodly than 5:00 am, when some of the big fish auctions have taken place). My plan is the following: On Monday morning I will hang out at the docks and chat up whoever is looking particularly eager to talk, and by Monday evening I’ll know if I’m feeling masochistic enough to wake up and watch the sardine boats arrive in the wee hours. A two-step plan – doable. I’m excited to see a port in action again, and to smell like dead fish.

The past two days I’ve been extremely fortunate in finding non-fisherman subjects (victims) to interrogate! In Muxia I expected to watch the sunset alone, thinking about, you know, the meaning of life, but instead I ended up talking with two French women for about an hour! We met when I asked one of them if it was possible to see Camarinhas on the other side of the ria, and, after the obligatory small talk (“Where are you from? How long are you here for? What have you done?”), I ended up telling them about my project. They seemed interested, so I asked if I could “interview” them (I also put quotation marks around that word when I’m talking), and they said oui! I wrote about our conversation when I went back to my room that night, and have retro-posted the entry, so it appears as though I posted it on July 30th when really I’m posting it along with this one. Manipulation of facts! But I’m confessing so that I don’t feel too dishonest.

Yesterday, Friday, I took a bus from Muxia to Camarinhas, and, after hostel bargain-hunting for Too Long (and with the end result that there is a column in the middle of my room), ran into a German woman and girl I had noticed on the bus in the tourist office. They were having serious communication problems with the young men behind the counter and were about to resort to interpretive dance when I offered to translate (too bad!). We had the cliché tourist conversation (they are from Muenchen and Spreewald, here in Spain for a few weeks, and had just finished the Camino de Santiago), then decided to go on a hike together to a lighthouse called Faro Vilan, about eight kilometers away. Gaby, the woman, was very religious (Christian, Protestant), and asked me about my faith even before I asked her about hers as part of my project! She, Linda (the 15-year-old daughter of a friend of hers, whom she had taken on vacation, and who is Catholic), and I ended up talking about theology and spirituality for most of the five hours that we were walking together. I learned so much! And I was impressed by Gaby’s willingness to share personal thoughts that she had obviously been developing over the course of her life. Linda, too, was candid, and told us about both what she’d been taught in her religion classes (e.g. that the meaning of life was to find one’s soulmate-of-the-opposite-sex-and-gender – not the kind of meaning of life I would want to reach watching the sunset!) and what she found questionable (the same).

That night, Gaby, Linda and I agreed to meet and go together to the Fiesta de la Juventud at a nearby beach, which Juan, a worker at the port, had told me about. We ate grilled chorizo, ribs, and pimientos de padron (no spicy ones), and I taught Linda what little I knew about dancing! She had obviously been repressing the dancer within for some time, because she kept dancing alone even when I occasionally got distracted watching other people and stopped. When we walked back to town, Gaby gave me two German poems as a parting gift – what a super gift! I am inspired to start giving poems that I like to people along my travels! Just have to find a printer (or let loose my inner scribe).

This morning was rainy and gray, and I walked around in my rain coat with the hood up, seeing only what was directly in front of me. But I heard an interesting sound! Camarinhas is known for its lace, and I happen to be here during its first annual lace contest! It is an impossibly complicated-looking process – a bunch of pins stuck into a pillow with many dozens of wooden bobs hanging from them by strings, and the women toss the wooden bobs back and forth from hand to hand faster than the eye can follow. It looks totally random, but somehow little lace flowers and arcs emerge from the madness (like monkeys at typewriters producing Shakespeare, but consistently and with good spelling). And when the little wooden bobs bump against each other, they make a soft little “click-click-click” sound, which I heard every now and then from the open window of a house as I wandered through town. Super! Now it is sunny, and I will wander again without my raincoat and with a much wider field of view.