Well, I am already behind in my weekly Mexico updates! Not too much of a shocker. And this one will be a shortie -- I started a longer post in a document on my computer, Toby, but he had a bout of grouchiness (my ability to break computers just by touching them has not diminished) and I couldn´t finish it.
Now I am writing on a nameless computer in Ocampo, where I arrived a week and a day ago to a parade with music and colorful banners -- not welcoming me, but celebrating Mexico´s 199th year of independence. It was lovely. I got to see most of the town´s adult residents lining the streets, proudly sprinkling confetti on the heads of most of the town´s schoolchildren, who were marching in step, looking proud or confused. Since that auspicious beginning to my stay here, so much has happened that I can hardly keep it straight in my head. Here is a list:
- I decided to move in with Adriana, an English teacher at a nearby school, instead of spending three months in a dark hotel room. Excellent decision. Adriana is wonderful, and we have spent the past few days cleaning and organizing the house (she more than I, since she moved to the house about a week before I arrived). Among our successes are: a garbage-free yard and river (at least the part of the river that we can see), a mostly functional kitchen full of food, a fixed ladder, and a compost bin with some fruit peels in it, which we plan to use on what will soon be our splendid garden.
- I met Adriana´s friend Edwin, who is the leader-type of a group of about ten young men (sometimes a few more, sometimes a few fewer) (a few fewer?), with whom I have gone to a dance, played soccer (´played´ is perhaps misleading -- I jogged around and dodged the ball), and hung out on several nights in Edwin´s room and in Adriana´s house. The young men -- Isaac Fernando, Javier, Gabriel, Eduardo, Chafai, Brian Alexis, Ricardo, Fierros, Freddy, and others -- are friendly and funny, and I´m glad to have been adopted by the group, even if I am still quiet and awkward around them.
- I met, went on walks with and/or had meals with several other people (a woman named Carla, her father Don Manuel, and her mother Dona Remedios; a girl named Anaisa who works at a taco stand; a man named Jacob who works at a telephone store; a woman named Angelica who is the director of a kindergarten) in Ocampo.
- I saw 1200-to-800-year-old pyramids with Adriana in Zirahuato de los Bernal. !!! We then went to Zitacuaro, the nearest city, to go grocery shopping and drink fruit nectars.
- Now that I´ve mentioned fruit nectars, I should also say that I´ve eaten: tacos with beef and pork and nopales, mole, rice, Michoacan mushrooms, chicken, enchiladas, pumpkin seeds, atole (a hot soupy sweet corn beverage), pan vaso (bread dipped in chili sauce, fried, and stuffed with your choice of meat), a lot of tropical fruits, and . . . well, chocolate, of course, but that´s not nearly as exciting. I´ve only gotten sick to my stomach once. Made of steel (I am). Adriana is going to show me how to cook other delicious things, among them tamales. The thought makes me salivate.
- Learned the Mexican names for many words! I hadn´t realized how different the vocabulary was.
That´s it for the list, I think. Now I should describe the places! I`ve spent the most time in Ocampo, which is flat and surrounded by tall forested hills (where the butterflies gather starting in November). It is a tiny town, with one main plaza, one main street and not too many others, and a river. There are always people in the streets, and there are always food vendors selling tacos, so some parts of town smell delicious. There are several wood processing shops, which turn wood (legally or illegally logged) into crates and sticks for mops and other such things. There are a lot of arcade game rooms. There are a lot of homeless dogs. There are corn fields and farm animals at the outer edges of town and beyond. There is a lot of rain, and there is visible breath in the mornings (it is cold! and humid) (the first few days I felt like I was in the rainy period of ´100 Years of Solitude´). There is a big market on Saturdays.
That description doesn´t do the town justice, and I think that I achieved my goal of sounding like a third-grader who doesn´t want to put much effort into her English homework. Yes!! I´m actually living much closer to Angangueo now, which is quite different from Ocampo. It, too, has one main plaza, but this plaza has two churches and they are taller and grander than the one in Ocampo. Angangueo is much more colorful and much more vertical than Ocampo, since it is located higher up in the hills; walking around is good exercise (for legs and eyes). In general, it seems better cared for than Ocampo, and has more hotels and nice-looking food businesses (the ones in Ocampo are nice, but not nice-looking) -- it is the more touristy of the two monarch butterfly reserve gateway towns. I have yet to meet people in Angangueo. Next week I will wander around looking friendly and eager to make the acquaintance of anyone who is nearby (but only if that person looks at least half as eager as me -- I don´t want to scare anyone).
´This one will be a shortie.´ I am so funny! I will write another update within the next, oh, ten days -- one better organized and more informative -- and send best wishes to you, kind reader.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
A chapter ending (A Corunha, Spain)
Oh, shameful neglect of blog! But I plan to write weekly (that's not too ambitious, right?) updates when I am in Mexico -- I leave tomorrow morning! In fact, this post is largely an attempt to put off packing, not because I have to rack my brains deciding what to bring with and what to leave behind (I am bringing everything with, of course), but because zipping up my suitcase tonight will be an awful lot like closing a chapter in the Book of Watson Adventure, and I am in a state of disbelief. Leaving Spain already? Quoi?!
The past few weeks have gone by incredibly quickly, and I've met more wonderful people than I can mention and describe. In Santander I spent every night with a group made up of Germans (there are a lot of these in Spain), American (just one), Cuban (also), Argentinian (also also), and Spaniards; we walked around, drank chocolate and ate churros, and admired the light of the moon on the water. No joke. It was really pretty. In Madrid I stayed with Rosa, who was the friend of a friend of my mother's and is now my friend (a shorter and nicer title), and with whom I felt completely at home and happy. She introduced me to her friends -- more feelings of comfort and happiness -- and pointed out every cute thing that her two young cats did. During the days I explored the city (enormous! grand! overwhelming!), went on a day trip to Toledo (narrow-laned, beautiful and touristy), and spent an afternoon with Alberto, my Foz friend. This past weekend I've been back in La Corunha with Sylvia, Juan and not-so-little Giulia, who has grown a lot since I met her three months ago! Her favorite word is "agua". You say, "Hooola, Giulia" and she responds, "Aguaguaguagua. Agua. Aguagua." (There are infinite variations of this exchange.) I wonder what she thinks she's saying.
All of these people have been incredibly good to me and admirable. I love admiring people! And I've been sad to say goodbye to them.
The topic of time has come up on many occasions during my travels. Almost everyone I meet is willing to talk with me about it, so I have learned oodles from people. I have also noticed that artists are obsessed with time -- many museums that I've visited have exhibits with creative titles like "Representations of Time" and equally creative artwork (that I often fail to get, like a painting of a cute little dog face that was supposed to make me consider the meaning of "instant" and "present"; it made me consider the weirdness of dog breeding). Historical museums, too, are filled with interesting time-related things; I like to see how different ones set up exhibits that span many centuries. I hope to write about these things in my journal when I am less computer-averse, and I'll post something more concrete in this blog (as well as a summary of my fishing knowledge!).
I'm not sure what my internet situation will be like in Ocampo, Mexico -- I'm not even sure what my living situation will be like! -- so I'll publicly apologize to anyone who tries to get in touch with me but doesn't hear back for a while: I'm sorry.
Now I'm going to go back to packing, and at some point I will zip up my suitcase (my personal soundtrack will be playing dramatic orchestral music, lots of violins). Ciao now, Spain! Hooola, Mexico!
I hope that you are doing wonderfully.
The past few weeks have gone by incredibly quickly, and I've met more wonderful people than I can mention and describe. In Santander I spent every night with a group made up of Germans (there are a lot of these in Spain), American (just one), Cuban (also), Argentinian (also also), and Spaniards; we walked around, drank chocolate and ate churros, and admired the light of the moon on the water. No joke. It was really pretty. In Madrid I stayed with Rosa, who was the friend of a friend of my mother's and is now my friend (a shorter and nicer title), and with whom I felt completely at home and happy. She introduced me to her friends -- more feelings of comfort and happiness -- and pointed out every cute thing that her two young cats did. During the days I explored the city (enormous! grand! overwhelming!), went on a day trip to Toledo (narrow-laned, beautiful and touristy), and spent an afternoon with Alberto, my Foz friend. This past weekend I've been back in La Corunha with Sylvia, Juan and not-so-little Giulia, who has grown a lot since I met her three months ago! Her favorite word is "agua". You say, "Hooola, Giulia" and she responds, "Aguaguaguagua. Agua. Aguagua." (There are infinite variations of this exchange.) I wonder what she thinks she's saying.
All of these people have been incredibly good to me and admirable. I love admiring people! And I've been sad to say goodbye to them.
The topic of time has come up on many occasions during my travels. Almost everyone I meet is willing to talk with me about it, so I have learned oodles from people. I have also noticed that artists are obsessed with time -- many museums that I've visited have exhibits with creative titles like "Representations of Time" and equally creative artwork (that I often fail to get, like a painting of a cute little dog face that was supposed to make me consider the meaning of "instant" and "present"; it made me consider the weirdness of dog breeding). Historical museums, too, are filled with interesting time-related things; I like to see how different ones set up exhibits that span many centuries. I hope to write about these things in my journal when I am less computer-averse, and I'll post something more concrete in this blog (as well as a summary of my fishing knowledge!).
I'm not sure what my internet situation will be like in Ocampo, Mexico -- I'm not even sure what my living situation will be like! -- so I'll publicly apologize to anyone who tries to get in touch with me but doesn't hear back for a while: I'm sorry.
Now I'm going to go back to packing, and at some point I will zip up my suitcase (my personal soundtrack will be playing dramatic orchestral music, lots of violins). Ciao now, Spain! Hooola, Mexico!
I hope that you are doing wonderfully.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
A collection of very old art (Santander and Puente Viesgo, Spain)
A one-paragraph update, because I am getting behind in my blog duties (but am also increasingly computer-averse)! Yesterday I went to a town called Puente Viesgo, where I saw, for the first time in my life, prehistoric cave paintings. The experience ranks high in my List of Mind-Boggling Historical Experiences. Over the past many millions of years, dozens of caves have been carved by water into the rock of Monte Castillo, the big hill by the town, and in the past century, people have found cave paintings in five of them. Two of these -- la Cueva de las Monedas and la Cueva del Castillo -- are open to the public. La Cueva del Castillo is the main attraction for paintings. Excavations in the opening of the cave have revealed twenty-six layers of human-produced materials, ranging in age from 150,000 years to about five centuries. This cave has been a home for a long time! The paintings themselves, deeper inside the cave, date from about 12,000ish years ago, and are of bison, deer, horses, hands, and symbols that haven't yet been deciphered. What I found most fascinating was that the painters used the contours of the rocks as part of their art. They didn't say, "Oh look, a flat wall -- I will draw a horse there!" They said (something like), "Hmm . . . those cracks look like a horse's hind legs . . . and look how the rock protrudes here, that could be the horse's head . . . I will draw the horse's torso and front legs." They saw the pictures before they drew them! My favorite one of all involved shadows. The guide pointed out a painting that looked pretty odd to us -- a large pair of legs with no body attached. She asked us, "Why would they do that?" We failed the pop quiz -- nobody knew. Then she put the lamp in a certain position behind a rock formation -- and suddenly there was an upright bison body to go with the legs! The people had seen the shape of the bison in the shadow and added legs to turn it into a shaman. That's the theory, at least. WOWEE!!! I almost bounced up and down (might have actually). I think it's so exciting that we can see the same thing in a shadow that people saw ten thousand years ago. The other cave was more geologically impressive -- stalactites and stalagmites and curtains and organs and falls and other beautiful formations galore. Our planet is so great!
That's it for this update because it is breakfast time. In nine days I will be in Mexico -- holy shamoley.
That's it for this update because it is breakfast time. In nine days I will be in Mexico -- holy shamoley.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
An exultation (Picos de Europa and Oviedo, Spain)
I think that I must be the most fortunate person in the world. My legs, on the other hand, consider it a great misfortune that they were paired up with me, and went on strike yesterday to protest the abuses to which they were subjected during the weekend excursion to the Picos de Europa. They haven't lifted the strike yet, so I cringe every time I go down stairs -- but all I want to do is go back to the mountains and abuse them all over again.
I arrived to Oviedo on Friday evening and was met at the station by Chus, my CouchSurfing host, who also studied physics (but is now an independent graphic designer) and with whom I have another 79348579345 things in common. Any attempt to describe him and his hospitality will end in gushiness; suffice it to say that I am glad to have a new Friend. He had organized our weekend excursion into the Picos de Europa, a vast mountain range about two hours from Oviedo, and that night we won the gold medal in Last-Minute Preparation -- when I confessed that I didn't have hiking boots ("but my sandals should be all right, no?"), Chus said, "Impossible!" and we drove to a delightful outdoorsy store at a suburban strip mall (Spain has these, too) to buy a pair. Castor and Pollux, my new spiffy boots (and trusty steeds), would end up saving my life, or at least my ankles, many times during the next few days. We also bought food for our hikes; in retrospect, two loaves of bread, five packages of sandwich cheese and meat, and 725 grams of chocolate (my idea) was overdoing it a little, but better that than (e.g. and oh horror!!) a chocolate craving left unsated. We had a late dinner at home and conked out after looking at an Ansel Adams book -- photographs of big wild spaces! We would be in one soon!
The next morning, we picked up Alina, a German student who is spending eight months in Spain and who came adventuring with us, at the bus station, and we all set off for the mountains. Alina, too, is gush-worthy, and almost the same person as me because 1. she spent a year in Minnesota, 2. she speaks Spanish, German and English, and 3. she will be doing her master's at Boston University either next year or the following one (in International Relations, though, not Science Journalism). Twins! Upon reaching the mountains, Alina, Chus and I left the car near a lake and hiked up to the refugio, where we would spend the night. Alina and I were delighted at every turn -- mountain walls of gray stone with purple flowers! cows with gently tinkling bells munching on the grass! some pretty trees! -- and Chus, who had visited these mountains many times before, said, "You'll see what the places we hike to are like!" Also auspicious was the almost sudden disappearance of gray clouds and fog that had hung over us until we stopped for lunch and Chus said, "We just have to hope that the clouds clear up." Lo and behold! They did.
Not everywhere, though. After dropping off two of our backpacks at the refugio and filling the third with water bottles, we hiked to a nearby mirador (passing the occasional cave in a wall or in the ground) and sat on a ridge that overlooked a valley, presumably forested but so completely filled with clouds that we couldn't see the trees! All around us, we could see mountain tops and ridges in the hot sun, and to our left was a steep mountain wall, wet from the water that seeps out of the rock, but below there was a cloud sea. At one of the edges of the cloud sea, I watched the fog spill over a low mountain ridge into another valley -- it is absurd what beautiful things this planet is capable of creating. Way to go, Planet. We reluctantly hiked back to the refugio and arrived just in time for our eight o'clock dinner, which was exquisite and especially impressive because the three people who run the refugio have to bring up all of the supplies on horseback. That night, after a peach-rainbow sunset over another cloud sea, the fog around us cleared up and we saw the stars. Ugh. We are part of such a big universe.
The next day was our Big Adventure (the one for which my legs still haven't forgiven me) -- a full-day hike to the top of the highest mountain in the part of the Picos we were in, complete with crawls up steep slopes of sharp, football-sized rocks, slips down snowy valleys, and scales up walls that were significantly more vertical than horizontal and significantly higher up than Safe Falling Altitude -- but we didn't fall. Castor and Pollux, and Alina's also-brand-new-but-six-times-as-expensive hiking boots, saw to that. I'm passionately in love with the Picos de Europa, which I feel incapable of describing. Such a big part of being in the mountains, and particularly these mountains, so big and harsh and dry (I kept thinking of Mars and the Moon on steroids), is emotionally responding to their presence. I can't write about what I saw because it wouldn't explain what I experienced. So: go to the mountains! Have a mountain experience! It will be super. (And even more super if you have companions like Chus and Alina.)
We made it back to the car at ten at night, now a company of four, because Javier, Alina's CouchSurfing host from Gijon, surprised us at the refugio! On the way home, Chus introduced me to Bruce Springfield, who is now on my List of Artists to Discover and Admire, and, after showering, we went to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. The next day was decadently relaxing. We slept in and spent the afternoon strolling through the old part of Oviedo, sitting at a bar and a sidreria (a place to drink sidra, or cider), eating gelato and fine chocolates, and sitting again at a park . . . "watching life pass by," as Chus told me Arturo Perez Reverte puts it. Watching life pass by is delightful. The park was full of elderly people who walked slowly and sat together or alone on benches, and parents with children, some of whom were entertaining themselves by chasing and popping the giant bubbles a man was making with a sticks-and-string contraption. We were surrounded by big trees, which were around before we were born and will, I hope, still be around after we're dead, and I'm sure that the park will be full of the exact same people doing the exact same things then (there's no "then" word for the future!).
In the evening, Chus and I cooked mofongo (plantain balls with garlic and pork) and fried okra, my attempt at an introduction to Puerto Rican and Southern U.S. cuisine, and Javier and Alina joined us for a lovely and long dinner. I have learned so much from so many people in the past week! Chus, Javier and Alina all indulged me by starting conversations about time, but these always morphed into conversations about life philosophies, ways of living, trends in society, goals for the future -- and I am forming a clearer and clearer picture of how I'd like to lead my life. Two concrete examples:
1. Alina told me that she had recently become interested in Zen and Buddhism, and that, several months ago, she had started meditating and making an effort to be present in the moment (a mentality that both Chus and Cristiano also shared with me). If she is doing the dishes, she is DOING THE DISHES. If she is walking in a park, she is WALKING IN THE PARK. It doesn't make sense to be stressed about what awaits her at home while she's walking in the park, because she can't do anything about it in the moment -- instead, she should enjoy the park. Since she started focusing on this way of living, she is happier. Moments are fuller, and sweet ones are less bitter; before, she wanted to hold everything close, and the knowledge that good things would disappear was painful, but now she is trying to accept that all things come and go, and they are no less wonderful for going. It was helpful to hear Alina (and Cristiano) talk about this, because I have struggled with it, too, and especially during this trip. It has been very difficult for me at times to be fully in the present when so much of what has shaped me, my family and friends and familiar environments, are far away. I miss them, I think about them, I fantasize -- and my mind ends up being somewhere different from my body, clinging to what is not there. Part of the reason that the mountain excursion was so glorious is that this didn't happen -- it was so easy to be exactly there, in the mountains with Chus and Alina, and not somewhere else in my head. I have to keep working on this!
2. Javier talked, among many other things, about his dissatisfaction with this society's consumerist ways. We're so used to consuming that it's what we do with our free time (think going shopping), and we value things that cost money more than things that don't (in his opinion, people don't go to the mountains because they're free; if they were fenced off and a 30-Euro entrance fee were charged, crowds would flock to the gates). We've become slaves of industry giants, who survive because we fall into a consumption-need cycle -- the more we consume, the more we need. Javier is currently working on freeing himself from this cycle -- a long, multi-step process -- by needing less. Last year, he looked around and said, "I have enough stuff! I'm not going to buy anything this year." He gave his fancy motorcycle to a friend, and is trying not to buy clothes, furniture, music -- material clutter. I admire this greatly! And I, too, am going to try to need as little as possible by consuming less. Also, when I do consume, I want to consume better. If I can choose between an imported apple at a grocery store and a locally-grown apple, I'll pick the latter, so that my consumption habits better reflect my philosophies and ethics. I think that this is much easier in theory than in practice, but it is also how I am (indirectly) relating to many parts of the world -- and that is pretty important! A life-long Thing to Work On. Those are the best.
Now I'm in Llanes, where I'm spending just a day, and tomorrow evening I go to Santander. So much so fast! I can almost feel myself growing up.
I arrived to Oviedo on Friday evening and was met at the station by Chus, my CouchSurfing host, who also studied physics (but is now an independent graphic designer) and with whom I have another 79348579345 things in common. Any attempt to describe him and his hospitality will end in gushiness; suffice it to say that I am glad to have a new Friend. He had organized our weekend excursion into the Picos de Europa, a vast mountain range about two hours from Oviedo, and that night we won the gold medal in Last-Minute Preparation -- when I confessed that I didn't have hiking boots ("but my sandals should be all right, no?"), Chus said, "Impossible!" and we drove to a delightful outdoorsy store at a suburban strip mall (Spain has these, too) to buy a pair. Castor and Pollux, my new spiffy boots (and trusty steeds), would end up saving my life, or at least my ankles, many times during the next few days. We also bought food for our hikes; in retrospect, two loaves of bread, five packages of sandwich cheese and meat, and 725 grams of chocolate (my idea) was overdoing it a little, but better that than (e.g. and oh horror!!) a chocolate craving left unsated. We had a late dinner at home and conked out after looking at an Ansel Adams book -- photographs of big wild spaces! We would be in one soon!
The next morning, we picked up Alina, a German student who is spending eight months in Spain and who came adventuring with us, at the bus station, and we all set off for the mountains. Alina, too, is gush-worthy, and almost the same person as me because 1. she spent a year in Minnesota, 2. she speaks Spanish, German and English, and 3. she will be doing her master's at Boston University either next year or the following one (in International Relations, though, not Science Journalism). Twins! Upon reaching the mountains, Alina, Chus and I left the car near a lake and hiked up to the refugio, where we would spend the night. Alina and I were delighted at every turn -- mountain walls of gray stone with purple flowers! cows with gently tinkling bells munching on the grass! some pretty trees! -- and Chus, who had visited these mountains many times before, said, "You'll see what the places we hike to are like!" Also auspicious was the almost sudden disappearance of gray clouds and fog that had hung over us until we stopped for lunch and Chus said, "We just have to hope that the clouds clear up." Lo and behold! They did.
Not everywhere, though. After dropping off two of our backpacks at the refugio and filling the third with water bottles, we hiked to a nearby mirador (passing the occasional cave in a wall or in the ground) and sat on a ridge that overlooked a valley, presumably forested but so completely filled with clouds that we couldn't see the trees! All around us, we could see mountain tops and ridges in the hot sun, and to our left was a steep mountain wall, wet from the water that seeps out of the rock, but below there was a cloud sea. At one of the edges of the cloud sea, I watched the fog spill over a low mountain ridge into another valley -- it is absurd what beautiful things this planet is capable of creating. Way to go, Planet. We reluctantly hiked back to the refugio and arrived just in time for our eight o'clock dinner, which was exquisite and especially impressive because the three people who run the refugio have to bring up all of the supplies on horseback. That night, after a peach-rainbow sunset over another cloud sea, the fog around us cleared up and we saw the stars. Ugh. We are part of such a big universe.
The next day was our Big Adventure (the one for which my legs still haven't forgiven me) -- a full-day hike to the top of the highest mountain in the part of the Picos we were in, complete with crawls up steep slopes of sharp, football-sized rocks, slips down snowy valleys, and scales up walls that were significantly more vertical than horizontal and significantly higher up than Safe Falling Altitude -- but we didn't fall. Castor and Pollux, and Alina's also-brand-new-but-six-times-as-expensive hiking boots, saw to that. I'm passionately in love with the Picos de Europa, which I feel incapable of describing. Such a big part of being in the mountains, and particularly these mountains, so big and harsh and dry (I kept thinking of Mars and the Moon on steroids), is emotionally responding to their presence. I can't write about what I saw because it wouldn't explain what I experienced. So: go to the mountains! Have a mountain experience! It will be super. (And even more super if you have companions like Chus and Alina.)
We made it back to the car at ten at night, now a company of four, because Javier, Alina's CouchSurfing host from Gijon, surprised us at the refugio! On the way home, Chus introduced me to Bruce Springfield, who is now on my List of Artists to Discover and Admire, and, after showering, we went to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. The next day was decadently relaxing. We slept in and spent the afternoon strolling through the old part of Oviedo, sitting at a bar and a sidreria (a place to drink sidra, or cider), eating gelato and fine chocolates, and sitting again at a park . . . "watching life pass by," as Chus told me Arturo Perez Reverte puts it. Watching life pass by is delightful. The park was full of elderly people who walked slowly and sat together or alone on benches, and parents with children, some of whom were entertaining themselves by chasing and popping the giant bubbles a man was making with a sticks-and-string contraption. We were surrounded by big trees, which were around before we were born and will, I hope, still be around after we're dead, and I'm sure that the park will be full of the exact same people doing the exact same things then (there's no "then" word for the future!).
In the evening, Chus and I cooked mofongo (plantain balls with garlic and pork) and fried okra, my attempt at an introduction to Puerto Rican and Southern U.S. cuisine, and Javier and Alina joined us for a lovely and long dinner. I have learned so much from so many people in the past week! Chus, Javier and Alina all indulged me by starting conversations about time, but these always morphed into conversations about life philosophies, ways of living, trends in society, goals for the future -- and I am forming a clearer and clearer picture of how I'd like to lead my life. Two concrete examples:
1. Alina told me that she had recently become interested in Zen and Buddhism, and that, several months ago, she had started meditating and making an effort to be present in the moment (a mentality that both Chus and Cristiano also shared with me). If she is doing the dishes, she is DOING THE DISHES. If she is walking in a park, she is WALKING IN THE PARK. It doesn't make sense to be stressed about what awaits her at home while she's walking in the park, because she can't do anything about it in the moment -- instead, she should enjoy the park. Since she started focusing on this way of living, she is happier. Moments are fuller, and sweet ones are less bitter; before, she wanted to hold everything close, and the knowledge that good things would disappear was painful, but now she is trying to accept that all things come and go, and they are no less wonderful for going. It was helpful to hear Alina (and Cristiano) talk about this, because I have struggled with it, too, and especially during this trip. It has been very difficult for me at times to be fully in the present when so much of what has shaped me, my family and friends and familiar environments, are far away. I miss them, I think about them, I fantasize -- and my mind ends up being somewhere different from my body, clinging to what is not there. Part of the reason that the mountain excursion was so glorious is that this didn't happen -- it was so easy to be exactly there, in the mountains with Chus and Alina, and not somewhere else in my head. I have to keep working on this!
2. Javier talked, among many other things, about his dissatisfaction with this society's consumerist ways. We're so used to consuming that it's what we do with our free time (think going shopping), and we value things that cost money more than things that don't (in his opinion, people don't go to the mountains because they're free; if they were fenced off and a 30-Euro entrance fee were charged, crowds would flock to the gates). We've become slaves of industry giants, who survive because we fall into a consumption-need cycle -- the more we consume, the more we need. Javier is currently working on freeing himself from this cycle -- a long, multi-step process -- by needing less. Last year, he looked around and said, "I have enough stuff! I'm not going to buy anything this year." He gave his fancy motorcycle to a friend, and is trying not to buy clothes, furniture, music -- material clutter. I admire this greatly! And I, too, am going to try to need as little as possible by consuming less. Also, when I do consume, I want to consume better. If I can choose between an imported apple at a grocery store and a locally-grown apple, I'll pick the latter, so that my consumption habits better reflect my philosophies and ethics. I think that this is much easier in theory than in practice, but it is also how I am (indirectly) relating to many parts of the world -- and that is pretty important! A life-long Thing to Work On. Those are the best.
Now I'm in Llanes, where I'm spending just a day, and tomorrow evening I go to Santander. So much so fast! I can almost feel myself growing up.
Friday, August 28, 2009
An uninspired haiku series with questionable grammar (Gijon, Spain)
My last few posts have been so long that even I am intimidated by them -- so this one is going to be a shortie. I considered writing it in haiku form, but . . . wait, that's an excellent idea! Genius. Here goes:
MONDAY:
Jesus at the docks
shares the history of Foz,
does not like pizza.
Ex-seaman Pepe,
friend of Alberto's, tells me
about Moon's effect.
Full moon: fish spread out.
New moon: fish stick together.
Plankton glow in dark.
He knows, too, about
life cycles of anchovies --
now almost fished out.
Fishermen seem all
to have a firm grasp on each
species' life cycle.
Later, evening-time,
Alberto introduces
me to old cousins.
They see love sparks where
there are none. They wink and smile.
Wonderful people.
TUESDAY:
Bus to Gijon -- five
hours. Once here, I see two
art museums. Then
I meet host Daniel,
who takes me on a great tour
of non-tourist parts.
Daniel is a vet
with well-developed views on
politics, world, us.
I learn much from him.
(Bifidus mystery solved:
yogurts not suspect.)
WEDNESDAY:
Hours among plants
at botanical gardens.
I really love plants.
Then, motorcycle
ride to nudist beach below
glorious cliffs. Wow!
I hike, fully clothed.
Sun is bright, people outside.
Drink water or die!
At night, dinner with
another CouchSurfer named
Cristiano. Hmm. (Is "Cristiano" three syllables or four? Ergo "hmm.")
Also mmm: good food.
Italian politics
outrageous, I learn.
The late-night habits
of the elderly also
surprised Cristiano. (This time it's three.)
Girlfriend's theory is
that old women have worked hard;
now this time is THEIRS.
THURSDAY:
Two-hour walk to
the industrial port, which
is like a city.
Another Jesus,
kind-eyed man, tells me about
seaweed collection!
Fascinating, but
alas! I do not see it.
Maybe in Llanes.
Long conversation
with Cristiano that evening.
He is so thoughtful!
Impossible to
sum up life philosophies
in haikus, but here:
Live every moment.
Find beauty in the small things.
Material things fade. (Oh no. Is "material" mah-tee-ree-al or mah-tee-rial? Probably the former. I'm a big-time haiku cheater. Also, I need to go back to elementary school and learn about syllables.)
Made me think a lot.
Lucky to meet people who
make one think a lot.
FRIDAY:
Gray and rainy day.
Soon my toes will be chilly
as I walk around.
WEEKEND:
The plan is to go
to Picos de Europa
with a CouchSurfer!
Big mountains, big sky,
trees and rocks and bugs and birds --
my friends. Peaceful breaths.
Well, I would call that a dismal failure. But I'll bet it took a lot less time to read than my usual posts!
MONDAY:
Jesus at the docks
shares the history of Foz,
does not like pizza.
Ex-seaman Pepe,
friend of Alberto's, tells me
about Moon's effect.
Full moon: fish spread out.
New moon: fish stick together.
Plankton glow in dark.
He knows, too, about
life cycles of anchovies --
now almost fished out.
Fishermen seem all
to have a firm grasp on each
species' life cycle.
Later, evening-time,
Alberto introduces
me to old cousins.
They see love sparks where
there are none. They wink and smile.
Wonderful people.
TUESDAY:
Bus to Gijon -- five
hours. Once here, I see two
art museums. Then
I meet host Daniel,
who takes me on a great tour
of non-tourist parts.
Daniel is a vet
with well-developed views on
politics, world, us.
I learn much from him.
(Bifidus mystery solved:
yogurts not suspect.)
WEDNESDAY:
Hours among plants
at botanical gardens.
I really love plants.
Then, motorcycle
ride to nudist beach below
glorious cliffs. Wow!
I hike, fully clothed.
Sun is bright, people outside.
Drink water or die!
At night, dinner with
another CouchSurfer named
Cristiano. Hmm. (Is "Cristiano" three syllables or four? Ergo "hmm.")
Also mmm: good food.
Italian politics
outrageous, I learn.
The late-night habits
of the elderly also
surprised Cristiano. (This time it's three.)
Girlfriend's theory is
that old women have worked hard;
now this time is THEIRS.
THURSDAY:
Two-hour walk to
the industrial port, which
is like a city.
Another Jesus,
kind-eyed man, tells me about
seaweed collection!
Fascinating, but
alas! I do not see it.
Maybe in Llanes.
Long conversation
with Cristiano that evening.
He is so thoughtful!
Impossible to
sum up life philosophies
in haikus, but here:
Live every moment.
Find beauty in the small things.
Material things fade. (Oh no. Is "material" mah-tee-ree-al or mah-tee-rial? Probably the former. I'm a big-time haiku cheater. Also, I need to go back to elementary school and learn about syllables.)
Made me think a lot.
Lucky to meet people who
make one think a lot.
FRIDAY:
Gray and rainy day.
Soon my toes will be chilly
as I walk around.
WEEKEND:
The plan is to go
to Picos de Europa
with a CouchSurfer!
Big mountains, big sky,
trees and rocks and bugs and birds --
my friends. Peaceful breaths.
Well, I would call that a dismal failure. But I'll bet it took a lot less time to read than my usual posts!
Monday, August 24, 2009
A boat ride and a very old cathedral (Foz, Spain)
(I wrote this last night but have wifi this morning.)
Seasickness: no laughing matter. I spent most of my twenty-hour fishing excursion from Thursday night until Friday evening as horizontal as possible -- spread-eagled on a bed (so as not to roll over while the ship rocked) or clinging to the deck railing and leaning on the flat surfaces in the bridge in a most undignified manner. And this in perfect weather, with the sea "like a plate." "It doesn't get calmer than this," I was told numerous times by Jose, who was probably thinking, "NEVER AGAIN will I say yes to someone who wants to get on my ship as part of a wacky 'project'." He also said, though, that there was more "mar de fondo" -- deep, long, smooth swells that make the ship tilt in all sorts of wild angles -- than usual, and other sailors told me that they had also been seasick the first few times they'd been at sea. They, however, jumped right back on the ship to get over it, whereas I am appending to my name the words "pathetic landlubber" (as in, "Irene Toro Martinez, Pathetic Landlubber") and chaining myself to a tree the next time someone suggests a boat ride where there might be "mar de fondo."
Whines aside: I did learn a lot about the work of a trawling fisherman. We left the port at Celeiro at around 10:30 pm on Thursday night, after the fishermen on the Pino Ladra had spent an hour taking the previous day's catch out of the hold with a crane and shoveling ice over each box (upwards of 400 boxes per ship, for a total of about 10,000 kg of fish). Jose and the captain of the partner ship decided, by scrambled radio, upon the night's course, and, as his ship is only five years old and equipped with the latest in fancy-shmancy technology, Jose simply put it on automatic pilot and pointed out the line on the screen that we would be following. He didn't rest easy after that, though; almost all of the times I saw him in the bridge, he was talking over the radio with his partner, alerting him to the presence of other ships in the area and discussing possible changes in the plan for the day.
It was at about this time that most of the ten-person crew were eating two "floors" down at the tables near the kitchen and the sleeping quarters. Jose told me that he would join them soon, shortly after eleven, and I made my first disappearance, deciding instead of eating to try to sleep until 6:00 am, when the net would be released. Before going to bed, though, I went out to the deck to look at the stars -- oh, glorious! Wowee! Oof! Not a cloud in the sky, and I even saw a shooting star. I love shooting stars!! I went to my luxurious private room, one "floor" down from the bridge, where the four highest ranking men on the ship sleep (the captain, the second mate, and the mechanics, one of whom was spending the night at home and in whose room I'd been placed), and clung to the raised sides of the bed for dear life (remember: "pathetic landlubber") until I fell asleep.
A 987245984524579-decibel siren sounded at 6:00 am to announce that the net was going to be released. Jose and most of his crew had slept about five hours (one man had stayed in the bridge, because there is always somebody in the bridge), and Jose, at least, wouldn't sleep again until the next night. We were now far from any shore, near the drop-off of the sea floor into deeper waters, surrounded by darkness and comforting little splashing sounds (presumably waves and not monsters from the deep). There were still stars in the sky (wowee! oof!).
Releasing the net is not as easy as it sounds, particularly for a two-boat trawling operation. To begin with, the net is enormous and has various clips and cables that have to be checked as it is unrolled (by machine) -- it takes a long time, and several people on the deck, to get it into the water. Then, since the net is strung across two boats, the other boat has to maneuver close enough for the fishermen of the main boat to toss the other fishermen a rope connected to an end of the net. This is simple enough in good weather; I can't imagine how nerve-wracking it is when the waves are strong. Finally, the two boats have to travel side-by-side, a set distance away from each other, in the same direction in order for the net to be effective (easy when you have a ship with cruise-control). They do this for several hours in the late morning and early afternoon, hope that the net sensors indicate that the net is full, and, at 2:30 pm, the same deafening siren sounds to call the fishermen back to the deck for what ends up being a full afternoon of work.
(Side note: I know that nobody cares about this insignificant detail, but, lest I give an inaccurate account of the mechanics of trawling, I wanted to say that I'm not actually sure when the net is joined from the main ship to the secondary ship. I vaguely remember the other ship approaching in the early morning, but it seems strange to me that they would be catching fish from then until 2:30 pm -- a long time. Since I was mostly out of commission between sirens, they may well have joined later in the morning without my noticing.)
It was more exciting to watch the net come in than it was to see it go out. When it was mostly rolled in, Jose pointed to the surface of the sea and said, "See? Look there. That's the fish." I could see a mass of something just beneath the surface of the water (this is very unnerving -- masses of something just beneath the surface of the water), and, when the other boat came close and took the net, the mass turned into a bag of fish the size of . . . oh gosh, I have no spatial intelligence. A big bag of fish. Really big. The fishermen pulled this really big bag of fish to the side of the boat and used a crane-assisted scooper (like a giant butterfly net) to pour fish into the hold of the ship. The idea is that each ship takes about half of the catch and prepares the fish for the sale; Jose and his crew complained, loudly enough that the other crew heard and laughed, that they always ended up with more than half. The really big bag of fish (now half as big) was returned to the Pino Ladra and its contents poured directly into the hold, where the fishermen spent the next four hours sorting fish by species (mostly bacaladilla and pescadilla) into boxes with the help of shovels and gutting the fish that needed to be gutted. Long and dirty work; Jose told me that they usually finished just as the ship was pulling into port.
I had been looking forward to this -- pulling into port -- for many a long hour, and, when we finally did at 7:30 on Friday evening, I was a happy camper. So were the fishermen! After unloading the boat, they had two days of rest to look forward to. On Sunday night they'd go to sea again. I took the last bus back to Foz and was grateful to the universe for solid ground.
My time in Foz has been wonderfully calm. I decided to take it easy on Saturday (I was dizzy until Saturday morning!), so I spent much of the afternoon sitting on a bench in front of the sea. An old woman named Leonor stopped and talked to me for a while (she said that she will be my first interviewee when I come back to Spain as a journalist -- I said, "Okay!!"), and, later, a young man named Alberto walked by twice and on the third pass started a conversation with me. A nerd after my own heart. We talked for a while (about nerdy things), then he invited me to go to a concert with him that night, and I said, "Sure!" The concert ended up being a bit disappointing, and we went to a club that he liked, where we awkwardly stood and watched a few people dance. Eventually, he asked if I had a boyfriend, and I said, "Nope. I'm gay!" He told me that he wasn't (I'd figured), that he liked girls ("Me too!"), but that he had a gay friend (good!), and then he said, "Well, we can be friends, then." Oh, Alberto. So now I have a friend in Foz, and I'm meeting with him again tomorrow afternoon so that his father can introduce me to a fisherman friend of his. We also agreed to have coffee when I'm in Madrid, where he lives (he's in Foz on vacation for a month). Excellent.
Today I spent walking in the countryside to a small chapel called O Bispo Santo, and then to the oldest cathedral in Spain, the Basilica de San Martin, which dates to the sixth century! Of course, the sixth-century parts have been mostly (but not completely!) covered up by further construction in later centuries; I saw stones that had been placed in the ninth and tenth centuries, and frescoes and murals from the eleventh, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is mind-boggling to me that this church has stood through so much history. So many people have lived their entire lives -- birth to death, with love, knowledge, jobs, original and unoriginal ideas, hopes, failures, und so weiter -- while this church has stood, and I don't know about any of them! I can't even imagine their lives! It is exciting to me that I will be one of these mystery hypothetical people to somebody in a thousand years. Maybe they will think about it upon entering the same church.
The church also made me think about something that I love thinking about: What will remain of our time in a few thousand years? Few buildings, I think, are made to last (we just don't use giant rocks anymore), but maybe the road systems will be preserved, or, smaller-scale, things like plastic or glass bottles, airplane parts. Ooh, back to large scale: I can't wait for future archaeologists to unearth particle accelerators and neutrino detectors! Or mirrors from giant telescopes. And satellites -- those will be relics in the sky. And spacecraft on the Moon and Mars -- someday they will have been there for thousands of years, and people will know that. Ours is the time that they will have an abstract understanding of as the "breaking of the space frontier." And here we are now, living it!
Seasickness: no laughing matter. I spent most of my twenty-hour fishing excursion from Thursday night until Friday evening as horizontal as possible -- spread-eagled on a bed (so as not to roll over while the ship rocked) or clinging to the deck railing and leaning on the flat surfaces in the bridge in a most undignified manner. And this in perfect weather, with the sea "like a plate." "It doesn't get calmer than this," I was told numerous times by Jose, who was probably thinking, "NEVER AGAIN will I say yes to someone who wants to get on my ship as part of a wacky 'project'." He also said, though, that there was more "mar de fondo" -- deep, long, smooth swells that make the ship tilt in all sorts of wild angles -- than usual, and other sailors told me that they had also been seasick the first few times they'd been at sea. They, however, jumped right back on the ship to get over it, whereas I am appending to my name the words "pathetic landlubber" (as in, "Irene Toro Martinez, Pathetic Landlubber") and chaining myself to a tree the next time someone suggests a boat ride where there might be "mar de fondo."
Whines aside: I did learn a lot about the work of a trawling fisherman. We left the port at Celeiro at around 10:30 pm on Thursday night, after the fishermen on the Pino Ladra had spent an hour taking the previous day's catch out of the hold with a crane and shoveling ice over each box (upwards of 400 boxes per ship, for a total of about 10,000 kg of fish). Jose and the captain of the partner ship decided, by scrambled radio, upon the night's course, and, as his ship is only five years old and equipped with the latest in fancy-shmancy technology, Jose simply put it on automatic pilot and pointed out the line on the screen that we would be following. He didn't rest easy after that, though; almost all of the times I saw him in the bridge, he was talking over the radio with his partner, alerting him to the presence of other ships in the area and discussing possible changes in the plan for the day.
It was at about this time that most of the ten-person crew were eating two "floors" down at the tables near the kitchen and the sleeping quarters. Jose told me that he would join them soon, shortly after eleven, and I made my first disappearance, deciding instead of eating to try to sleep until 6:00 am, when the net would be released. Before going to bed, though, I went out to the deck to look at the stars -- oh, glorious! Wowee! Oof! Not a cloud in the sky, and I even saw a shooting star. I love shooting stars!! I went to my luxurious private room, one "floor" down from the bridge, where the four highest ranking men on the ship sleep (the captain, the second mate, and the mechanics, one of whom was spending the night at home and in whose room I'd been placed), and clung to the raised sides of the bed for dear life (remember: "pathetic landlubber") until I fell asleep.
A 987245984524579-decibel siren sounded at 6:00 am to announce that the net was going to be released. Jose and most of his crew had slept about five hours (one man had stayed in the bridge, because there is always somebody in the bridge), and Jose, at least, wouldn't sleep again until the next night. We were now far from any shore, near the drop-off of the sea floor into deeper waters, surrounded by darkness and comforting little splashing sounds (presumably waves and not monsters from the deep). There were still stars in the sky (wowee! oof!).
Releasing the net is not as easy as it sounds, particularly for a two-boat trawling operation. To begin with, the net is enormous and has various clips and cables that have to be checked as it is unrolled (by machine) -- it takes a long time, and several people on the deck, to get it into the water. Then, since the net is strung across two boats, the other boat has to maneuver close enough for the fishermen of the main boat to toss the other fishermen a rope connected to an end of the net. This is simple enough in good weather; I can't imagine how nerve-wracking it is when the waves are strong. Finally, the two boats have to travel side-by-side, a set distance away from each other, in the same direction in order for the net to be effective (easy when you have a ship with cruise-control). They do this for several hours in the late morning and early afternoon, hope that the net sensors indicate that the net is full, and, at 2:30 pm, the same deafening siren sounds to call the fishermen back to the deck for what ends up being a full afternoon of work.
(Side note: I know that nobody cares about this insignificant detail, but, lest I give an inaccurate account of the mechanics of trawling, I wanted to say that I'm not actually sure when the net is joined from the main ship to the secondary ship. I vaguely remember the other ship approaching in the early morning, but it seems strange to me that they would be catching fish from then until 2:30 pm -- a long time. Since I was mostly out of commission between sirens, they may well have joined later in the morning without my noticing.)
It was more exciting to watch the net come in than it was to see it go out. When it was mostly rolled in, Jose pointed to the surface of the sea and said, "See? Look there. That's the fish." I could see a mass of something just beneath the surface of the water (this is very unnerving -- masses of something just beneath the surface of the water), and, when the other boat came close and took the net, the mass turned into a bag of fish the size of . . . oh gosh, I have no spatial intelligence. A big bag of fish. Really big. The fishermen pulled this really big bag of fish to the side of the boat and used a crane-assisted scooper (like a giant butterfly net) to pour fish into the hold of the ship. The idea is that each ship takes about half of the catch and prepares the fish for the sale; Jose and his crew complained, loudly enough that the other crew heard and laughed, that they always ended up with more than half. The really big bag of fish (now half as big) was returned to the Pino Ladra and its contents poured directly into the hold, where the fishermen spent the next four hours sorting fish by species (mostly bacaladilla and pescadilla) into boxes with the help of shovels and gutting the fish that needed to be gutted. Long and dirty work; Jose told me that they usually finished just as the ship was pulling into port.
I had been looking forward to this -- pulling into port -- for many a long hour, and, when we finally did at 7:30 on Friday evening, I was a happy camper. So were the fishermen! After unloading the boat, they had two days of rest to look forward to. On Sunday night they'd go to sea again. I took the last bus back to Foz and was grateful to the universe for solid ground.
My time in Foz has been wonderfully calm. I decided to take it easy on Saturday (I was dizzy until Saturday morning!), so I spent much of the afternoon sitting on a bench in front of the sea. An old woman named Leonor stopped and talked to me for a while (she said that she will be my first interviewee when I come back to Spain as a journalist -- I said, "Okay!!"), and, later, a young man named Alberto walked by twice and on the third pass started a conversation with me. A nerd after my own heart. We talked for a while (about nerdy things), then he invited me to go to a concert with him that night, and I said, "Sure!" The concert ended up being a bit disappointing, and we went to a club that he liked, where we awkwardly stood and watched a few people dance. Eventually, he asked if I had a boyfriend, and I said, "Nope. I'm gay!" He told me that he wasn't (I'd figured), that he liked girls ("Me too!"), but that he had a gay friend (good!), and then he said, "Well, we can be friends, then." Oh, Alberto. So now I have a friend in Foz, and I'm meeting with him again tomorrow afternoon so that his father can introduce me to a fisherman friend of his. We also agreed to have coffee when I'm in Madrid, where he lives (he's in Foz on vacation for a month). Excellent.
Today I spent walking in the countryside to a small chapel called O Bispo Santo, and then to the oldest cathedral in Spain, the Basilica de San Martin, which dates to the sixth century! Of course, the sixth-century parts have been mostly (but not completely!) covered up by further construction in later centuries; I saw stones that had been placed in the ninth and tenth centuries, and frescoes and murals from the eleventh, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is mind-boggling to me that this church has stood through so much history. So many people have lived their entire lives -- birth to death, with love, knowledge, jobs, original and unoriginal ideas, hopes, failures, und so weiter -- while this church has stood, and I don't know about any of them! I can't even imagine their lives! It is exciting to me that I will be one of these mystery hypothetical people to somebody in a thousand years. Maybe they will think about it upon entering the same church.
The church also made me think about something that I love thinking about: What will remain of our time in a few thousand years? Few buildings, I think, are made to last (we just don't use giant rocks anymore), but maybe the road systems will be preserved, or, smaller-scale, things like plastic or glass bottles, airplane parts. Ooh, back to large scale: I can't wait for future archaeologists to unearth particle accelerators and neutrino detectors! Or mirrors from giant telescopes. And satellites -- those will be relics in the sky. And spacecraft on the Moon and Mars -- someday they will have been there for thousands of years, and people will know that. Ours is the time that they will have an abstract understanding of as the "breaking of the space frontier." And here we are now, living it!
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
A pretty fish (Burela, Spain)
I had been told to come to Burela to learn about bonito fishing, and oh boy have I learned about it. Not only did I go on a tour of the official bonito museum (which floats -- it is a boat), but I have seen boxes of bonito at the pre-dawn bonito auction and, what's more, "interviewed" a man who used to own a bonito boat. In short, I am a bonito expert. That's a lie; I am no expert. But, thanks to Tono (there should be a tilde over the "n" -- the name is like "Tonio"), the gracious man who chatted me up at the lonja (reversal of roles!) and invited me to come and talk with him this morning at his office, I know much more than I did before I came to Burela. Allow me to write at length about this fish:
Bonito is, true to its name, a pretty fish. It is also a migratory fish, and travels in shoals from the Azores Islands towards the northern coast of Spain between June and September, making its way to the region near the British Isles called "Gran Sol" by October and then, mysteriously, disappearing. Its movements have everything to do with the temperature of the water, and are therefore, to a certain degree, unpredictable; the climate refuses to do the same thing twice. You have to look for bonito to fish them, and every year you end up looking in new places. Burela has always been economically dependent on the costera, the passing of the bonito, and its float had up to eighty ships at some points in the past century. Now there are about thirty, and, although they are made of metal instead of wood and sport fancy-shmancy tech toys like global positioning systems, the method of fishing bonito remains (almost) exactly the same as it was fifty years ago.
On the Galician coast, bonito is fished with hooks, fifteen of them, which are attached to lines strung to an elevated horizontal bar at the stern of the ship, which allows for the bait to appear to swim through the water as the ship moves. The bait is not live, though -- it is a little bundle of ribbons covered with a jiggly, squid-like piece of plastic. Back in the day, when artificial materials didn't reign supreme, fishermen used corn husks to make the bait, but to their disadvantage; apparently the fish are more likely to bite certain colors of bait on certain days (which makes the rainbow that plastics offer a boon to modern bonito fishermen). On cloudy days, light-colored bait is used; on bright days, dark-colored bait. And on good days, this is how the fishing happens: A boat comes upon a shoal of fish, and they, liking the color of the bait on the hooks (I imagine: "Neon pink?! I've never eaten anything THAT color before!! I wonder what it tastes like!"), start to bite. Quicklyquickly the fishermen pull the lines with fish on them towards the side of the boat, grab the fish by the tail with a long hook, and whack it on the head with a wooden club with the intent to stun. If they hit it too gently, it thrashes its way to an ugly demise, and if they hit it too hard, blood might fall into the water and frighten the other fish away. This is the last thing the fishermen want, because they will continue to make passes through the same shoal until they stop catching fish.
The boats go out for a maximum of twenty days at a time, but come back sooner if they get lucky with the fishies. Tono recalled that when he first started fishing for bonito, at age fifteen, they knew that they had gotten lucky with the fishies when they saw whales; both whales and bonito eat shrimp, so, where there were whales, there was likely to be bonito, too. (He didn't say anything about whales these days, but many people have told me that they keep retreating farther and farther into the deep ocean; I wonder where and how often modern-day fishermen see them.) (I would really like to talk to a whale.) Tono also said that overfishing is not as grave a problem with seasonal fish, like bonito, as it is with fish that stay in the same place, like merluza/pescadilla. However, fishermen at other ports catch bonito with circular nets (that don't just catch bonito, but anything else unlucky enough to be swimming by), which he looks down upon because it is "industrial" and the quality of the fish decreases immensely. Also, until a few years ago (ten?)(ish), it was legal to fish by stringing long rectangular nets in the water, but, of course, some ships were caught placing nets that were eight times longer than the legal limit, and the harm to non-fishy species, like dolphins, was so great that the practice was banned entirely. Before the ban, bonito did suffer from overfishing; now they seem to be doing all right.
Well! I hope that you are impressed! It is really an interesting form of fishing, particularly because it's changed so little in the past fifty years. In addition to learning about bonito fishing, I have formulated a plan of attack against my recent moodiness (I'm lonely, but I deserve no pity, because 1. I am having an adventure and 2. it is a learning experience) (3. and it builds character! I don't think Calvin ever bought that, though): I will go on day trips to nearby towns! Yesterday I spent the entire day in and around a town called Mondonedo (the second "n" has a tilde over it), which is tucked between green hills a ways south of Burela and which used to be much more important than it is now (now it is a tourist hub; it used to be the capital of a province). I saw the impressive cathedral and the exteriors of several other churches, a convent where nuns still live, many an old beautiful building bathed in sunlight, which makes everything old beautiful, and much more in the way of camera fodder. I also went walking around the neighborhood called Los Molinos, through which artificial water canals run (some houses are accessed by little bridges!), and explored the rural surroundings. Narrow dirt paths bordered by trees and bushes that sometimes formed a dense ceiling -- ugh. Beautiful. In the spirit of my guide book: charming.
Something else charming that I've been meaning to mention: In several of the towns I've been in, I've stumbled across the Place Where the Old Men Meet. This is an unofficial landmark -- usually somewhere near the water, and usually somewhere with benches or steps -- where something vital to the functioning of the town takes place: old men reminisce! When I found the Place Where the Old Men Meet in Burela, I asked a man nearby what the building where I had seen them gathered was called. He said that it was a social room of sorts, but that everyone called it "the story benches." Isn't that lovely? In every town (or at least many towns), every afternoon, old men gather to tell stories, or, if the words aren't flowing, to sit in silence (but also in company). Routines of the retired. May we all enjoy them.
In other news, it is looking like I am going to be able to go on a fishing excursion with Jose (the man who had agreed to let me go with him last week, but whose ship broke) tomorrow night. I am nothing if not persistent (and BOLD), and on Friday, as I was returning by foot to Viveiro from San Ciprian, I passed by the port at Celeiro and decided to leave a note for him at the main office of the lonja. It read something like: "Oh hey there, Jose! I hope your ship is fixed soon! If it is, think I could go with you sometime next week? I won't be far away and I'm great at taking buses! It's okay if you say no! Well, let me know! Great! ~Irene" but sixteen times more formal and maybe only half as obnoxious. I didn't expect him to write -- because half as obnoxious is still pretty obnoxious -- but yesterday I got a one-line e-mail from him, all capital letters, telling me to show up at the dock any night this week. I'm tempted, at this point in my writing, to go wild with exclamation points, but I've resolved not to reveal my inner enthusiasm, lest the sea gods notice and cause the ship to break again (I already saw the weather forecast for tomorrow: rain all along the northern coast of Spain) (i.e. waves!). To that end, I'll say: If I do get to go on the ship, maybe it'll be sort of interesting. I probably won't learn that much, though. Honestly, I'd rather stay in my hostel room and watch TV or something. At least I wouldn't get seasick. And who wants to be around a bunch of flopping dying fish? Probably only weirdos. Lord knows I am not a weirdo! (Do you think I fooled them?! Oh probably!)
Bonito is, true to its name, a pretty fish. It is also a migratory fish, and travels in shoals from the Azores Islands towards the northern coast of Spain between June and September, making its way to the region near the British Isles called "Gran Sol" by October and then, mysteriously, disappearing. Its movements have everything to do with the temperature of the water, and are therefore, to a certain degree, unpredictable; the climate refuses to do the same thing twice. You have to look for bonito to fish them, and every year you end up looking in new places. Burela has always been economically dependent on the costera, the passing of the bonito, and its float had up to eighty ships at some points in the past century. Now there are about thirty, and, although they are made of metal instead of wood and sport fancy-shmancy tech toys like global positioning systems, the method of fishing bonito remains (almost) exactly the same as it was fifty years ago.
On the Galician coast, bonito is fished with hooks, fifteen of them, which are attached to lines strung to an elevated horizontal bar at the stern of the ship, which allows for the bait to appear to swim through the water as the ship moves. The bait is not live, though -- it is a little bundle of ribbons covered with a jiggly, squid-like piece of plastic. Back in the day, when artificial materials didn't reign supreme, fishermen used corn husks to make the bait, but to their disadvantage; apparently the fish are more likely to bite certain colors of bait on certain days (which makes the rainbow that plastics offer a boon to modern bonito fishermen). On cloudy days, light-colored bait is used; on bright days, dark-colored bait. And on good days, this is how the fishing happens: A boat comes upon a shoal of fish, and they, liking the color of the bait on the hooks (I imagine: "Neon pink?! I've never eaten anything THAT color before!! I wonder what it tastes like!"), start to bite. Quicklyquickly the fishermen pull the lines with fish on them towards the side of the boat, grab the fish by the tail with a long hook, and whack it on the head with a wooden club with the intent to stun. If they hit it too gently, it thrashes its way to an ugly demise, and if they hit it too hard, blood might fall into the water and frighten the other fish away. This is the last thing the fishermen want, because they will continue to make passes through the same shoal until they stop catching fish.
The boats go out for a maximum of twenty days at a time, but come back sooner if they get lucky with the fishies. Tono recalled that when he first started fishing for bonito, at age fifteen, they knew that they had gotten lucky with the fishies when they saw whales; both whales and bonito eat shrimp, so, where there were whales, there was likely to be bonito, too. (He didn't say anything about whales these days, but many people have told me that they keep retreating farther and farther into the deep ocean; I wonder where and how often modern-day fishermen see them.) (I would really like to talk to a whale.) Tono also said that overfishing is not as grave a problem with seasonal fish, like bonito, as it is with fish that stay in the same place, like merluza/pescadilla. However, fishermen at other ports catch bonito with circular nets (that don't just catch bonito, but anything else unlucky enough to be swimming by), which he looks down upon because it is "industrial" and the quality of the fish decreases immensely. Also, until a few years ago (ten?)(ish), it was legal to fish by stringing long rectangular nets in the water, but, of course, some ships were caught placing nets that were eight times longer than the legal limit, and the harm to non-fishy species, like dolphins, was so great that the practice was banned entirely. Before the ban, bonito did suffer from overfishing; now they seem to be doing all right.
Well! I hope that you are impressed! It is really an interesting form of fishing, particularly because it's changed so little in the past fifty years. In addition to learning about bonito fishing, I have formulated a plan of attack against my recent moodiness (I'm lonely, but I deserve no pity, because 1. I am having an adventure and 2. it is a learning experience) (3. and it builds character! I don't think Calvin ever bought that, though): I will go on day trips to nearby towns! Yesterday I spent the entire day in and around a town called Mondonedo (the second "n" has a tilde over it), which is tucked between green hills a ways south of Burela and which used to be much more important than it is now (now it is a tourist hub; it used to be the capital of a province). I saw the impressive cathedral and the exteriors of several other churches, a convent where nuns still live, many an old beautiful building bathed in sunlight, which makes everything old beautiful, and much more in the way of camera fodder. I also went walking around the neighborhood called Los Molinos, through which artificial water canals run (some houses are accessed by little bridges!), and explored the rural surroundings. Narrow dirt paths bordered by trees and bushes that sometimes formed a dense ceiling -- ugh. Beautiful. In the spirit of my guide book: charming.
Something else charming that I've been meaning to mention: In several of the towns I've been in, I've stumbled across the Place Where the Old Men Meet. This is an unofficial landmark -- usually somewhere near the water, and usually somewhere with benches or steps -- where something vital to the functioning of the town takes place: old men reminisce! When I found the Place Where the Old Men Meet in Burela, I asked a man nearby what the building where I had seen them gathered was called. He said that it was a social room of sorts, but that everyone called it "the story benches." Isn't that lovely? In every town (or at least many towns), every afternoon, old men gather to tell stories, or, if the words aren't flowing, to sit in silence (but also in company). Routines of the retired. May we all enjoy them.
In other news, it is looking like I am going to be able to go on a fishing excursion with Jose (the man who had agreed to let me go with him last week, but whose ship broke) tomorrow night. I am nothing if not persistent (and BOLD), and on Friday, as I was returning by foot to Viveiro from San Ciprian, I passed by the port at Celeiro and decided to leave a note for him at the main office of the lonja. It read something like: "Oh hey there, Jose! I hope your ship is fixed soon! If it is, think I could go with you sometime next week? I won't be far away and I'm great at taking buses! It's okay if you say no! Well, let me know! Great! ~Irene" but sixteen times more formal and maybe only half as obnoxious. I didn't expect him to write -- because half as obnoxious is still pretty obnoxious -- but yesterday I got a one-line e-mail from him, all capital letters, telling me to show up at the dock any night this week. I'm tempted, at this point in my writing, to go wild with exclamation points, but I've resolved not to reveal my inner enthusiasm, lest the sea gods notice and cause the ship to break again (I already saw the weather forecast for tomorrow: rain all along the northern coast of Spain) (i.e. waves!). To that end, I'll say: If I do get to go on the ship, maybe it'll be sort of interesting. I probably won't learn that much, though. Honestly, I'd rather stay in my hostel room and watch TV or something. At least I wouldn't get seasick. And who wants to be around a bunch of flopping dying fish? Probably only weirdos. Lord knows I am not a weirdo! (Do you think I fooled them?! Oh probably!)
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