The First Day

PART II

Upon driving through a small-modern city, the cab pulled in to a small plaza. It had an island in the middle that house an underground parking lot hidden under a small park. Bordering this plaza was what looked like and was the medieval quarter. Paved streets do no encroach upon it. It is a sanctuary of the pedestrian. I paid the driver and stepped I to the gray cobblestone street. There is really nothing in the states like this. We just didn’t exist when these kind of cities were built. So of course, excited, I began to wander the streets and explore instead of thinking about eating or where I was going to sleep. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I was somewhat familiar with the city, not so much in where I was going but in what it had, what is was about. There layout really has no rhyme or reason, you can tell they extemporized the building as the centuries went by. So I meandered through wide arcaded lanes, backstreets, passageways, and alleys. Carrying my pack, it soon began to wear on my shoulders and this fatigue snapped me out of my rapturous exploration.

As I started to think about a place to rest, standing in a small plaza, and staring at a fountain with water flowing out of horse’s mouth I felt a blow on my shoulder. It wasn’t painful but enough for me to take notice. I promptly stepped in to a defensive stance but no on was in front of me. I am not a karate expert or anything like that, it was just a reflex for me to get my hands up and squat my legs a bit. I heard giggling behind me that made me angrier. I swerved around to see a skinny, pasty Englishman smiling at me with two broad-front teeth at the forefront. Appeased and assuaged, I began to laugh myself. I knew this man, he was English but he had lived in New York and I knew him well. Now, it is nothing strange for tourists from Northern Europe to visit Santiago, it gets quite a bit of tourism, still the coincidence flabbergasted me a bit. Meeting someone you know on the street is on thing, running in to someone you know on a street in a random country is another. My friend, Eric, was in his late 30’s. I actually babysat his kid. I had met him through my mother who knew hike from work. He needed a babysitter for a summer and I wanted easy summer job money. Anyway it was nice to feel a familiar face.

After explaining that I didn’t have any definite plans, I was just kind of wandering; he said “You're coming with me mate.” He himself was there because his girlfriend was an academic who had some business in the city but he had been left on his own for the day. He took me back to his hotel room where I dropped off my bag. He wanted to eat and drink, with an emphasis on drinking. I wanted to check out the city. We settled on doing both. There are some things should know about Santiago; the food is delicious, it has a population of about 33,000 students, and it is about a pristine a city as you are going to get for time travel. You should know also that it’s not the Spain you are used to. It rains all of the time, its not sunny. There is no flamenco or bullfights, they actually play bagpipe here, the region has Celtic origins. Drinking in bars where people have been drinking for over a century really only enhances the experience.

As always avoid the bars with pictures if you can. There a re a lot of great places around the cathedral, the main attraction of the city, where they purportedly have St. James the apostle buried. The local beer, Estrella Galicia, is very good as are the house wines. I recommend croquettes, gambas al ajillo, pimientos de padron, tortilla, among other great tapas. Croquettes have this milky stuff inside combined with ham or chicken or crab. They are addictive and delicious. Gambas are forced shrimp. Pimientos are these little local green peppers, they are amazing as well. Tortilla is a sort of concoction they make from eggs and potatoes also great. If you have a brave tongue, try octopus as well. You won’t find any better octopus in the world, not that Americans are often octopus enthusiasts. It looks unsettling to eat a creature like that but on the table you just get little pieces of the arms and its not revolting at all.

So my friend and I pretty much went on a day-long surfeit. There are so many restaurants and bars packed in to the old quarter. It’s really not that large but the maze-like structure makes it seem more daunting and expansive than it is. The good thing is that because it is small getting lost isn’t that big of a deal. Keep wandering and you will find the cathedral or your hotel or the parking lot where you parked. Anyway, some of my drunken highlights included walking through a museum, a building adjacent to the Cathedral where I am guessing clergy used to live and peasants were housed. It had been converted and let me tell you that wandering medieval halls in their entire splendor while buzzed is very fun. Inside the Cathedral I also stumbled upon an amazing statue. They have a figure of a saint who goes by Santiago Matamoros aka St. James Muslim Killer. Spain had been occupied at least in part my various Muslim Taifas and caliphates for 700 years so they took the apostle St. James, Spain’s patron saint, and converted him in to an infidel slaughtering machine. IN the statue he is on his horses promptly decapitating “moros” I am glad the evangelicals in the U.S. don’t have the kind of devotion to saints that Roman Catholics do or I suspect they surely would have promoted this statue after 9/11. From the roof, they have this huge urn, about five feet tall, and they swing it across the nave releasing incense. I kept wondering how the thing didn’t haphazardly bump in to the vaults or the stain-glass windows but the priest were dexterous and kept it on an up and down axis. I imagined filling it up with weed and baking out the entire cathedral, almost like a Christian version of a peyote ritual.

I also bought a phone drunk; American cell phones don’t have coverage over here so I picked one up for my travels here. The attendant was a young woman with a black ponytail; she didn’t seem to enjoy my glib indifference to the details of the payment pan. I just wanted to flirt with here (unsuccessfully) and pay. The night culminated with us in a bar full of college kids. They weren’t speaking Spanish but instead Gallego or Galician, the local language. Its pretty much Portuguese if you want to know what it sounds like. Anyway they were arguing and by this point I was bordering on blacking out. I by no means want to drink my way across Europe and have it all be a haze. I know there are millions of ways of having fun without blacking out but when you are with an Englishman particularly this one, it’s hard to avoid it. I wish I could tell you the specifics but I don’t remember, I vaguely remember arguing separatists politics. All I know that I have woken up next to a woman, a woman I remember being attracted to and trying to talk to before I blacked out, and that I now I have the first new number in my cell phone. I checked it when I woke up and found her name was Marta although I wrote Mararta when I put it in.

Now I woke up and my English friend was nowhere to be found and my backpack was in his room. So I got up, Marta wasn’t around, and walked outside. I had no idea where I was, luckily Santiago is based on a hill and I know that the Cathedral is at the top of that hill and that my friend was staying in a hotel adjacent to that hill. SO I walked excelsior or ever upwards until I saw the spires and was soon back in the large square that contained the cathedral, the hotel, town hall, and a building of the University. I walked in to the hotel, uncomfortable with the unnatural red carpet on stone under my feet. I went to the front desk and asked for help. The problem happed to be that I couldn’t remember his last name so that they could not help me. I knew he wasn’t leaving until the next day so I didn’t panic. I decided that instead of wasting my day trying to find him I would come back at night and wait to see him walk in the hotel. If he didn’t show I would try again the following morning and try to catch him leaving. I was too restless to sit around waiting for him. I had a bit of money on my pocket for food (luckily it had been other people treating me to drink the night before from what I could tell from what I had left) so I was alright. So I set off.

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