Blogs from Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain, Europe

About an hour and a half on the train from Vigo is Santiago de Compostela a place you may have heard of because despite it being smaller than Vigo and A Coruna, it is probably more famous than both due to its religious significance in a very religious country. My own, terribly outdated and incorrect view of such places is such that I thought, on arrival I’d be greeted by a huge throng of people, all completing the Pilgrimage to Santiago or that I simply wouldn’t be allowed out of the station and into the city for not being religious enough – a la Medina or Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Of course, neither of these are even close to being true and only serve to show, again, just how ignorant, kind of uneasy and yet slightly ... read more

For the four day weekend in October I went with Fernando and a few of his friends to Santiago de Copostela. We stayed in one of his friend's beautiful house. I spent the whole weekend eating and drinking!... read more

After spending a magnificent day in Madrid, we headed back to the train station and jumped on a train around 10:30 at night. Transportation is so strange here, you just give them your money and you get on said type of transportation. No drama, no security, no hassle and no problem! We managed to get a little sleep despite the cramped quarters and the bright lights in the cabin. Seven hours later we arrived in Santiago de Compostela, the city where I would soon be calling home. We snagged a cab and took a short ride to our hostel/hotel called Casa Felisa (Happy Home). The room wasn’t available until 10am so we left our luggage behind and headed out to the city while the sun was still coming up. We walked a short way and turned ... read more

I’ve often thought, particularly while walking the Camino de Santiago in 2009, that Spain would be the place where I’d settle, at least for a good few years, if not forever. Therefore I’d been putting off moving to Spain for as long as possible because I thought I should get other ambitions out of the way first, such as living and working in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia, and travelling around Africa. Seeing as all of those things had been achieved, I started applying for work in Spain. The north of Spain appealed the most. It is the greenest part of Spain without the excessive summer temperatures found inland and, unlike the Mediterranean, the north coast isn’t destroyed by endless ugly hotels with grey sand beaches covered in pink Brits. Fortunately there is still a ... read more