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Published: April 29th 2012
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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 My own, terribly outdated and incorrect view of such places is such that I thought, on arrival I’d be greeted by a huge throng of people, all completing the Pilgrimage to Santiago or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 in awe I am of all things religious.
When I did get off the train, at about 11oclock on a Sunday morning, something ever so slightly interesting did happen, although as far as I’m aware there was no religious significance to it at all. I walked out of the station and realised that I had absolutely no idea where I was or where I
should go. This may just sound like the actions of an idiot, and that’s a difficult one to argue against, but as someone who tends to plan everything, in situations like this, down to the Nth degree, to get a train to a place and then suddenly realise that I had never even looked at a map of the city to find out where the station was in relation to the Cathedral (the thing I wanted to see) was unusual. In Liverpool terms, the station could’ve been like Lime Street and nicely positioned in the city centre, or like Liverpool South Parkway, and nobody wants that.
This may not sound like anything more than bad planning, but for me it was one of those ace moments where after getting on for two years of doing this, I realise that there is still scope to surprise myself.
So, I decided just to pick a side and stick with it and comforted myself with the thought that, thanks to my dreadful sense of direction, not knowing where anything was would make it only marginally less likely that I’d find it than if I had a map and a sat-nav. On
leaving the station there were four directions to go in, giving it a bit of a feel of Knightmare without the helmet and the three geeky kids giving directions. I chose the one that went uphill, purely based on the fact that the Santiago Pilgrimage is meant to be tough, so it seemed more likely that way. Of course, the traditional pilgrims probably didn’t have to walk through a high street full of clothes shops, but that was the best logic I could come up with at the time.
Fortunately, as it turned out, the station was more like Lime Street as walking uphill led me, inevitably really, to a very pretty church which also happened to have an anti-Government protest going on in the grounds. As you’d expect, given the 45% youth unemployment here (youth being anyone under the age of about 35) these protests happen fairly regularly on a variety of scales. Here, there were a good few hundred people which, considering it was the day after the first day of Carnaval (the equivalent of the morning after St Patrick’s Day, in a way) was quite impressive.
I had been told that once you’re in the
old town, you’ll see the Cathedral as it towers above everything else and that was pretty accurate advice which made it straightforward enough to negotiate my way through the beautiful old town – which constantly gives you the feeling of being in the real Spain – and find it.
The Cathedral itself is imposing, breath-taking and completely incredible to look at. It is overwhelming in a totally different way to a building like the Parliament in Budapest, as, rather than it being positioned next to the river for all to see, it is in a relatively compact, intimate square, meaning that despite its height, it doesn’t feel as though it’s been made on a huge scale, it’s just the intricacy of its design and its age that gives it almost a unique feel and power. I sat down on the ground, on the other side of the square in an effort to try and take it in, but even then, it just made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up every time I went back to look at a different section – sort of the building equivalent of an REM song.
As I say, the
weekend I was there was Carnaval weekend, (I gather it has some significance beyond a 4-day weekend for me, but I couldn’t quite ascertain what that was), which is the same deal as the Rio Carnaval as I understand it, but with less half-naked people dancing and more people dressed as Batman or Zorro. In Santiago this meant that as well as the protesters, there was also a group of people (think Hare-Krishnas in quieter clothes but with scary, porcelain doll type masks on) winding their way through the streets, playing music, singing, dancing and trying in vain to get terrified children to join in. Difficult to blame the children really as, despite being undoubtedly happy, well-meaning people, thanks to the masks the funsters did have a very sinister, Wicker Man type air about them.
Vigo did have its own stuff for Carnaval, including a parade through the city centre and a protest of its own, although according to my students, the major celebrations were on the Friday and Saturday nights in the form of fancy dress parties. It was these which led to me walking to the train station seeing all manner of drunk/hungover people asleep on the
floor in the street. Men dressed as women, women dressed as nurses, everybody dressed as superheroes – all meaning that it was just a couple of takeaways and a fight away from being exactly like Lime Street on a Sunday morning.
Pura Vida
Dave
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