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Published: October 14th 2007
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For a continent that’s suffered through - in no particular order - two World Wars, the Black Death and ABBA, you have to wonder what cruel twist of fate has inflicted American college kids upon Europe. These ersatz ambassadors of the culture - with their flip-flops and athletic shorts and astonishing breadth of four-letter words - have become as welcome a sight overseas as Condoleeza Rice. I can hear them in the café from half a car away, the hoots and howls that signify I’m in for, like, a very long night. The Spanish passengers - like migratory birds come winter’s chill - are in full flight in the other direction.
There are nights when you can practically feel your brain gasping for air. No matter how you try to slice it, lines like, “Dude, you need to chug that fucker,” just won’t scan like “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” I order a coffee and bury myself in a copy of
El Pais. Beside me, an earnest kid with floppy blond hair and a yellow LIVESTRONG bracelet is hunched over a pen and pad. Though he’s with the others, he’s going over vocabulary drills in soft murmurs. Not for
him this talk about the mile-high club or the state of a certain girl’s leg hair. One of his friends - tall and tan in a sleeveless tee - comes over to offer some sage advice.
“Dude, I hate books,” he says. “Reading sucks.”
As you can imagine, the rest of the night is less Algonquin Round Table than “Hollywood Squares.” They play enough drinking games to fill an alcoholic Olympiad and sing nonsense, rhyming songs in Spanish. The keen observation that someone’s moustache makes him “look like a Mexican” is complicated slightly by the fact that he is, indeed, half-Mexican. Twice the bartender has to ask them to quiet down. The kid doing vocab drills offers a bashful, “
Lo siento.”
Plenty of fuckers are being chugged.
Even after I’ve headed back to my seat, it’s hardly a peaceful night. The windows in Spanish trains are apparently made of cellophane, and there’s little to keep out the cold or the clamorous noise as we race over the tracks. The train arrives in Santiago at half-past seven. There’s a thin blanket of mist over the platform; the sky is still black. After an
hour a deep, pre-dawn blue settles on the plazas and the spires of the cathedral. In the plazas, fussing around in the dark, a few old women are setting up their souvenir stalls, hanging the rosaries and the plastic crosses.
This moody, rainy city of moss-covered stone is quick to cast a spell on me. I watch the pilgrims trudge into the Praza do Obradoiro throughout the day: barefoot or in Gore-Tex boots, wearing high-tech rain gear, wearing plastic bags, tapping the stones with their walking sticks. Santiago might attract more tourists than any city in Spain, but these aren’t the resort crowds of the Costa Brava or the day-trippers of Toledo. Most have arrived on foot, and I’m pained to learn that of the two dozen or so travelers staying in my hostel, I seem to be the only one whose Camino de Santiago started at the train station. I meet Yedde, a ruddy Danish nurse who’s walked the
camino for the third time. She’s taken six weeks off from work, but she’ll be returning to Copenhagen after the fourth. It’s a painful process trying to adjust to the rhythms and doldrums of daily life after walking
the
camino, and she needs those extra two weeks just to adjust.
“It’s so beautiful, so spiritual,” she says. “You can’t explain that to people who haven’t done it. These other people, how they live…they don’t understand.”
I’m trying to figure out where I fit into all of that.
You see the same beatific faces and upturned eyes around the city. On the steps of the cathedral, four spry young pilgrims - given fresh legs as they cross the finish line - are humming religious hymns. Priests are everywhere, glowing rosily. By the time you’ve spent a few hours circling the Old Town, you expect to find a handful of cherubim posing for pictures in the plazas.
In a
panadería there’s an Australian woman struggling to order some sweets. She’s wearing a bright red jacket and has a red scarf tied around her neck, and when she wants two slices of
tarta she asks for “
deux.” There’s something endearing about an Australian speaking French in a Spanish bakery, and after I help with a few translations and some confusion over the bill, we walk the wet streets of Santiago in a slow, ambling
loop.
Joss makes for good walking company - not surprising, considering she’s had tons of practice. She’s walked most of the
camino in France; she’s walked across the Pyrenees and the Alps; she’s walked through Switzerland and Austria, and across much of Canada. It’s good timing that I bumped into her when I did: tomorrow she’s leaving Santiago, having given herself a year to walk from here to Rome. She tells me about all the lovely people she’s met on the road, about the time she was traveling through Labrador and had to jump onto a passing train. We marvel at the mossy flagstones in the plazas and the somber light striking the face of the cathedral. The rain is falling in fits and starts.
We stop for tea in a dark, smoky taverna. Joss’ white hair is matted to her head, the color full in her nose and cheeks. She begins to tell me about her two daughters - one a photographer, the other an organizer for an international peace symposium. Her voice swells as she talks about their work, but she sighs into her tea. “They don’t know what to do with me,” she says.
“They say, ‘Why can’t we have a normal mum, who stays home to make biscuits and chicken noodle soup?’” There’s a mischievous light in her eye as she says it, and it’s not hard to suspect that her course - however long and wandering it may be - has been set far from a kitchen in Queensland.
At a loss for what comes next, we say our goodbyes outside an old convent. There are workers chiseling and scraping at the façade, sending little clouds of dust into the air. We offer hopes to meet again someday, when our paths might criss-cross outside some French medieval town, or on a dusty, barren stretch of Australian outback. Then Joss opens her umbrella and walks across the plaza, disappearing into a soggy mass of pilgrims.
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