Boo (pronounced BEAU) de Piélagos > Cóbreces. En route, about 28 km, but I took a bus to avoid a narrow train bridge (trains are bad at sharing bridges) and only walked about 12 km.
Here I am and now, in Cóbreces. Today was ringing bells, barking dogs, and accidents. Ringing bells fade away, but dogs have endless bark stimulation. They love the life.
This was my first day walking the Camino del Norte by myself. Outside a supermarket an elderly Canadian couple demanded to know my age. They looked cheated when I told them the truth. I thought maybe they would ask for my passport, too.
Before I left my friends, we went to see La Iglesia de la Virgin Grande, literially the Church of the Big Virgin, or more likely the Very Big Church of the Virgin. It was surprisingly Modernist, and empty. Then I left my friends with my pack full. I had a liter and a half of water, salted peanuts, a Snickers bar, and a loaf of day-old bread sticking out of my pack like a mast. In many ways, walking alone is harder than it is with a group, although I’m grateful for the chance to slow down the pace. I’m a loiterer by nature.
I spent twenty minutes or so feeding some donkeys by the side of the road. Behind an electric fence, they could see, but not eat, the juiciest weeds. So we spent some time, me feeding weeds, them eating weeds. It was almost like eating lunch among baby humans. Until the leader of the two got impatient (maybe I got lazy) and he bit my finger instead of the weeds! I had a moment of real panic that he would bite my finger off like a carrot.
Ok, he didn’t. But he did break the skin! That was accident number one.
Accident number two involved coffee, coffee, fresh orange juice, cerveza sin alcohol, and a liter of water, and no bathrooms, and an unforseen patch of stinging nettles. Maybe the government of Cantabria did this on purpose, or maybe someone very important and educated once muttered, Fuck my ass, I forgot to build some bathrooms on the Camino!
I thought that as I walked, my thoughts would coalesce around some great plot, but they didn’t. They lazed around and some grew appendages like tadpoles. I thought about phrasal verbs and the tower of Babel.
Phrasal verbs are idiomatic and difficult to define, but in English they’re ususally defining an abstract movement. The formula is verb + adverb and/or preposition. Such as “turn down [the offer.]”
Like how in Spanish, you “take” a coffee (not “have” a coffee). In English you take pictures, in Spanish you sacar fotos. Which is interesting because you also sacar la basura, to take out the trash. In German you use the verb machem, to make. “Make photos.”
To take photos is to extract them from a photogenic environment. To take out/get photos is to carry your photos away, to seperate them from the photogenic environment. And to make photos is to use the camera to make something that previously didn’t exist. At least for my English brain, each of these word games has a different connotation.
If I looked out from the tower of Babel, I would see each language as the living embodiment of a way of being. I would see that I came to Spain not just to learn Spanish, but to learn Spain. When do I say genial, and when do I say de muerte?
Of course that’s an idealistic outlook, because I’m not in a tower, I’m on the ground. Languages are barriers to connection as much as they are ways of being… But to travel in another language seperates you from your home barriers, you start to think differently about how you think, and I think that’s a good thing.
My head is in the clouds, but after all I’m traveling through the mountains. When it comes down to it, for my interview in August, to determine if I am conversational enough in Spanish, it won’t matter where or I learned to speak, but only if I can smoothly answer the question, Cual es tu mayor debilidad? What’s your biggest weakness?
I would say, I have no weaknesses, I’ve done the Camino. Or if they pushed me, I would say Mis pies, my feet.
I’m traveling alone on foot in a foreign country. It’s hard but I’m free. Freedom hurts. Tomorrow I get closer to Santiago de Compostela, and to my goal. How else can I shape my changes?
cdzhouse 