Tuesday May 28, 2019

Pontevedra to Combarra, Spain—Day 13; about 23,300 steps

Proverbs 13

v. 4  A sluggard’s appetite is never filled, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.  The diligent—is that us?  We press our feet to the ground kilometer after kilometer, daily shortening the distance to Santiago.  An Italian lady I met in the Slow City Hostel yesterday had been walking the Caminho Portugués from Lisbon (!) but had decided the Camino was not for her and was going home—just days from Santiago!  How could she not press on with the goal almost in sight?  Maybe she has fulfilled what she was called to do.  But we seek to diligently keep on to the end.  Our desires are now simple:  cool water, some shade, a reasonable place to rest, a hot meal at the end of the day, the wifi password, our feet to stop hurting, the first sight of the cathedral in Santiago.  “The righteous eat to their hearts’ content,” writes Solomon at the end of the chapter (v. 25), and most of the rest of our desires seem close to fulfillment.  Dear Lord, I look to you for my feet to stop hurting!  And thank you that, no matter our earthly desires, in you I will be fully satisfied forever.

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There is no sound privacy in the hostel’s unisex, one toilet stall, one shower stall, two sink bathroom.  Everyone was out early except us and the Koreans.  The world learns English to get along.  It really is an amazing thing.

Maurice sat on the bed to finish assembling his pack.  He looked down on the floor and there was his missing hearing aid.  Really.  The floor I had crawled around on and Jorge had swept.  Maurice supposes it fell out of his pack—the pack he had searched two nights before.  But there it was.  A Camino miracle.

We were out at 8:55 and soon met up with Ronna from Chicago and Doug from Sarasota.  They have been friends since working together 35 years ago and discovered they are good walking companions.  Doug (even older than Maurice) is writing a blog for the Herald Tribune along the Way.  He posts every day and writes it on his phone.  What a slacker I am.  We separated from Doug and Ronna at the split for the Camino’s Spiritual Variant which we (I?) had planned that we should do, adding more kilometers to our journey (it seemed like a good idea at the time).  Actually I missed the split because I was walking ahead and talking with Doug.  Maurice had to rein me back (“Sounds like an urgent call,” said Doug), which is not the first time he’s had to do that.  Maurice is fairly certain I’d be lost the first day if I tried to do a Camino on my own.  

At a little Romanesque church, closed but with an outdoor pulpit and baptismal font, I had a brief conversation with a French couple.  Farther on, the Poio monastery, now a luxury hotel though the cruceiros have not been taken down, gave us sellos and allowed us to have a drink in their cafe and use their nice facility.  We watched ladies washing windows in a former cloister overlooking lemon trees in the garth and wandered into the lovely modern capilla, all a pleasant diversion before we picked up our packs and moved on. 

Out the other end of the monastic complex we passed an unchanged section with church and another cloister where we could have had a visit but it cost money and time and we didn’t want to hang around long enough to make it worthwhile.

We passed a preschool with besmocked children playing outside, reminding us of Eric and Chris’ Italian asilo days, and suddenly we were at the ria, with views across the little bay to Combarra where we were headed. 

It was a nice enough walk along the water, though we couldn’t determine what all the floppy white things were in the clear water—aquatic plants or shredding plastic bags? 

The ancient stone fishing port was just a few feet above the beach. Narrow stone lanes twisted among dwellings, barns and cruceiros (Jesus facing inland, Mary facing the sea), and one path snaked along the coast, threading between fishermen’s houses with second story balconies propped up on stone columns, and stone ramps and horreos on the seaside.  Many of the old buildings had been converted to shops, bars/cafes or restaurants, not overly commercial but with a tourist vibe and many pedestrians.

Maurice had booked us a hotel, the Stella Maris, which turned out to be at the far end of the harbor, so on we trudged.  Our window looked out to…the road.  How much more for a sea view?  The receptionist consulted a paper and told us seven, which really turned out to be nine.  Whatever.  We opened our big window to the breeze, hung our washed socks in the window track and sat on the bed to eat lunch and enjoy the fine view of beach, marina and the modern town ringing the sea, then slept for a solid hour until we were hungry again.  It was a relatively short day but we were beat.

Maurice went out to explore and I eventually dragged myself back to town.  The tourists were leaving.  Two restaurant barkers were vying for customers in their shared space on a small open plaza by the sea.  We tried to quiz them:  did they have a pilgrim menu, was it a reasonable price and what did it contain?  We’re both pretty sure we rejected the seafood-only menu and picked the restaurant where the person said something like “biftek.” 

The first course was empanada, a thick flakey pastry stuffed with something pleasant.  The barker had turned into our waitress and we discussed the menu further in Spanish and English, our two languages passing one another in the evening breeze.  Did we want chipirones?  Oh, no, no, no.  Google Translate wasn’t working but that word sounded familiar.  We had been in a bakery a few days previous and asked about a big slab of something on the counter.  Was it blackberry cobbler?  No, said the little clerk, flipping through her phone; she didn’t know the word but turned her phone around to show us pictures of…disgusting swimming things with a lot of legs.  Definitely not blackberry cobbler.  So, no, we didn’t want chipirones.  We wanted the arroz con pollo, rice with chicken.  There was no mention of biftek.  After a while our waitress returned and sat a cast iron pan in front of us, ready to dish it out.  Maurice and I stared in horrified dismay.  Chipirones. 

Whole little squids, cooked lavender in their ink.  “They look like your gel toe caps,” said Maurice.  Yes.  But with tentacles.  Gel toe caps with tentacles. I wanted to gag.  I could hardly look at them much less eat them.  Maurice fleetingly appeared ready to take a deep breath and try them—but no.  The waitress was chattering away.  She had no idea what the problem was, but we wouldn’t let her dish them out.  “OK, OK,” she said, and took them away.  There were little cats skulking around that I hope got some chipirones that night.  Soon our waitress reappeared with the arroz con pollo.  The chicken turned out to be a hope and a dream, nothing but a few backbones, but the rice was mixed with plenty of legs and tentacles and other things I didn’t look too closely at.  We ate most of it and even found some edible pork therein.  Perhaps it was out of pity the waitress finished off our meal with slabs of a heavy bread-pudding-like dessert, or maybe she just hoped it would weigh us down and we’d tumble into the sea on the way home, never again to insult her restaurant’s fresh Neptunian delicacies.