day 11 :

tuesday, 5 june

Have you ever noticed how you're starving in the morning after having had a big meal the night before? Well, today was one of those days, so we were glad to have a big breakfast at our hotel – bread, jams, fresh juice, fruit, semi-soft cheese, quince paste with walnuts, and café con leche.

We walked to the edge of Santiago de Compostela, and under a blue sky and brilliant sun we followed the final segment of the Camino de Santiago, in the company of several pilgrims completing their arduous journey. Once at the plaza, we decided to tour the cathedral's crypt and museum for the very reasonable price of five Euros. There was a lot to see: relics, sculptures, paintings, tapestries, and old gardens. There were many, many rooms of all shapes and sizes in the monastery, and old stone staircases between the floors, so that you felt like you could go on exploring all day. The upper level of the museum was particularly nice, which had an open-air palace, and an exterior promenade that had wonderful views of the cathedral's plaza.

To complete our immersion here, we attended the noon mass, where the church seats were packed with pilgrims and tourists a half hour before the service started. Backpacks lined the side of the church, propped against each other. The mass was in Spanish and Latin, and even though we didn't understand a lot of what was said, it was still similar to Catholic masses back home.

We caught lunch at the same tapas bar as yesterday, and Eric finally got to try his local pulpo (octopus) dish. There was, in fact, an enormous amount of octopus on the plate, so much so that Eric's octopus cravings were quelled for several days afterwards. While we were hanging out and enjoying our coffees, two young girls came in with their dad to buy ice cream. This was actually a repeat of a scene we saw here yesterday; one of the waiters hauled out the huge laminated picture board similar to one you might see on the side of an ice cream truck, and smiled patiently while the girls waffled between bars and cones and bomb pops. This event was pretty representative of a trend we saw on this trip: family life is more integrated into society. You find kids in bars (which have these ice cream menus expressly for them), you find them in fancy restaurants, you find them everywhere you go; they're always under adult supervision, but they're not segregated to the local Chuck y Queso-equivalent establishment. Parents benefit because they can still go to the places that everyone else goes to without having to get a babysitter, and the kids learn early on what real life is all about.

Speaking of real life, this was mid-way through our trip, and our laundry had been piling up. On a trip like this, we'd normally spend several hours in a do-it-yourself laundromat, see a little of how the locals live, and take a break. We had heard from the hotel owners in Asturias that do-it-yourself laundromats are pretty rare in Spain and Portugal, and the hotel receptionist confirmed this by telling us that there was only one, and it was all the way across town. Given our limited time here, we opted instead to have our hotel send it out for us, since the price seemed fairly reasonable (as compared to some hotels we'd been to where just a single pair of socks was a couple Euros to launder). We sent out two bags stuffed to the top, and when it was all returned to us nicely folded this afternoon, it seemed like 18 Euros well-spent.

We were in search of two things today: an orange scarf for Dawn, and rosquillas for Eric. The scarf quest turned out to be pretty easy, and in fact Dawn found two for just a few Euros each. The rosquillas proved to be more elusive; we had read that we shouldn't miss trying these donut-shaped specialty cakes, but when we asked for them at a bakery that our hotel recommended, the woman kindly explained that she only makes them for festivals – you can't just buy them every day. We fed our dejection with a couple of shortbread cookies, and quickly got over the non-existent rosquillas.

For our final evening in Santiago, we walked through several parks outside the old town, and then went for a casual dinner at a Galician restaurant called O Dezaseis. Apparently foreshadowing the coming days on our trip, the Castillian Spanish we had learned and practiced so much was not particularly useful here; our waiter spoke Galician, and the menu was in Galician. Galician is an interesting mix between Castillian Spanish and Portuguese, still similar enough to Spanish that we could recognize the options on our menu, but different enough that we had no chance of speaking it. That was no matter – we pointed at a few dishes on the menu, waved our hands a bit to get water and wine, and enjoyed a simple meal of cuttlefish and torta dishes.