Month: March 2022

We have heard that energy is very expensive here in Spain. People are careful to turn off lights and they are frugal with indoor heating. Charlie and I knew that we were coming when the weather would still be cold but all we really thought about was how we’d feel hiking in the cold weather and decided we had enough to keep warm and dry while hiking. Turned out we barely did. I threw in a light-weight fleece hat just a few minutes before we headed for the airport. I had packed two buffs and had some misguided idea they would keep my head and ears warm. I’m so glad I threw in that hat. I’ve worn it nearly constantly. But, basically, we haven’t been too uncomfortable hiking in the cold. It’s the hotels and hostels and pensions and albergues and B&Bs that are the problem. And restaurants and bars to some extent.

One strange thing was that on our first night on the Camino, in Bercianos del Camino, there was a large radiator in the room blasting out heat and we couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. We were way too warm that night. The next morning the owner proudly asked us if we were warm enough. I smiled and told him “yes, thank you” and held back saying “way too warm!”. Now I know why he was so proud of providing a warm room. Just about everywhere else we’ve stayed has been cold. Some better than others and some just barely tolerable. After we checked into our Airbnb here in A Coruña and our landlady showed us around I asked her “hay califacción?” She showed us two electric space heaters (the kind that look like little radiators). So, the first thing we did the next morning was shop for something warm to wear in the apartment. Our landlady told us about Decathlon, an inexpensive chain that sells sports clothes. We found some warm but not-too-heavy fleece shirts that work nicely and we’ll be able to take them with us back to the Camino for the cold hotels. Charlie also bought some big thick fleecy socks at a China store that he can wear around indoors.

PS. We’ve blogged about the China stores in previous years. They are all over Spain. There is one just down our street named, in Spanish, “Store of Gifts China”. They are crammed with stuff, just about anything you can imagine. Most is low quality and quite cheap. But sometimes you can find just what you need. And they always seem to be open even when all the other stores are closed during the long mid-day break.

I cranked the telephoto up to x15 and got this.

It’s not clear what it is for. It doesn’t look like a house exactly. On the next hill, about 500 feet away, was this structure.

The blog photo might not have enough resolution to see but it is a smaller building with two big holes in the roof and a bare tree in front. I made up a silly story in my mind about how that was the loser’s house and the winner could look down on their derelict house.

The old town in A Coruna is on a big peninsula. Yesterday I walked all around it on a seaside path. There were lots of big apartment buildings like these with great views of the ocean. It was cloudy but pretty warm.

We mentioned earlier that we have not had a lot of fears about covid on this trip and that we have decided to trust the vaccines. I wanted to add it’s a lot more than that. Back home, even up to shortly before we left, I was reluctant to go anywhere without a mask and only would dine in restaurants if they had an outdoor area. That was difficult in our cold Albuquerque winters but luckily a few had patio heaters. (Thank you Holly for indulging me on that!)

We also stopped feeling so fearful because Spain has a high vaccination rate and, like the US, is in a low point with respect to number of covid cases. A lot of people got Omicron so we figure that there’s probably a lot of immunity out there. Also we took a plane trip to California in January at the height of Omicron. Four or five days after our plane flight there, I had a mild sore throat and felt very tired. I took a home covid test and it was negative and luckily no one I was around got sick. But I was kind of convinced that I had a very mild case and/or reaction to an exposure either on the flight or in wait in Phoenix Airport. Somehow surviving that trip made us feel a lot more confident.

This might all be crazy thinking. I’ve heard stories about over-confident people getting extremely sick or dying from covid.

It certainly would be a drag to get covid here, even a mild case, because of needing to quarantine. But one amazing thing is that Galicia, the Spanish region that we are in, will pay for all medical care for anyone who gets covid including tourists. Galicia is trying to get their tourist industry going again and this is part of it.

One more thing I wanted to write about: In the landing outside our Airbnb apartment (above photo), there is some hand sanitizer and a bin for shoes. We hadn’t noticed the shoe bin but this morning, our landlady, Margarita, pointed it out, not to ask us to use it but to tell us how at the beginning of the pandemic she and everyone thought it was important to sanitize our hands and not to track covid into our houses. She said that now they know it is transmitted through the air and not (or rarely) through surfaces. So now she doesn’t ask people to take off their shoes.

Always take a photo of the menu in the window. They often don’t give you a copy inside. The server will read the choices to you really fast and then wait for you to decide and it’s hard not to feel rushed, much less understand everything they said. Many food names in menus are not generally words that Wynette learned in her Spanish studies. We’ve had to learn a lot of new words in restaurants here. We still see new ones every day.

This photo above was the menu from a previous post with the trout bones.

The menus del dia are wonderful. Cheap and almost always very good. And it’s nice to make just a few choices and be done. Usually we choose two different things and share. And we learned you can order two firsts instead of a first and a second. The firsts have more vegetables. Usually they are 10-12 euro, this one was more because it was a Sunday, but you know us, the last of the big spenders.

We haven’t watched the TVs in the rooms but every room has one. The ratio of TV size to remote size was the smallest I have seen.

Spanish bars always have TVs and they are always on. It’s the only thing we don’t like about Spanish bars. We try to sit as far away from the TV as we can.

In the bars, the TVs are either tuned to sports (fútbol!) or news. In our hotel rooms, we could watch a lot of American or British TV shows. However, all TV shows here, as far as we can tell, are dubbed into Spanish. So strange to watch American characters that we know and love speaking Spanish.

When we were in Portugal a few years ago, we found that all the American or British shows were in English with Portuguese subtitles. Someone there told us that this is why most of the Portuguese speak pretty good English. As opposed to most of the Spanish who pretty much don’t speak English.

People put small change on the rough wall of this bar in Villafranca del Bierzo. Not attached, just carefully placed. A nice effect.

The smallest coin you normally see is 10 cents, except in grocery stores where you get copper (colored, certainly not real copper), that is, 1, 2, and 5 cent coins. They are a real pain so it felt great to leave some on the wall.

This was a very pleasant bar with a friendly server. They were open at 8 so we got coffee before our 8:40 bus to A Coruna. She wrapped up some Spanish tortilla (egg, onion and potato pie) for us to eat on the bus.

It’s not clear to me what game you play here. Anyone know? I saw some guys playing bocce a little farther down.

This was on a drawer in our place. It looks like it would be very useful for something but I don’t know exactly what. Anyone seen one of these before? I assume it’s not just that Uri Gellar stayed in this Airbnb.