Month: March 2022

Well, I keep going on and on about the food. I hope I’m not being too boring. This post is mainly about what a great bargain it is. I don’t think I’m exaggerating too much to say it is about half the cost of food in the US, at least in the smaller cities and towns. This morning, here in Astorga, we found a bar/cafe/restaurant for breakfast that had the best coffee we’ve had so far. It was more expensive than usual: 1.30 euros. (1 euro right now $1.10.) So that makes the coffee roughly $1.50. In the states a coffee this good would be about $4.00, I think. This place actually advertised that they served “English breakfast” (as well as the typical coffee and a roll European breakfast) so we ordered that. We weren’t sure what it would include. Turned out to be two fried eggs, LOTS of bacon and sausage, bread, a generous glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a coffee, all for 4.90 euros. Keep in mind any price I quote any time includes tax and tip. (Well, they don’t expect to the tipped here in Spain. Sometimes people leave a little extra change if they get some extra change after paying.)

This morning, when Charlie paid for our English breakfasts, he left a 2 euro tip just because it seemed so ridiculously inexpensive. He walked away and I saw the server look at the money he left on the counter and point it out to the other server/cook. They both looked over in our direction. I felt like we had done something wrong based on how they looked at us. I guess people might think that we assume they are needy. Waiters and waitresses in Spain get paid better than they do in the US and don’t depend on tips.

Yesterday we stopped at a bar/cafe and had fried eggs, toast, coffee and they also threw in some Spanish tortilla (omelette) and more bread and the total cost for BOTH of us was 7 euros. I don’t understand how they can make any money at these prices.

It turns out Astorga is a big chocolate town. Historically the cacao beans arrived in ports in Galicia and were transported over the mountains by people from this area and they decided to just do the processing in Astorga rather than sending the raw beans to Madrid. We went to the Chocolate Museum this morning. It was a small pleasant place in a beautiful old building. We saw a video of one guy going through the whole process of roasting the beans, liquifying them with a roller and adding sugar, and molding them into chocolate squares. Then we saw the whole process again with the machines they used in the 19th century to do the same thing. Now there are, of course, much more automated machines. Astorga used to have over 20 chocolate makers, now they have five. Local chocolate is sold all over town. We got some at the chocolate museum.

There must be some regulation about servers masking because everyone in a hotel or shop has a mask even in little towns. I assume from that that the rule is enforced with some significant penalties. I would say 80-90 percent of the customers coming in also have masks but as soon as their coffee or food comes the masks come off and stay off for the whole meal. Is this covid theater? Yes, of course it is, but I think it shows some solidarity with the wait staff and willingness to do what is necessary. Spain is over 80% vaccinationed.

We are in full trust-the-vaccine mode and can’t wait for some food to come so we can take off our masks.

We are in Astorga today and I would guess that 75% of the people walking outside are masked which surprises me. We are not wearing masks outside.

Touchless got much more popular during the pandemic. We have paid for almost everything, like coffee this morning, with Apple Pay and have used much less cash than we normally do on a camino. Almost all vendors have a device that accepts smartphone payments and touchless chip credit cards.

We are loving the Spanish “homemade” food. It’s hard not to eat too much of it and we end up eating a lot of meat and bread. Some great salads and some vegetables, too, but not as many veges as we’d like. We are staying an extra day in Astorga, a vibrant city on the Camino. We’d bought fruit, nuts, oats for a muesli breakfast tomorrow and there was way too much so we decided to have it for lunch today as well, despite all the good restaurants here in Astorga. We grabbed a pre-packaged salad and a tomato to add to the lunch. How’s that for a menu? Muesli and salad and fruit!

These strawberries are amazing. They were only 1.49 euros for 500 kilos (more than a pound) and are huge and very sweet. They come from the south of Spain.

We are in Astorga today at the Hotel Gaudi, across the street from the Bishop’s Palace, one of three Gaudi buildings outside of Barcelona. It appears the bishop got booted because walking in I saw a sign for the Gaudi Palace.

We toured it the last time we were here and might go again tomorrow.

I wanted to say a few more things about Gaudi after seeing the museum in Leon. I had thought of Gaudi mainly as an artist who built building modeled on organic forms, but he was a gifted architect as well. Leon is colder than Barcelona and has problematic soil and lots of rain. He designed a new kind of foundation method for the Leon building, different from what was done before in Leon. The local architects didn’t think it would work and spread tales about how dangerous the building would be. But it did work and was also used in a later Gaudi building in Barcelona. He designed a ventilation system for the building to make it comfortable in summer and winter. He slanted the roof so the snow would fall off and other parts of the building so the snow would stay and give the building a frosted winter palace look. He designed drainage systems so the rain would not run down the side of the building including failsafes if they got blocked. He also designed furniture for the building, Quite the all-around guy.

Wynette has been amazing this trip with her Spanish. She will be the first to tell you how bad it is and how much she misses, especially when people talk fast, which they usually do. That is all true and she would not qualify as fluent but she calls and makes reservations and we have a place to stay. She has lengthy conversations with people and she learns lots of things about their lives. And sometimes we get hugs at the end, how great is that?

This all is making me think I need to spend at least some time learning some Spanish. I’ll never match Wynette who has been working on it for years but I can do a little.

Reading the previous post I started wondering why we went early and thought about it. Since Wynette speaks pretty good Spanish she is able to talk to local people who only speak Spanish, which is most of them. We are usually the only people staying in the places we stay so we get the full attention of the people running the place. Wynette talked about her long conversations with Anabel in Villar de Mazarife. Anabel gave us a big hug at the end and Benedito gave us a manly handshake (you know how we guys are). This morning at breakfast she had a long friendly conversation with our hospitalier (?) ending with photos all around. People in restaurants have plenty of time to chat and ask us about our walk and tell us about their lives.

Sometimes we get cold and some places are closed but I think it is worth it.

As Wynette said we came early to avoid later crowds. We read a forum about all things Camino and everyone on the forum seems quite anxious to walk after a two-year hiatus. I expect there will be a huge number of pilgrims this year with the Holy Year and the post-covid surge. Hard to believe since now there are hardly any Pilgrims and many places are closed.

It is not like the Camino was free from crowds before the pandemic. The forum is filled with tales of people getting up at 5 am, walking some distance in the dark, and racing along in order to get a bed at the albergue for the night. We always thought this was sad. People did not stop and look at things. In a way this made sense because, for most pilgrims, the Camino is about doing the walking and socializing with other pilgrims.

Of course, the Camino will not be the only busy place this summer. I expect all the tourist sights will be packed and most are booked up for the entire summer.

If you want to see what the Caminoistas are talking about, take a look at Ivar’s forum at https://www.caminodesantiago.me/community/

We chose to come in early March for two reasons:

(1) To beat the rush. We expect the Camino to get crowded with pilgrims, perhaps as early as April. This is because of the pent-up demand of people not being able to come because of covid the past two years. Also this is a holy year on the Camino. The definition of a holy year is a year that St. James’ (Santiago’s) birthday falls on a Sunday. Actually, last year was the “real” holy year but, as Charlie says, it’s up to the pope to determine what is a holy year and he made this year a holy year since last year was pretty much a bust because of covid. The number of pilgrims goes way up in holy years. (Double or more.)

(2) The other reason we chose to go early was because we decided we’d like to get home before holy week, the week leading up to Easter. It’s even harder to find places to stay and eat that week. (We found that out the hard way in 2019.)

Now we are finding out the downside of coming so early.

(1) It’s been quite cold. Every morning we wake up to freezing temperatures. Actually it was something like 34 this morning, the warmest morning we’ve had. But it was also the grayest/drizzliest day. Even in the afternoon, it’s so cold and breezy in the shady tunnel-like streets of the little towns that we have very little inclination to stroll around and explore.

(2) We’re meeting very few other pilgrims. There’s been only one that we actually had a (brief) conversation with so far. He was from France. We met some bicyclists this afternoon but we were all freezing and rushing to get indoors and out of the drizzle and wind. Most of the places we’ve stayed had few other guests and as far as we could tell, no other pilgrims.

(3) Because of the scarcity of pilgrims, many place aren’t even open. We’ve been amazed to call for a reservation to places that looked like a wonderful place to stay to find they are closed. We are starting to dread hearing the word “cerrado” (closed) as much as we used to dread hearing the word “completo” (full). It’s not just the hotels that are closed but many bars and restaurants.