Author: Charlie

Here is a new variant, insult Castilla and add “solo” after Leon. We learned from Margarita that this is a separatist, nationalist movement.

I get it but I wonder how the tires could have followed those tracks

Do they have weather too? I didn’t get my camera up fast enough to show the temperature map where Portugal is completely blank. It appears Portugal does have a few wispy clouds above it.

Actually the oldest extant lighthouse, a landmark in A Coruna. I walked up there today to climb it. It was a beautiful sunny warm day. Here is the walkway up to it.

I walk up there, up the steps and go to the entrance. Two people were guarding the entrance. A ticket booth was off to the left. I said I wanted a ticket and they said you can’t get them here, you get them at the kiosk as you enter the park. Okay I’m Camino guy, I can do that. Down the ramp, the stones on concrete are quite unpleasant to walk on. Way over to the kiosk. Two people there guarding the ticket booth. Wait for one guy. Use the disinfectant they require. Put on my mask. Go to the booth. They ask me what country I’m from. I get the ticket that is only good for 30 minutes. Guess what? It’s free on Saturday, but you still need a ticket, from the kiosk, at the entrance to the park. Walk back to the ramp. Walk up the ramp and the stairs and give her the ticket.

It is about 250 steps up, I counted. Standard tower steps, square, five steps a flight then turn 90 degrees. 20-30 circular staircase steps at the end. I’m the only one there. The views are great. Overall I saw them turn away 5-6 people with no tickets. I came back, not sure how many others did.

[enter snark mode] I’ve read 4-5 articles in the last year about the record number of pedestrian deaths and injuries all over the US. One even mentioned Albuquerque as having one of the highest rates in the country. I’ve been a pedestrian (aka “target”) every day in Albuquerque for several years and I’m happy to report that I am still alive and unmaimed even though I always carry a backpack that reduces my maneuverability and car dodging abilities. But lets be realistic, how long can my luck hold out?

The Spanish have come up with a clever solution to this problem that they call a paso de peatones, in English it would translate into something like ”crosswalk”. For Albuquerque residents unfamiliar with this concept here is what they look like.

Here’s the idea: people enter the crosswalk and the cars stop for them, every time. I know this beggars the imagination but it is really true, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Albuquerque could try this ingenious Spanish idea and reduce the pedestrian fatality rate and avoid bad press on the national media. [exit snark mode]

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.

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.