Living like a local

We are into a routine of staying in one place for a few days to a week after we finish a Camino. Over the years we’ve stayed in Madrid, Lisbon, Gijón, A Coruña, Muxia, Oviedo, Llanes, Pontevedra, Vigo (plus Lucca when we walked on the Via Francigena in Italy). An interesting mixture of very large, very small, touristy, non-touristy towns. Our favorites so far have been Gijón (large but with a small walkable center and very non-touristy) and Llanes (tiny). Those are both on the Camino del Norte, on the Atlantic coast in northern Spain, with great walking along the ocean.

This year we chose Zamora. It sounded like a nice town and it was in a convenient location. No ocean walks but impressive river paths. Zamora is not among our favorites, but it has been a pleasant place to live for a week. In a way it doesn’t matter where we are. We love Spain so much and enjoy pretending to simply live here and do our usual routines. Of course, it’s impossible to really do that but we try.

Yesterday we walked to the Carrefour Supermarket. We liked the Carrefour grocery store in Palencia so decided it would be worth the 2 mile round trip walk to go to the one here. We were shocked how huge it was. It was inside a shopping mall. It had clothes and appliances, a little bit of everything, as well as food. In other words it was similar to a Walmart and nearly as large. No telling how many small businesses it has shut down. I fear it won’t be many years before the small neighborhood markets are gone here in Spain. Luckily we have a small DIA market a 3 minute walk from our apartment where we go every day. Strangely, for most things, we like the DIA food selection better than the Carrefour.

One section in the Carrefour you wouldn’t find at Walmart in the states. Spanish ham!
A McDonald’s we passed in the shopping center. Few employees needed. You just stand at the big white phone-like things and place your order and pay with your phone.
Nearly every grocery store has beautiful displays of fruits and vegetables.
Zamora, like most Spanish towns of any size, has a market with stalls that sell fresh produce and meat and seafood and such. Open every day except Sunday. We were disappointed to find that the one in Zamora is closed down due to renovation. It looks like a neat old building (above), but …
It is open at a temporary location a few blocks away. We got a kick out of the design they put up at the entrance of the temporary location. A photo or painting of the facade of the old location!
Rain, rain. Our landlady was complaining that Zamora was becoming like Galicia.
We have a washing machine in our apartment but no clothes dryer. (Those are rare in Spanish homes.) And it’s too rainy to hang clothes on the line outside one of our bedroom windows. So, we took our clean wet laundry to the laundrymat to use the dryers. In the above photo, this was the only basket in the laundrymat. At least it would hold a lot of laundry!

4 thoughts on “Living like a local”

  1. Boy, those Carrefours are everywhere, plus, the smaller Carrefout Expresses. We stopped at a Carrefour in Morocco (well more than once). They are one of the few places you can buy alcohol and I wanted to try a bottle of local wine.

    And I love that huge laundry basket!

    Reply

  2. The McDonald’s in the US have those big ordering screens now too, and usually a skeleton crew of employees. They are also removing the playplaces and replacing them with computer game stations. But not as bad as Carl’s Jr – went through the drive-thru the other day and was greeted by an AI voice taking my order!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *