Thuoughts from Galicia: 15.917

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.

- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain. 

If you've arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my web page here.

Life in Spain

These first 3 items here are filched from yesterday's Business over Tapas:-

• Here's my fellow-blogger, friend and Business Over Tapas author, Lenox Napier, on the question of why the Spanish aren't a nation of consumer complainers. As he put it:  After almost forty years of democracy, the DNA of the Spaniards still does not incorporate the culture of claiming their rights as consumers. So, guess what happens.
• Despite her apparent leadership in the economic recuperation of Europe, Spain is the European country where wages have lost the most in purchasing power.
• Spain’s position in the World’s health stakes has fallen precipitously. Thanks to the high consumption of alcohol and cigarettes and to childhood obesity, her ranking has dropped from 7th to 23rd position
• During Spain's euro-driven phony boom of 2000-2007, the banks opened branches with what used to be called gay abandon, each with its expensive complement of staff behind desks to give the face-to-face service preferred by Spaniards. Come La Crisis, many of these have now been closed. Indeed, Lenox cites a report of 16,000 branched closures in recent times, with the loss of around 82,000 jobs.

These are someone's idea of the 10 dishes you must try if you're visiting the UK:-

Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding

Pork pie

Omelette Arnold Bennett

Scotch eggs

Golden syrup steamed sponge

Rice pudding

Welsh rarebit

Fish and chips

A 'Full English breakfast'

Afternoon tea

I've actually eaten some of them. Well, most of them, really. The Full English Breakfast is, in fact, exactly the same thing as a Full Irish breakfast and a Full American breakfast. If you're unlucky, a Full Scottish breakfast might add a bit of haggis.

CAMINO NEWS . . .

Manzanares is not as pretty as references in Spanish would have you believe, though its location at the foot of the Guadarrama mountain range is impressive.

We had the misfortune to arrive on a local holiday, to find many shops and, more importantly, the imposing castle, closed.

The fiesta, by the way, was in honour of the town's patron saint. This turns out to be Jesus Christ, Which seems to me to be a false reading of the word saint. But perhaps not. You certainly couldn't choose a more powerful one to intercede on your behalf with . . . well, Himself.

As Madrid didn't exist for hundreds of years after the original pilgrimages began, the walk out of Colmenar Viejo isn't a genuine camino – but how many of these are there really? So, it shares its trajectory with one of the many long walks which dot this part of Spain. This means you meet other walkers coming into and going out of Colmenar Viejo. 

And then there are the cyclists. Some of these are polite but many ride, at top speed, as if they own the path and can do that the hell they like, provided only they shout a warning at you when they're 5-10 metres behind you and approaching at a rapid rate of knots. One of these individuals actually loudly berated my colleagues yesterday for not getting out of the way quickly enough. Which led to some choice words in his direction on my part. And a threat of fisticuffs on his when I finally told him to eff off and shove his bike up his backside. 

But, anyway, after this incident I acquainted my colleagues with my tactic for inconsiderate cyclists on the pavements of Pontevedra. Which is to hold one's walking stick or poles horizontally, leaving just enough space between it/them and the wall to allow a cyclist to get through. In theory at least. In practice, they slow down against the possibility they won't make it. Should they complain as they go past – more slowly than they'd planned - you can always adopt the Spanish approach – feign innocence and apologise profusely.

Finally . . . I'm still struggling to avoid unwanted notices in Google Alerts. I did finally realise that I had to add the exclusions alongside the inclusions - rather than as separate items - but this hasn't worked completely. Adding them as separate items preceded by a minus sign actually increased the volume of unwanted reports on, for example, Super Boat Galicia.

By the way . . . We didn't meet a single other 'pilgrim' en route yesterday. But we did enjoy fireworks at the early hour of 10pm, as we walked back from a super supper in a Moroccan place we'd stumbled on when taking fotos of the castle.