France 2024 – Camino de Santiago Day 8 – Santiago de Compostela

Aquí se rompió una taza, y cada quién para su casa!

Margarita is heading back to Porto by bus, to take a cooking class tomorrow Thursday (she is going to learn how to make the famous tarta de nata), and head back to Guatemala on Friday. She also wants to transcribe her audio notes to keep a lasting record of her own El Camino experience.

Chrissy and Raimund are also going back home, by plane, and come the early afternoon will be back home.

Me, I still have one more day in Santiago so, after saying goodbye to my friends, I jumped on my bike to go visit La Ciudad de la Cultura. This is the name given to an architectural monstrosity built on a high hill overlooking the city, which from the distance is supposed to merge with the rounded hills that surround it. The thing is, it is built of a light-tone creamy phyllite that clashes with the green hills. I think it was built in fits and starts over the last 20 years, with the idea that it would be a convention center. However, nobody wanted to have their conventions there, so the cost overruns were horrendous, and it ended being used as office space for the provincial government. It has a small museum with an interesting visiting exposition on the Vikings (which once entered the bay of La Coruña but lost interest quickly over the poverty-stricken fishermen communities), and another on treasures of the Holy Land. A third temporary exposition on modern female painters let me completely cold.

I walked around and can certainly confirm that the whole complex is a bit rarito (strange),  y como lo raro es pariente de lo feo ...

Afterward I bicycled around in the glorious countryside, enjoying the sun, fresh air, and bounty of the ag fields. The corn is brilliant green and growing, but I have to ask myself why grow corn if they don't eat tortillas here?

I came back home kind of early, around 5 pm, to catch up with my blog, watch kids play in a giant Splash Mountain inflated in the middle of the hostel (ah, to be a kid again), and plan my next move. Tomorrow Thursday around noon I will be taking the bus to Bordeaux (arriving at 1h00) and from there taking another bus to Périgueux (arriving at 4h30), to wait in the dark for the bus to Bergerac. I will count myself lucky if I can get home at 8h00 in time for breakfast.