Santiago/A Coruna

So Thursday and Friday were spent in Santiago, doing a variety of things, mostly in the company of the German guy.

Later on Friday night, after he had to head back to the family that was hosting him here in Santiago, I went back to my room at the pension (cheap hotel), and there in the pension I met a group of architecture students studying in the UK, and they invited me to come out to dinner with them and the rest of their group.

There was a group of about 28 of them from their program (students from all around the world studying in London), and they´d walked about a week of the Spanish part of the Portuguese Camino route (the route I walked was the French route, there are many different ones), since they´re working on a project about the pilgrim hostels, and ¨how to build a better pilgrim hostel¨.

The four that were staying in the same place with me consisted of two girls, one from Sweden and one from Poland, and two guys, one from New Zealand and one from Latvia! So now I´ve been able to use all of the languages I know or have studied on the Camino - Latvian was the last one I was waiting to use.

During the dinner, I was introduced to others from the program, and their supervisor, and they were all very impressed with the amount of walking that I had done. I got contact information for some of them, so I might meet up with them again when I get to London. I told them more about the pilgrim hostels I´d stayed in, and what was good and bad about them, to help them with their projects.

Saturday, the German guy and I made a spontaneous visit to A Coruna, on the northern coast of Spain - round-trip train tickets were only 8 euros, and the train took only an hour each way (unlike the bus to Finisterre, which takes three hours each way).

We walked around the city, visited the Tower of Hercules (the oldest working Roman lighthouse in the world, though it has been restored many times), walked along the beach, and walked a few kilometres of the English Camino (medieval English pilgrims to Santiago would take a ship to A Coruna and walk from there, and some people still do it today). Learned that the English Camino is terribly marked - the tourist office drew the route in on a map for us, but we only saw about three markings the entire way.

Then we returned to Santiago in the evening (almost missing the stop, since we both fell asleep on the train), and then it came time to part, since he was flying back to Germany early this morning. He has some things to do in Germany before he can continue his walking around the world. I hope to see him again at some point in time when we´re on the same continent, but I don´t know when that will be.

Today I´m wandering Santiago on my own, since everyone I know has headed home. And tomorrow morning I leave for Porto!

Hasta luego, for what is probably my last post in Spain!