Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.

And, lo, has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light!

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable: Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’

Cosas de España

Columbus Day – called El Día de Hispanidad in Spain – has just passed, on October 12. A day not seen as worthy of celebration in much of South America. And very possibly not by Native Americans. By coincidence, I read this only a day or so ago: Columbus recorded these comments when coming ashore in the Bahamas in 1492, when he was astonished at how peaceful the inhabitants were: “They do not bear arms, and they do not know them, for I showed them a sword and they cut themselves out of ignorance·. This gave him an idea: “They would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want”. Columbus lost no time in putting his plan into action. The following year he returned with 17 ships and 1,500 men, and started the transatlantic slave trade. Half a century later, less than 1% of the original Carib population remained; the rest had succumbed to the horrors of disease and enslavement. It must have been quite a shock for those so called savages to encounter such ‘civilised’ colonists. Columbus – Colón in Spain – was quite a navigator but a lousy administrator and, quite obviously, not a very nice chap. Hard to understand, then, why Poio wants to claim he was born here. And why Columbus Day is a national holiday in the USA. In fact, not all states celebrate it and I guess it will be renamed there one day soon. Nationwide, I mean. I see that, in fact, some states already celebrate it as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Stop Press: The power of this blog. . . I’ve just read that Poio has cancelled its Día de Colón festivity planned for this weekend ‘because’ they claim, ‘rain is forecast to fall incessantly.’

I like wolves and so I enjoyed reading this article on their return to Galicia.

Train travel in Galicia . . . Thanks to a bizarre subsidy scheme which can be ‘gamed’, there are no seats left on trains between Pv city and Vigo on Fridays and Sundays between now and Xmas. I imagine it’ll be pretty hard to get one on Saturdays as well. There’s no indication the number of trains will be increased to meet exceptional demand.

If our local flora are confused by the weather of the last 2-3 months, imagine how they must feel facing the plummeting temperatures caused by this blast of cold air coming down from Iceland, via the UK:-

Another quote from Cees Noteboom’s Roads to Santiago: [Writing about the scenes after the election of the Socialist party in 1982] The time seemed to have come at last for Spain, confined for so long within the walls of its own house, to struggle free and turn to face Europe, to drive out the shadows of the past. There was a lot of catching up to do, and it was duly done, with a zest that left the land gasping for breath, and it is with the same euphoria that people take almost everything in their stride, rising prices, ostentatious materialism, the loss of things that will be hard for later generations to recover. And behind that memory of Election Day lurks another memory, of a much older Spain, beset by other disparities, when men paraded the streets wearing German helmets.

The EU

With members like this . . . European leaders are seething over a Putin-Orbán meeting. Hungary has long been criticised for democratic backsliding at home and for its Russia- and China-friendly policies abroad. Its foreign minister routinely visits Moscow. And, in a move that has frustrated its allies, Hungary – along with Turkey – has yet to ratify Sweden’s application for Nato membership.

I guess we’ll be hearing more and more about the ‘digital euro’. Cash that isn’t coins or notes. Here’s Wiki on digital currencies. They do have a physical form in an unclassical sense coming from the computer to computer and computer to human interactions and the information and processing power of the servers that store and keep track of money. Whatever that means.

Spanish

ERC afirma que las negociaciones para la investidura están ‘muy verdes’. Fruitful? Almost certainly not no, 12 in the list of 22 meanings of verde in the RAE:- [Dicho de un cuento, de una comedia, de un chiste, etc].: Indecentes, eróticos.

Did you know? . . .

There is a site which specialises in ‘fake news you can trust’. It’s said to be a Christian version of the satirical newspaper The Onion.

Finally . . .

I’ve just finished Peter Hopkirk’s book: Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. This tells the fascinating story of the discovery – and subsequent removal/’theft’ of – thousands of works of art buried under the sands of the deserts to the west of China. Or hidden in caves. Until China clamped down in the 1920s, men from several European states and the USA enjoyed virtually a free hand to remove these treasures to museums – or basements thereof – around the world. Including wall paintings and frescoes. But the conditions in which they did this were frequently appalling – even fatal – and they certainly suffered in their endeavours to bring their finds Westwards. Apart from the discovery of manuscripts written in lost or unknown languages, perhaps the most surprising thing to read about was the influence of Greek art on Middle Eastern and Chinese works of more than a thousand years ago. And of the influence of Western religions on those of the East.

For new readers:– If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there – updated a bit in early July 2023.

For those thinking of moving to Spain:- This is an extremely comprehensive and accurate guide to the challenge, written by a Brit who lives in both the North and the South and who’s very involved in helping Camino walkers.