Villafranca del bierzo
all saints day & kleptomaniac
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 12:04:59 +0000
hey hey,
hola, we´re in Villafranca del bierzo, have stopped an extra day as deri is getting no better, the woman here is really nice though and hasn´t kicked us out in the day time -that´s what they normally do and then open back up between 12 and 2. We´re thinking that a day of rest should cure his cold, or hoping anyway. I have been telling my body that it is strong & healthy and it´s defences are impregnable, and it´s working, i´m not getting his cold or any other lurgy germs that these pilgrims have. There are lots of sick people on the camino, the bathrooms are not the place to be in the mornings with all the retching and coughing that´s going on in there. Some korean woman collapsed last night and an ambulance crew came rushing in, we think it was just exhaustion, but they carried on walking today.
It has been really nice here the last few days and we´ve gone back to shorts and vests, doing really easy days now - we´re only 220 k away from santiago, so we want to try and stretch it out as much as possible - if we wanted we could do it in 4 days, easy, but seen as we´re here til june that would be silly. There are some real hardcore cyclist here though, this italian lot that were in ponferrada had cycled all the way from leon that day - that´s about 110k.
Villafranca del Bierzo is a little town up in the mountains and to answer everybody´s question they don´t seem to celebrate halloween very much, the only sign we´ve seen of it was in Palencia, and that was in the pasterria´s where they had pumpkin shaped cakes and stuff. What they do celebrate is ´all saints day´, and all the supermercados are shut which means we are going to go out for food. Last night though this italian guy made us food, pasta with a tomato sauce , with spinach and onions, it was great - that was the first time we´d had spinach or onions since we´ve been here. He´d turned up at the albergue without enough money so coz it had happened to us the day before and I would´ve really liked someone to help us out I paid the difference for him. It worked out really well though and we had a nice meal, plus wine, worth 4 euros i would say.
It was really funny actually, he spoke italian and could sort of understand spanish but couldn´t speak any, deri (& me sort of) can understand words in spanish and speak a little , or in my case pocissimo (very little), and there was this czech girl who ate with us and she could also speak a little spanish and poco anglettere. So we drew pictures and used gestures alot, but it worked.
We have met a lot more religious people in the last few days and I keep having to kick deri under the table when he starts ranting ......dot dot dot.... too much. We´ve also met a load more australians, most are ok but there´s this one that australian chris would describe as the type ´that if they went to school speaking like that, they get beaten up´- the stereotypical outback australian like on crocodile dundee - she even says g´day. The rest are nice though, and what we´ve discovered is that we, or deri in particular , who had formed quite rigid opinions on australians, is that as long as they are quietly spoken, they tend to be ok, even the religious one who keeps trying to get us to go to church was nice. She gave us yogurts for breakfast and gave deri pasta last night - though this weird kleptomaniac woman stole it. I had been alerted to her thieving tendencies in fromista on our first morning when i seen her looking through someone else´s stuff, but thought that she might have been mistaken or something, coz it´s not really the pilgrim way is it. But no I was right, we´ve been thinking of ways to get back at her, so far we´ve come up with, loosening the wheels on her trolley - not so much that they fall off right away but so as they fall off on top of a mountain or something. or catching up with her taking her picture, riding ahead and making up big ´wanted dead or alive´ posters and sticking them up around the camino. Deri has been considering catching up with her and hitting her with a stick, but I think public humiliation would work much better. Well not a lot else to say except some police men with guns have just walked into the albergue - scary.
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