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Camino De Santiago - Day 8
Time of Visit: October 7, 2022
It turns out that Sarria by night is no more charming than Sarria by day.
Galicia is home to a peculiar breed of fog. It's so dense that it feels like it's drizzling, and your clothes will get damp as if it really were drizzling, but if you check the Doppler radar there's not a patch of green to be seen. A cross-country runner's dream.
One feature unique to the landscape of rural Galicia is the horreo - an elevated stone granary designed to keep rodents and moisture away in the exceptionally wet climate. Due to the advent of the supermarket, few horreos continue to serve their original purpose, but many homes maintain bright, beautiful horreos outside for decorative purposes.
Rural Galicia reminds me of rural Japan in a lot of ways. Endless green, a quiet connection with nature, inhabited by a diffident, simple, and humble people living in harmony with their surroundings - a marked contrast with the loud, gregarious castellanos.
To quality for a certificate of completion for the Camino, pilgrims must have stamps from albergues or restaurants along the last 100km of the route. Sarria, the town I stayed in last night, is the last town before this 100km mark, so many people who are short on time will start in Sarria and spend 4 or 5 days doing the last 100km. The number of pilgrims on the road also increases threefold past Sarria.
I stopped at a cute vegetarian cafe a few kilometers before Portomarin. The owners were a young couple who evidently knew how to appeal to the 'gram.
My accommodation for the night was a huge 130-bed albergue that more closely resembled a war hospital or orphanage than it did serviced accommodation. I met a Taiwanese guy living in Japan with his Korean girlfriend and we communicated in a strange mix of English, Mandarin, and Japanese because we weren't mutually fluent in any three of the languages but the union of our respective knowledge served us quite well.
We were adopted by a group of Koreans for dinner. One man had brought his own chili powder from home and had been buying and slicing cabbage every few days to make his own kimchi, letting the cabbage ferment on the trail and overnight.
song of the day: Loveholic - Loveholic - the Korean group's eponymous track is an infectiously positive pop-rock anthem. The music video is also so wonderfully 2000s.