Let go of your expectations.

A park in Santiago de Compostela. This will be the only photo
from Santiago, as most of this post concerns other places in
Galicia, but since we've used the oak leaf theme to open our last
two posts, this one seemed fitting. These are oak trees.

We decided to walk another portion of the Camino de Santiago, even though we technically “finished” it in Santiago de Compostela on New Year’s Eve. (Of course, one of the spiritual insights that pilgrims commonly have is that the pilgrimage never really ends. I didn’t expect it to, myself.) We wound up getting sort of stuck in Santiago for the entire New Year’s weekend. We intended to spend at least one day there, and then move on to some other site to explore a bit more of Spain. But since it was New Year’s weekend, many things were shut down for much of the weekend, and the fewer trains and buses running on Sunday were full. So, in addition to the pilgrims’ mass at the cathedral, we had some quiet strolls around town (including through the university campus, where I felt far more at home than in the cathedral), and that was about it.

I lied. We have two other photos Santiago...of
food. One of our followers requested food photos
in an earlier comment, so here they are. This is
Corvid pigging out on churros y chocolate, which
was the name of one her high school Spanish
textbooks, so she's especially amused. Also
note the scallop shell she's wearing on around
her neck. This is a symbol of Santiago pilgrims,
though there are various myths as to why.

This isn't quite food, yet. It's soon-to-be-eaten
seafood at a fancy restaurant in Santiago.
Seafood is what Galicia is known for, which
perhaps has something to do with the
scallop shell pilgrim symbol.
(We don't condone eating octopus.)

This down time provided a good opportunity to reflect on how the experience of the Camino compared to our expectations for it. At least two of my readers will be amused to know that the phrase, “Let go of your expectations” has come to my head more than once on this journey. I decided to make it the spiritual theme of this post, as this will also be a good way to review the highlights and lessons learned from the trip. But first, an update on what we’ve been doing with ourselves the last couple of days.

As we strolled around Santiago, we had lots of time to discuss what we’d do with our remaining days in Spain. The idea of Granada and the Alhambra was raised, which would have been a crazy trip because it’s just about as far away from Santiago as you can get in Spain. But there was the argument that who knows when we’ll be back in Spain again, and I felt drawn to seeing something with a strong Moorish influence to atone for the steeping in early Christian theology that I’ve had. But we had also been considering continuing on the Camino for a few more days. Many pilgrims feel that a more symbolic end to the walk is at a small fishing village called Finisterre (or Fisterra in Galician), the name of which stems from the Latin for “end of the land.” Just beyond the village is a cape that separates the open Atlantic Ocean from the Bay of Biscay. On the cape is a lighthouse and a cross, and apparently some pilgrims burn their clothing at that site to symbolize the death of the old self and the birth of the new. We’d also learned from another pilgrim that there’s a final piece of the Camino that winds north of Finisterre to another small fishing village called Muxia, and that this walk is particularly lovely.


...We tried to insert a map here, but the best I can seem to do is this link to a Google map.

The fishing village of Finisterre.

Fish buyers at the port in Finisterre. Perhaps
some of these fish make it to the restaurants in
Santiago. There was a very interesting museum
explaining the local fisheries as well.

Shoes that have been burned at the end
of the Camino at Finisterre...

...despite the warnings painted everywhere
around the cape not to burn anything.
Apparently a pilgrim started a wildfire
burning clothing recently.

In the end, because we got stuck in Santiago longer than we expected, we compromised and took a bus to Finisterre (which is apparently the choice of transport for about half of the pilgrims who go there), then spent the next day walking the 19 miles to Muxia, which is where we are now as I write this. It was a good decision. The walk was indeed one of the best sections of Camino that we’ve been on since Portugal, leading us through small, traditional Galician villages and over forested hillsides (though yes, they were forested with pine and eucalyptus plantations). It had been raining heavily during our night in Finisterre, and it’s pouring again this morning as I write this. But miraculously, it cleared up yesterday morning and remained cloudy but not rainy for our entire walk to Muxia.

Graffiti (?) on the side of
cement building in Finisterre.

Arriving in Muxia was more magical for us than arriving in Santiago. This place suits Old Bay and me far better than the holy city. It’s in a phenomenally beautiful natural setting, and yes, I’m perfectly prepared to admit that this is a matter of personal preference rather than a spiritual insight of some sort. It’s small and quiet and remote, much like the places we’ve chosen to live or visit for much of our lives. We couldn’t resist splurging and spending 40 euros (instead of the 5 each we would have spent for dorm beds in the pilgrim hostel) on a room in a pension overlooking the bay in front of town, then asking the hostess to prepare real, honest-to-goodness Galician paella with fresh local seafood. It really was a perfect end to a perfect day.

We don't know the name of this particular little town on the coast
that we passed on our walk from Finisterre to Muxia.

This is a good time to show you some of the very typical Galician
"architecture" we saw everywhere. These are mausoleums in
a churchyard. These are like small country church graveyards,
but with a more efficient use of space than in the US.

We still don't know what the Galician (or English) name for
these caches is, but they were very common in the small
villages, though not always this picturesque.

The caches were very occasionally filled
with what we presume was their intended
bounty--ears of corn.

But how often does that really happen in life, that your expectations for what will make you happy are fully met? A key point from the many conversations I’ve had with others about Eastern philosophies over the years is that many people suffer needlessly because they are too attached to their expectations or desires. I think that the Tao de Ching is in large part about letting go of the expectations of the self by dissolving the self into the Tao. Krishna explains in the Bhagavad-Gita that this cannot be accomplished through simple abstinence, because refraining from ones desires simply makes you angry. “The abstinent run away from what they desire, but carry their desires with them. When man enters Reality, he leaves his desires behind him.” Similarly, and very relevant to me and my life, “Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender… They who work selfishly for results are miserable.”

A very friendly guard dog.

A guard horse?

These can't possibly be guard sheep, though they could
be veal. Seafood isn't the only food of choice in Galicia.

Once again, I’ll now try to apply this to our Camino, but I am fully aware that analyzing and dissecting how our expectations were or were not met is in many ways completely contradictory to the spirit of these passages. One does not “enter Reality” through “paralysis by analysis” (shout out to stac here for this phrase). But maybe we can all learn something through the contradictions and paradoxes of being human and experiencing our lives through our limited senses and perceptions.

Old Bay at an overlook at the end of the Camino in Muxia.
(How many ends of the Camino are there, anyway?)
Sadly, we learned that this was the site of a major
oil spill on the coast of Spain in 2002.
There is much more we could write about this, of course.

So why did we do this trip in the first place and what did we hope to get from it? While the focus of my writing for this blog has clearly been on spiritual insights (which I still feel a bit silly putting into print), this was only one of the purposes of our trip, and not necessarily the main one. I never honestly intended to answer some deep spiritual questions; I just thought it would be interesting to see what I could learn from this very different way of exploring one’s faith—through a Catholic pilgrimage route. As with all things Catholic for me, this experience felt more like a cultural journey rather than a spiritual one. It seems that many young Europeans who make this pilgrimage do so not because it’s part of their Catholic duty but not just for the fun of it either. It has become a sort of cultural expectation, “new-agey” for European Christians in the same way that spending a few weeks at an ashram is for many American agnostics. So I got a small window into that experience.

Corvid contemplating the view from our room in Muxia.

More fundamentally, Old Bay and I like traveling to see new places and experience different communities. Moreover, we really like doing so as “independent travelers,” as this method allows us to experience the culture more authentically through things like public transportation rather than pre-arranged tours. And we’re hikers and cyclists. We like covering territory via human power. The Camino de Santiago helped us meet all of these goals. However, that being said, we probably won’t walk through populated areas like this again. We can envision returning to Europe to do a bike tour, perhaps, but when it comes to walking, we’d far prefer being in the mountains. I don’t need to go into detail about this, as I talked about the whole “natural nature” thing quite a bit before.

The village of Muxia.

Of course, our expectations are that we’ll enjoy every aspect of the traveling, but that’s never the case. Perhaps a spiritual pilgrimage isn’t supposed to be exactly enjoyable, and maybe you can in fact grow more by being physically and psychologically miserable, but that’s definitely not what we set out to do. And I suppose that it’s just as inappropriate spiritually to have negative expectations as to have positive ones. In any case, we had positive ones. It’s easy to imagine this sort of idyllic, utopian community in one’s mind before traveling to see the place, forgetting that people are people everywhere, and not everyone is going to smile at you on the street just because you’re a goofy American with a backpack. In fact, they could be less likely to smile at you because you’re a goofy American with a  backpack. That’s not to say that people were unfriendly, especially since we’re working with cross-cultural forms of communication here. They just didn’t seem to care much one way or the other. Indeed, I would venture to say that there’s a bit of tension between locals living along the Camino routes and the Spaniards and other officials who are promoting the Camino as a tourism development project. In some communities, like the one and only village with a  café between Finisterre and Muxia, pilgrims provide a large proportion of the business.

One of the beaches near Muxia.

In the Muxia harbor.

There are different aspects of traveling that we find individually more or less enjoyable. Take meeting new people, for instance. We both enjoy meeting people, but to put it bluntly, I’m an extrovert and Old Bay’s an introvert. He’d rather not get too deep with folks, whereas I thrive on the intellectual and personal stimulation that comes from deeper exchange with new people. This difference can clearly cause some tension in our travels, but we work around it. Indeed, practicing the art of compromise was one of the expectations we had for this trip as well. On the other hand, we tended to agree in our general distaste for hostels. About half the nights on the Camino, we stayed in pilgrim hostels, or albergues. I had read about these before we started. Indeed, these hostels were one of the reasons I suggested the Camino, so we wouldn’t have to bring camping gear and camp out every night. I envisioned cozy, friendly places where one would want to hang out at the end of a long day of walking. In reality, they are more like typical youth hostels, with lots of bunk beds, usually in one enormous room, a tiny shared kitchen and eating area (some of the more cynical among us theorized that this was to encourage pilgrims to go out to eat and support the local economy) , and really unpleasant stall showers. Sleeping was usually a challenge. Sometimes we pushed two bunks together and shared the bottom pair; sometimes we simply split up with me on the top bunk and Old Bay on the bottom. All in all, these were not cozy places where we wanted to linger. At least we agreed on that.

Our seafood paella. We were very torn about eating this,
of course, but this is one of those paradoxes. Do we support
the efforts of the local human community to return to a
sustainable fishery after the oil spill and honor the cultural
history there, or do we eat more bread and cheese? Hmm...

The only hostel that really met our expectations was the one I wrote about staying at on Christmas Eve. There were only three other pilgrims there, all of whom spoke English, which clearly also made thoughtful conversation easier. We spent several more days leapfrogging with these three, and in fact saw the German couple in Santiago on our last day as well. The majority of other pilgrims populating the hostels closer to Santiago were Spaniards, although there were also two young Japanese men, and one older Dutch gentleman. Beyond a few friendly exchanges (Old Bay wrung quite a bit of English out of one of the Japanese guys who has been traveling around Asia and Europe for over a year, which Old Bay wanted to hear all about), we didn’t converse much with other pilgrims.

Corvid being contemplative again, this time gazing at the
windmills across the bay from Muxia. We loved the windmills,
both for the interesting beauty they can add to the landcape
and for the "clean energy" that they signify, like perhaps
what powers the street lamp in the photo.

More superficially, I had some other hopes for this journey. I wanted to travel to a Spanish-speaking country for our holiday trip this year because I wanted to practice and improve my Spanish. Mission accomplished. Mi espanol es mucho mejor. It’s not that I learned much new vocabulary that will stick with me until the next time I have cause to use it. It’s more that the sound of it has become much more comfortable, so that I can distinguish individual words from each other when someone shoots a string of words at me. Not only was I able to talk to lots of native speakers to practice listening and speaking, but I also watched lots of Spanish TV, including a portion of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix dubbed in Spanish. I really love this experience. I see why it can become addictive to learn new languages. It’s utterly unbelievable to me that our hostess last night spent about five minutes telling me about an episode of a Geraldo-like TV show in which a young Spanish girl had an internet boyfriend in Mexico, and I understood at least 90% of what she said, enough to make sense of it all as a whole.

Finally, we had specific intentions for keeping this blog as well. We wanted it to inspire me to write and Old Bay to share his photos. For the most part, we’ve really enjoyed it, and it was worth the extra burden of carrying a netbook and planning in time to find a wi-fi hotspot and work on the blog. Old Bay especially liked that he has been able to share photos during his trip rather than having to wait to get home to give a show, though I’m sure he has many more photos he’ll share with those of you patient and interested enough when we return. As for me, I plan to dive into some more significant and necessary writing projects very soon, so I hoped that this blog would get my writing juices flowing. I have always found the experience of walking to be very conducive to writing. I’ve enjoyed writing for the blog, but I confess that it has been rather strange to have such a diverse audience and not be entirely sure how to tailor some of my comments. I think many of my musings have had the tone of being rough drafts of essays (perhaps overly-long) that I’m trying out on people. But it’s a little odd putting myself out there in that way, especially since I know there are many readers who aren’t commenting publicly on the blog. So if you haven’t yet, I wouldn’t mind if you dropped me a line or posted a comment.

Back in Santiago on the evening of January 5, we found ourselves
witnessing yet another holiday festivity--the parade of the three
kings, who of course arrived to visit Jesus on the 12th day of
Christmas. Apparently Spaniards exchange gifts on January 6.
In fact, we're actually in Madrid again now sitting in a train station so
we can poach wi-fi from a nearby restaurant, and we've yet again
been thwarted in our plans for Madrid for the day because many
museums and stores are closed for the holiday. Ah, expectations...