Alone in Galicia: My anxieties and I go on a trip
I didn’t want to risk any of the worst case scenarios in my head (What if I took the wrong train/got out at the wrong station/forgot my bag, etc) I who have had the gall to publish two travel books.
23 May 2019
I have to take the train to Ourense tomorrow, so today I tried the public transport system. Apparently I am the sort of person who rehearses travel routes. The whole time I’ve been here I’ve stayed in the old town where everything is within walking distance. According to Google I could catch the 23 bus on Avenida Marina, get out at Santiago Torres tunnel, and walk the short distance to the train station. At noon I turned up at the bus stop across the Port Authority, and after sitting on the bench for five minutes I looked at the bus map and decided to wait at the bus stop across the street. Half an hour passed, then the number 23 appeared. I bought a ticket (1.20e) from the driver and reminded myself to count eight stops. Except that the bus went towards Plaza Maria Pita, then Parrote, then did a U-turn so I found myself right where I started.
The 23 bus took me to the newer, less pretty part of the city, and half an hour later I got out near a housing estate. I asked two schoolgirls to point out the train station, and then an old man at another bus stop. The train station is an ugly brown brick building. Having figured out how to get there, I returned to the bus stop. Another thirty minute wait, then I got out in the old town near the Paroquia Santiago. While I was walking home—I have only one week left in La Coruña, and I miss this place already—I overheard an old American couple looking for shops and I asked them if they needed help. They said it was nice to hear English again. They may have been my age or younger, now that I think about it. I pointed them to Calle Real, warned them that everything would be closed, then bought cake at the market.
I should be sleeping because I have a train to catch in the morning, but my brain won’t shut up. I’m looking forward to going back to my regular life, but I also miss this alternative life, a sort of Platonic ideal in which I write copiously, take long walks, and don’t think about bills. All it lacks is my cats.
24 May 2019
I was up before the alarm and ready to go by 8am—ample time to catch the bus, but I didn’t want to risk any of the ten worst case scenarios in my head (What if I took the wrong train/got out at the wrong station/forgot my bag, etc), I who have had the gall to publish two travel books, so I went to the taxi rank at Puerta Real and took a cab to the train station (5e). I was more than an hour early for my train to Ourense. Ah, the life of a raving neurotic. At the station bar I bought a coffee and checked my messages.
Why do I have so many fears? They’re not even mine, but my parents’. Of course their biggest fear was being found out as a couple of lower middle class aspirants living on debt. I was raised to be their ticket to bourgeois prosperity; they should’ve stopped me from reading books.
The train was on the track twenty minutes before departure time. My basic Spanish proved useful—I understood when an old man asked me if we could swap seats. I settled in and took out my book, A Heart So White by Javier Marias. To think that it took me years to get used to his meandering, digressive, extremely chatty style well enough to finish one of his novels. The first one was Thus Bad Begins, which wasn’t great, but it led me to All Souls, which was wonderful, and now this. Next: The Infatuations, and A Man of Feeling.
I arrived at Ourense at 1050, and after some confusion over where the exit was I found my hosts: Carlos, who heads the Allariz co-op, owns two bookshops and publishes books; and Eva, originally from Porto, who’s lived in London and the US and speaks English. They put me up in a very nice little hotel called Portelo, in a room with a foyer, a sitting room, a bathtub, and a large bedroom. Eva gave me a quick tour of the old town—narrow cobblestone streets, a farmers’ market, a garden competition. Impossible to get lost because all the streets lead to the mayor’s house.
I was famished and at 130 I set out in search of lunch and wandered into Fio de Liño, the bar inside the small Museum of Fashion.
My hosts run a co-working space that includes a publishing company and design studio. They plan to do these talks every month, and I am their first resource person. There were a total of six people at the event, but I thought it went very well: they’d never met a Filipino before, and I think I managed to convey the sheer absurdity of the Philippines. Afterwards we had a drink at Casa Pepiña, where I had a good chat with Eva and a guy in a Walking Dead T-shirt who asked me if I’d seen Avengers: Endgame.
25 May 2019
(For the tour of Allariz, please see 24 hours in Allariz, jewel of Galicia)
The tour of Allariz ended at 2pm just as my knees had begun to weep. Eva took over and we had an excellent lunch at Casa Pepiña. Afterwards we went to the International Festival of Gardens, where the flora was not as interesting as Eva’s life story. Eva’s father has a leather factory in Porto. Her parents split up; mom is bipolar, loves cats, and works in Amsterdam hotels in the summer. Eva is married to a Mexican and they have two kids, 5 and 1. They’ve lived in the US, the UK, Mexico, Sweden. She makes handbags, but lately she’s been too busy to make any.
At the garden show someone paid homage to Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle.
My ride to the station was at 830pm. By 630 I was at the Hotel Portelo lobby reading Marias. I chatted with an American couple from LA who had driven over from Lisbon. Carlos, my host, had an appointment to keep so his wife Margarita would drive me to the station in Ourense. When she did not appear ten minutes ahead of time I began to get anxious. Why am I like this? What is the worst that could happen? I miss the train, I take the next one, jeez. When will I grow up?
Margarita showed up at 840pm with her very well-behaved little dog, Lua. The train was at 920pm, and I know the drive was only thirty minutes, but it was tense. I was at the station by 910pm, whereupon I started worrying that I was waiting on the wrong track, then getting on the wrong train, then falling asleep and missing my stop, then the taxi costing a fortune. Of course, none of these happened.
I was home by 1045. “Home.” I miss it already.
To be fair, I also rehearse travel itineraries whenever I'm in a new place. I'm also anxious about taking the wrong bus, getting off at the wrong stop, making a wrong turn while walking. I don't understand why other people seem so relaxed about these things. Weird (they, not me).