Euro Tour Update

Someone else´s picture of the Santiago de Compestela

Hello all.

I´m writing this from the city of Santiago de Compostela, a super old cathedral town located in the Northwest corner of Spain. I´m sitting in the basement of a huge church nearby called the Senor Menor (I think), a place where hundreds of religious pilgrims come to rest overnight while they visit the Santiago De Compostela. It´s kind of like the YMCA, but 8000 times less sketchy. While I am not a religous pilgrim, I do enjoy a good value, and at 10 Euro a night for beds, showers, laundry, and internet, it´s pretty hard to beat. It´s rainy today, but that´s ok because we´ve scheduled in a rest day to take in the sights and sounds of this incredibly historic city. 
 
The trip building up to this point has been going very well.After we got our bearings and made it out of the airport section of town, we started heading up north from Porto, Portugal following the coast on the N-19 highway.  I´ve been biking my ass off ever since (literally, I can´t feel a thing down there).

We´ve been putting in an average of about 90 km a day (approx. 56 miles) and yesterday afternoon we passed through Valenca and crossed into Spain. The scenery is absolutely stunning, especially when we rolled into a town called Rodondelo. This place is basically like living inside of a postcard. Waiting for us there was a a pictuaresque street fair with music and dancing and amazing food as well. Unfortunately the camp site was closed yesterday so we had to improvise. We ended up finding a patch of grass behind a hotel so we set up our camp there and used the hotel´s bathroom facilities on the sly.  Actually turned out to be quite nice.
 
Today was probably the hardest day yet of cycling. The road leading into Santiago, though well paved, is extremely hilly. We had several long climbs today over the course of a 100 km day (just over 62 miles) and now my legs feel a little like pudding. Despite the exhaustion, I´m having a great time. It literally feels like I can´t open my eyes wide enough for them to absorb all the sights we take in on our two-wheeled journey.

Anyway, more posts coming soon. Stay tuned.

Goodbye Korea

I spent the first three months of my time in Korea wondering just where the hell I was. Now, 13 months later and sitting at the free interent  booth at Incheon airport, I’m starting to wonder just where the hell I’ve been. Perhaps we should start with the facts. I lived in a town called Seosan, which sits in the Cheongchungnam-do Province on the West coast of Korea. It has a population of about 200,000 people. It’s main industries are agriculture and petrolchemical processing (which are two industires that probably shouldn’t be so close together. But it is more than that.

Seosan is a place of crooked streets, of buildings and buisnesess haphazardly crammed together, and where apartment blocks compete for space with rice paddies. It is a place of unintentionally hilarious mispellings, of broken English, of convience stores placed on nearly every corner. It is a place where old women are bent at the hip from years and years of back-breaking work, and where old men drag carts of scavagend goods to junk yards. But it is more than that too.

Seosan is a place of kindness, where strangers smile and bow polietly, and where children stop to say hello to the funny looking “waigooken.”  For me it was a place of hand-gestures and body language.  It was a place where everyone called me teacher, even though I am certain that I was student. It was a place where I went to teach people to speak my language, but also where I learned once and for all that actions speak louder than words. It was a place where I made friends for life. But it was more than too. For 13 months, it was the place I called home.

So now I am saying goodbye. This chapter has come to an end and a new one will soon begin. I’d like to thank everyone who followed along as shared my stories and my discoveries, but most importantly I’d like to the thank the amazing people of Korea for making the last year such an incredible experience. So until we meet again, “Anyeong-he-kay-sayo.”

-E

Related Viewing: “Closing Time” – Semisonic