Parental Transport, Inc.
Today is September 7th. Today is the first day of classes at the universities in Spain. From being the last to begin work, university students have become the first. Strange, unexplicable tweakings of the education system. But, today being the first day means that yesterday was also the first Sunday of a long school year of transport.
Most students attend university locally. In Galicia there are three universities, in A Coruña, Santiago, and Vigo, and an extension campus of the University of Santiago in Lugo. Almost all the Galician students who attend college can go home on the weekends. Most do. A lot of them are within driving distance of their campus. Which means parents become Sunday cab drivers.
It's not just making various trips with a full car to set up the dorm room or the (more common) student apartment. Though those trips do make for marathon drives sometimes in late August and early July. It's that the students generally go home on the Friday evening buses or trains with all their dirty laundry and then are driven back on Sunday evening with clean laundry and maybe a sack of potatoes, a bag of fruit from the home orchard, a couple dozen eggs, five tupperware containers of caldo gallego, a butchered chicken, and whatever else a doting grandmother thinks her starving college-age grandchild will need to survive an entire week in the wilds of the city. Because it's generally the grandmothers who make sure the students won't go hungry. Parents tend to be more lackadaisical. If you need it, buy it, and learn to live on your own. Parents supply the money and the transport. Because after loading the grandchildren with half the pantry, the students have so many bags they need to be driven back.
So, yesterday we began the weekly pilgrimage. We always leave early, around six, so that we don't encounter too much traffic. When we come back, around seven thirty, is when most people decide to travel to the city, and we sometimes see long lines of cars inching their way north. Yesterday, summer reappeared, so, added to the newly college-bound students were the homeward-bound beach goers. Guaranteed traffic jams.
And now, rain or shine, until the end of June, every Sunday evening there's a drive to be made to deliver our daughter to the halls of learning for the week. And, even though I know she does well on her own, and that she'll be home every Friday, there's still a little tug on my heart every time she closes the apartment door behind her on Sunday evenings.
Most students attend university locally. In Galicia there are three universities, in A Coruña, Santiago, and Vigo, and an extension campus of the University of Santiago in Lugo. Almost all the Galician students who attend college can go home on the weekends. Most do. A lot of them are within driving distance of their campus. Which means parents become Sunday cab drivers.
It's not just making various trips with a full car to set up the dorm room or the (more common) student apartment. Though those trips do make for marathon drives sometimes in late August and early July. It's that the students generally go home on the Friday evening buses or trains with all their dirty laundry and then are driven back on Sunday evening with clean laundry and maybe a sack of potatoes, a bag of fruit from the home orchard, a couple dozen eggs, five tupperware containers of caldo gallego, a butchered chicken, and whatever else a doting grandmother thinks her starving college-age grandchild will need to survive an entire week in the wilds of the city. Because it's generally the grandmothers who make sure the students won't go hungry. Parents tend to be more lackadaisical. If you need it, buy it, and learn to live on your own. Parents supply the money and the transport. Because after loading the grandchildren with half the pantry, the students have so many bags they need to be driven back.
So, yesterday we began the weekly pilgrimage. We always leave early, around six, so that we don't encounter too much traffic. When we come back, around seven thirty, is when most people decide to travel to the city, and we sometimes see long lines of cars inching their way north. Yesterday, summer reappeared, so, added to the newly college-bound students were the homeward-bound beach goers. Guaranteed traffic jams.
And now, rain or shine, until the end of June, every Sunday evening there's a drive to be made to deliver our daughter to the halls of learning for the week. And, even though I know she does well on her own, and that she'll be home every Friday, there's still a little tug on my heart every time she closes the apartment door behind her on Sunday evenings.
Sounds like Boston when the students come back and the streets are clogged with moving vans. More regular than even migrating birds.
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