Spanish views from a small town

I am so out of it. I am tired . I got my second shot yesterday morning. I was fine all day, with only minor aching in my arm. But then, around evening, I got extremely tired. My body ached. I had a small headache. I took a paracetamol, and I got a bit better. But then, during the night, I was cold, couldn't sleep well because of that, and awoke with a low-grade fever and general achyness. Now, I'm a bit better, with another paracetamol. Hopefully, by tomorrow, I'll be my normal self. It's been busy for me since I finished classes last Tuesday. The car was in the garage Wednesday and Thursday, having the clutch fixed. Wednesday night, Midsummer, we had our own little bonfire to jump over and keep witches away. Friday, I went on one of my road trips, the first since last June, and yesterday I got my second shot and got zonked out. My road trip had been up in the air. I had been intending to go down to Porto, where I haven't been in at least two or three years. But, in...

Even though contagion is going up again in our township, the open-air market today was crowded today. That means that all the cafés and bars in town are also crowded. I think we might rise in status from medium-low to high this week. Hopefully, we won't be put in lockdown next week. There have been quite a few binge-drinking get-togethers all over the country, including in our small towns, here. And people have been travelling this weekend, especially since Monday was a regional holiday. It seems that with the state of alarm gone, everyone thinks that the pandemic is over.  Last year, everyone was mentioning how refreshing it was to be able to walk around their cities and countryside without hordes of people diminishing the beauty. We've already forgotten about that. Our regional president of Galicia is hoping that, with the general lower count of contagion, and more vaccinations, that tourists will come back, again. Yet, before this pandemic struck, we were complaining about e...

Thinking over the protest this past Sunday, I remembered that the singer, Miguel Bosé, who had urged people to attend, lost his mother this past spring to Covid. He is the antithesis of Sharon Stone. She denounced that her grandmother and godmother died of Covid, and that her sister, a sufferer of lupus, is in grave condition in the hospital with the virus. She harangued against how Trump and the federal government have abandoned the population to the ravages of the virus, leaving state governors to do whatever they could against it, with fewer resources. This difference in these two public personas kind of makes you wonder a bit about the first. Oh, the numbers in Spain keep rising. Over two thousand new cases just yesterday. If you look at the total population of forty-eight million, it seems paltry. But we are all connected. A friend of my daughter's, with whom she had been on Saturday, got ill yesterday, with a headache, dizziness, nausea. Immediately, she started worrying on W...

As was to be expected, there is a surge in infections in nearby Ribeira and Pobra do Caramiñal. A person who lives in Ribeira returned from Brazil via Lisbon, at the beginning of the month. He was fine, but he infected nine people within his circle, and I think about fifteen others have been put in quarantine, just in case. From what I've read, it's a strange case. Apparently, he had a PCR test when he came and was negative, but when the cases appeared, he got an antibody test, and tested positive for IGg antibodies, which means he passed the infection a good while earlier. None of those infected are seriously ill, so the viral load must have been low.  One person and nine known infected. Yet, the borders to other countries in Europe have been opened yesterday, except for Portugal, which will open July 1st. Some of those countries have high rates of infection still, like the United Kingdom. I can just see the infection rate rise along the Mediterranean.  It's true we ca...

I am late in writing today because I have been out and about. In part, because I wanted to ground myself for upcoming scenes I've been thinking about for my book. In another part because we are finally free to move around. Even though it's still only possible within the autonomous region. Long ago, I heard the saying, "a book whose sale's forbidden all men rush to see, and prohibition turns one reader into three." That is so true. Tell me I can't leave my house, and I want to leave my house. Tell me I can't leave my province, and I want to leave my province. It doesn't matter if the reason for the prohibition is good, prohibition of something makes you want it. So, I've been aching to go out, to see where I'm going to place my characters, and to change my own vistas. After leaving lunch ready for my husband, I went down to Pontevedra, first. It doesn't seem to have changed much. Some businesses are still closed, I don't know if for...

Yesterday was the big day. We were being let further out of our cages. It coincided with an appointment my mother-in-law had at the hospital in Santiago. She had not been sure during these months leading up to it if she would be able to go, but she got a phone call a couple of days before, telling her that it was still on, and she should wear a mask and gloves. It was an evening appointment, very rare, and meant for people whose diagnosis is more urgent. In her case, urgency was required when the appointment was made because of pain that made walking a torment. Since then, the pain has gone away, but the knee problem remains, with a return of the pain lurking in the shadows.  The norms in this Phase One are that a driver can take people that don't live with them, but in the back seat and with a maximum of two people. Also, both driver and passengers must wear masks.  So, we drove like this to Santiago. I let my mask down around my chin to be able to breathe without foggi...

I am becoming increasingly reluctant, in my oldening age, to leave the house. Almost every morning that I have nothing scheduled, I feel the yearning to see different sights. But once I start thinking about which sights, I don't feel like abandoning the house. It's not that I have foregone my love of travel, or that I hate to step foot outside. I still love to dream about going far from here, about getting in the car and just driving. Some days I decide to go an hour's drive from here, and do so. But the action of closing the door behind me and getting in the car is becoming more difficult. I almost feel as if I don't want to go. I feel almost guilty for leaving the house.  Oh, I do have a very nice time wandering around, and seeing old and new places. It's that the inertia is becoming more difficult to overcome. I begin to understand my mother when she would refuse to go out, saying that she was very happy to stay home.   There is one good reason to limit unn...

I was finally able to drag my husband down to Portugal, specifically to Porto, my favorite foreign city. He had been under the impression, generated by dumb stereotypes, that Portugal was a poor country with no initiative, which produced cheap goods. He still had the images from boyhood of people who would go down to northern Portugal to the feiras , the open air markets, to buy cheap linens and housewares that were badly made and inexpensive. That was because from the oil crisis of the mid seventies, to around ten years later, the years of my husband's boyhood, Portugal confronted an economic downturn. Since the mid eighties till this last world recession, Portugal has grown exponentially. Now, it is beginning to recover, as well, much better than Spain, which still pursues the austerity delusion.  As a result, Porto is now being recuperated. Old gems of buildings are being reconstructed or recuperated. The first time I visited, in March, 2013, it seemed a sad city. Beautiful st...

After one of the coolest and rainiest months of May in many years (I haven't worn short sleeves even once!), today the sun has risen without almost any clouds and it's starting to warm up. Just in time to usher in June, a few days of good weather are predicted for Galicia. That, and the beautifully long days, have given me wanderlust. At the end of June I have one week all to myself. On one day of that week I intend to make one of my traditional day trips. I am starting to think about where I can go. I set a goal of a maximum of three hours driving to get to the place. Unfortunately, that limits the places I can visit outside Galicia that are still in Spain. Portugal is closer; the border is just a little over an hour away. But I would prefer to visit there in September, so for next month I'm scratching my head and wondering just how fast I can drive. Should I visit somewhere I've already been? Last year I went to Las Médulas in León province and wandered through Po...

Yesterday was one of my days to give in to wanderlust. However, the days being so short I couldn't go as far as I would have liked (the moon). So I kept within the confines of Galicia, and tried to reach a place where snow had fallen. Goats herding themselves. The first snowfall of winter has been extremely late this year. Though it has fallen, as always, in the mountains. The high mountains. Which meant far from where I live on the coast. So I headed for the mountains with the best access, in the province of Ourense. I got off the highway at Allariz and headed for the far mountains covered in snow. As I neared the mountains along a secondary road, I reached Sandiás and the Lagoa de Antela. To my left, rising on a small hill, I saw one of the guard towers standing like a lonely sentinel over the present potato fields and highway glinting with cars. So I took a left at hazard, since there were no markers leading to the place. Nothing new in Galicia. The Lagoa de Antela was v...

Yesterday I took a mental health day. It's a day in which I get in my car and go wherever I feel like going, leaving all responsibilities behind for one day. Yesterday I decided to go to Porto in Portugal. It's about two and a half hours away from where I live. I've been there before and I like the city. It's similar to cities I know in Spain, yet different enough to know I'm in another country. It's an old city and the first time I saw it was on a rainy day. Its tired buildings with crumbling façades, dirty ceramic tiles, and peeling paint made it seem ancient and poor. A row of houses.   It looked as if it wanted to retire from the modern world and rest quietly forever on the banks of its river. The next time I saw it, it looked old and poor but lively instead of tired. That day it looked like an old grandmother who threw on her brightest shawl and put on her reddest lipstick to go to the fair. The sun was shining hot and it was near the Eve of St. John,...

Last night my husband and I drove his youngest brother to the airport to catch his flight back to Barcelona. My mother-in-law had mentioned that she wanted to go, but then she changed her mind. As the car drew away from her house last night, she waved and put her hand over her heart. This brother-in-law has always been her favorite. Probably because he is the youngest. My husband always complained that when they were single and went out on weekend nights with friends, his brother could come home the next morning and there wouldn't be any problem. But if he did the same, he'd get beaten with the broom.  At the airport we had some doubts about my brother-in-law's suitcase. He opted to pay for a suitcase weighing a maximum of fifteen kilos, but it felt like a lot more. His intention hadn't been to take anything more than a carry-on bag, but his mother, in true Galician fashion, urged him to take things back with him. Such as homemade orujo , a type of Spanish grappa di...