BootsnAll Travel Network
Add this blog to: MyYahoo, Google, Bloglines, RSS


Articles Tagged ‘Santiago’

More articles about ‘Santiago’
« Home

In Vigo with a Better Plan

Sunday, August 6th, 2006

I woke with a sore throat and am coming down with a ferocious cold, so spending the whole night on a series of trains and ending up in Lisbon at 5 a.m. was definitely a bad idea. Instead I hopped a two-hour train to Vigo, where I can get a luxurious night´s sleep and then catch a train tomorrow at the reasonable hour of 7:45 a.m., getting to Lisbon around 3 p.m., then catching a half-hour train to Sintra. All it took was letting go of the money for the hostel, letting go of Santiago de Compostela (that was hard), and then springing some fairly big bucks (for me) on a credit card for the Hotel Mexico, located a short walk from the train station in Vigo (pronounced BE-go). On my way from the train station to the hotel I passed this internet station, two doors before the hotel door, so here I am again, after a couple of hours of lying in bed, sneezing and blowing my nose, and watching CNN. [read on]

Posted in Spain/Galicia | 2 Comments »

To blog or not to blog?

Sunday, June 11th, 2006

As I prepare to leave for my pilgrimage in Portugal and Galicia, a couple of people have asked if I’m going to start a travel blog. I have mixed feelings about blogs. When they first crept into my awareness, I found blogs exhibitionistic. Why, I thought, would people put the intimate details of their lives on the internet for any stranger to peer at. What’s that urge about? And then who reads blogs? I’m still trying to integrate my experience of living in Lesotho, where most people have no electricity and are nursing family members with AIDS by candle light, with living in Sugar Land, Texas, where most people live in mansions and still support Tom Delay: “He’s done so much for our community.” So I think about access, about the cyber-gap, about who lives in the global village, who cuts the grass for whom. About 166,000 people are in prison in Texas. I visited Guillermo today. He’s been incarcerated since 1992. He’s working on his three-minute speech for the graduation ceremony at the end of the Gang Renunciation program he’s in. He asked me whether I thought it better to quote Sun Tzu or Gandhi. He reads. The first book he asked me for, back when he was still in solitary, was Thucydides. He has never used a cell phone, a computer, or an ipod. Portable CD players were the hot new thing when he got locked up. His mom died this past March. He’s working on his soul. He said the change has come gradually, “Not like no lightbulb moment. More like a very slow sunrise, like a ten-year sunrise.” He says he used to want to find the people who pressed charges against him and beat the shit out of them. Now he wants to find them to make amends. He said, “I hurt them, and they didn’t have nothing to do with the pain I was in. I feel so bad about that.” I told him I’m going to light candles for him in chapels, churches, and cathedrals all over Portugal, and his eyes filled with tears. He’s never sent or received an email. Guys like him don’t read blogs. So I think about audience. [read on]

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, What does it mean? | 3 Comments »