Oh $#!T and Oh Wow Moments in Galicia

We just got back from a long weekend at the beach in Galicia. The trip was great, and it can best be summarized by a series of OH S#!T and OH WOW moments. Details after the jump.

I'm Ready!

So, first off, it should be said that the LL was ready for the beach. And there were plenty of beaches to enjoy in Galicia. For those unfamiliar, Galicia is a region of Spain located essentially at the northwest tip. They have their own language, called Gallego. Their cuisine is very focused on seafood. It is very green and very nautical. It's a long coastline, that is a combination of rocky cliffs and beautiful horseshoe inlets with fantastic sand. It is far enough north that it doesn't get that hot even in the middle of the summer, but the water is warm enough to swim in during the summer months. It is a beautiful place and is underappreciated as a beach destination.

So let me start with the first oh S#!T moment of the trip. I did something I rarely do. I booked a rental apartment directly with an owner, found on homeaway.com, but homeaway provided essentially no support on the actual rental process. It was all directly with the owner. But other options were filling up so I decided to take a chance, with the caveat that the owner we were working with had plenty of reviews and was putting off no warning signs. I also paid the full rental up front because it had to be done via bank transfer and I wanted to just do it all in one lump sum since the international wire transfer fee was the same regardless of amount.

That's the background for our arrival in Malpica on a Thursday late afternoon. And I should mention that I was starting to have some warning bells go off in my mind when I had tried to communicate with the owner about arrival instructions and had not gotten very clear responses to my inquiries, but this could easily have been chalked up to language difficulties. Well, the alarm bells really started going off when we arrived to the apartment building, rang the owner's apartment and got no answer. And then we rang neighbors and also got no answer. This went on for quite a while while the LL sat with Jana in the car, desperately needing a nap.

Finally, we decided to find a place to hang out and ideally find some free wi-fi so I could check my email and see if any additional instructions had arrived in my inbox while we were on the road. We did, after some searching, find a place on the waterfront with free wi-fi. So we bought a couple of drinks and checked email. Nothing. This is about an hour and a half after our initial arrival and and this point I'm starting to become more seriously worried. We fired off another email to the owner, this time with the real Spanish speaker Jana doing the writing, hoping that the owner might clue us in to what's going on and how we get into the apartment. Again, nothing. Oh. S#!T!

I walked back up to the apartment entrance again, ringing the owner's apartment. No answer. Rang the neighbor's bell. Someone responded. (Note that this is a intercom system at the front door, so you ring and then they talk to you through the intercom and buzz you in or not.) I could barely hear her. I explained who I was looking for and who I was, and she actually sounded like she was expecting me. She buzzed me in, explained that the owner was out of town, that she had gotten delayed in getting home, but she was here now with the keys and with instructions about the apartment. RELIEF! And the apartment was just fabulous. Nicely appointed. And with a balcony overlooking a beautiful beach and close enough to hear the wave rolling in. Perfect.

Our Apartment was in the line of buildings right on the beach

That was a big time oh S#!T moment. Fortunately, all of it worked out great. I guess the first oh wow moment was probably looking out the window at that view. Seeing the crystalline blue water, hearing the waves lapping up on the beach, and watching the sun start to go down beyond the hills just south of the Malpica beach. Beautiful. And a big time surprise from a place not really that well known for its beaches.

What they are well known for is seafood. And we had a few oh wow moments related to culinary pursuits. First off, 4 euros for 2 kilos of great mussels that we cooked at home. Wow. A meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant called As Garzas with a view onto an essentially deserted stretch of beach and by far the best paella (they are just called arroces, rices, here in Spain) I've ever had. And the LL was treated like a princess at this restaurant. She loved it. Wow. And we tried razor clams (not all that uncommon I suppose) and percebes (barnacles, pretty rare) as well. The razor clams were a revelation. Tried them for the first time at San Francisco restaurant right on the Malpica waterfront. We asked about the preparation at the end of the meal. Just grilled. No seasoning. Just the clams and a charcoal fire. Put those together and you get delicious. And the LL went after these things. She's a great eater. Love clams and mussels, but french fries she is happy to skip! Here are the razor clams:

And here are the percebes. By far the grossest-looking thing I've ever eaten. But there were good. A more pure taste of the ocean than anything I've ever eaten, including raw oysters. So a unique experience. These are basically available in Portugal and a few places in Spain in this part of the world. They are rare even here. Would I get them again? Given the price, probably not. But a very worthwhile experience.

So now on to another, literal, oh S#!T moment. We decided to take off on a hike on Saturday evening. Things had worked out so that we had a little more time than we expected (a rarity these days with the LL along). So we decided to take a walk out to a point where the views were supposedly amazing. They were, by the way. We were able to see France from the viewpoint that was the goal of this hike. The view was a wow. But the LL started getting a funny look on her face while she was out of the backpack walking around at the viewpoint. It was the look that she gets when she's making a smelly little present. No big deal, except that she had just made such a present right before we left so we decided not to bring any of the diapering equipment along for the hike. OH S#!T. Rookie mistake. What to do? Well, we took off the diaper (we use cloth). It had a liner in it so we used that to wipe her up a bit. The little gift was tossed in a garbage can and the old diaper was put back into place with a few paper receipts as a buffer between her bottom and the diaper. Not ideal, but it worked. We made it back to the apartment, very tired, and got a fresh diaper put on the LL. All was well with the world.

The other big oh wow moment took place on a day trip to Santiago. Santiago is the goal of pilgrims who walk the Camino de Santiago. Movies have been made (e.g., The Way). Millions of people have made the trip on foot using various pilgrims routes from France and Portugal to Santiago. The Cathedral here is said to house the body of St. James. So it's clearly an important spiritual place. We visited the church and took part in one of the major experiences, the embracing of St. James. There is a statue of St. James in the altar in this church. Pilgrims are invited to climb up stairs behind the altar and hug the statue. Multiple hundreds of thousands do this every year. Sometimes the wait is two hours for the experience. We waited for about 15 minutes. When we gave the embrace, a priest joined us and gave the LL a special pilgrim's blessing. (To be clear, we did not really complete the pilgrimage in the traditional way, on foot, but we did journey to the pilgrimage site nonetheless.) The experience made me think that walking one of the pilgrim's routes would be a worthwhile thing to do at some point in the future. Here's a long view of the Cathedral:

And here are a few other shots from the trip. First, two from Cathedral Beach, so named because the rock formations form large caves and offshore formations that look something like cathedrals. Amazing beach.

And one of the harbor at Malpica. Malpica was a truly beautiful place. While we had a few hiccups along the way it was a lot of fun and very relaxing. I'd buy real estate here soon if you want to get in on the cheap. Once things fully recover from the last bust, this is a place that will eventually find its way onto the tourist circuit in a more serious way. Right now, it's a relatively undiscovered and minimally developed slice of heaven.