Costa Brava

The many coasts of Spain have names. The western coast near Santiago is La Costa de Morte, because it´s where ancients believes the sun died. The northern and southern coasts are named after colors, after the dominant color in the landscape. Noth of Barcelona, it´s called La Costa Brava, which can be translate as the Brave Coast or the Angry Coast. However, I can´t tell where the name comes from because based on the beautiful beaches and amazing green landscape neither name applies.

Getting out of Barcelona was a challenge. I realized after the fact that I had been overcome by inertia in Sitges, and I was fighting hard to overcome it. After a late morning, cleaning my cousin´s house a bit, and packing up, by the time I got on the road it was 6pm. That´s the kind of inertia that was holding me back, and I decided the only way to overcome it was to just do it, as Nike says. So at 6pm I hopped on a train that would take me from the southern suburbs to the northern suburbs, and there I would find a campsite. By the time all of that happened, it had gotten dark. (don´t worry, mom, I had front and rear lights!) Even though I only had to ride 13km to find a campsite, what mattered was that I was, again, on the road.

I am reading Paolo Coelho´s "Pilgrim to Compostela", his first book, written after his own 1986 pilgrimmage. Back then, the Camino de Santiago was not something many people did, so his experience was very different. But it brought to mind the idea that any sort of travel that takes you so far away affects you deeply, phyically, mentally, and spiritually. He focuses a lot on the spiritual component, and in the book he is in search of a sword. The search for the object motivates him, but it is neither the search nor the object that matter. Ultimately, it´s the experience of traveling and encountering the unknown world on a daily basis that changes him. It is that experience that I am facing daily, and it reminds me that this kind of travel is a profound way of communing with the world around us.

Back in the routine of bananas, nutella, lots of bread and water, and setting up my tent every night, I am happy. I am seeing new thing every day, and today, it was some amazing Greek and Roman ruins (after all, this is the Mediterranean), and also the house/studio that Dalí used for most of his life. I am spending tonight in Figueres, Dalí birthplace, and tomorrow morning I will visit the grand museum dedicated to his work, or oeuvre, as they would say here, because I´m so close to France that Spanish is a third language (also, behind Catalan). Everyone here seems to speak the three, and many also speak German and English. Imagine growing up quintilingual!

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