This morning my usual panadera asked if I had gone to her shop for bread yesterday. It seems she saw me. On public holidays, of which yesterday was one, she opens a little later than usual but was even later yesterday because the stormy weather overnight had somehow led to difficulties in her getting here from the other end of town. She had been parking her car as I was heading for the other, inferior, bakery.
Later on we headed for the railway station, giving ourselves, so we thought, plenty of time to buy our tickets and claim our over-60s discount. We were off to Pontevedra for lunch with a friend. We arrived at the station with a good 10 minutes to spare but spent 15 minutes in the queue. There were in fact two queues, both for salida inmediata and judging by the conversations I overheard more than half of those in the queue were after the same train as we were. And so we missed our train but then so did most of the people in the queue. Amazingly resigned (for a people who hate to queue) voices were heard to comment that they would just have to get the next train. Which is of course what we did as well.
Why the long queue? Well, yesterday was a fiesta and everyone and their grandmother was off on a journey somewhere. We hadn’t even realised it until a couple of days earlier when I discovered it was the feast of Saint Joseph. One of the rare men in our yoga class commented that it was his saint’s day. This caused confusion as we all know him as Manuel. He turns out to be José Manuel and so we had to wish him a Happy Saint’s Day!
I did wonder what happens if you have one of those double names such as Juan José. Do you have two saint’s days, one for San Juan in June and one for San José in March? I suppose one answer is that you have as many as people will offer you presents for.
Anyway, getting back to things that were missed yesterday, we tried to contact our friend in Pontevedra to let him know that we were going to be rather late and were repeatedly unable to get through to him Now, the beauty of the mobile phone is that you can take it places with you; it is mobile. That way you can be contacted easily. It doesn’t work if you leave the phone in your car! Consequently our friend found out he had missed a number of calls from me … when he returned to his car.
Eventually we all got together and headed to our chosen restaurant only to miss out on a table because you needed a reservation yesterday …. because it was a public holiday.
Nothing daunted, we went elsewhere and had a variety of nice tapas at the Restaurante Cinco Ruas, which rather made up for the other things we had missed over the course of the day.
A final note: we also missed the sunshine which had been around for most of the week.
But I did collect some weather statistics. According to AEMET, the Spanish weather bureau, this winter has been the wettest in Spain since 1947. In Galicia it has been the most unstable and changeable for 10 years! Last year however, was the warmest year in Spain since 1947; the average temperature for the year for the whole of the country was 15 point something degrees (although I’m not sure how they work that out). And here in Vigo they STILL tell me we didn’t have a summer last year!
Never mind, Spring is officially about to start so we all have something to look forward to! And although I have also missed the snowdrops in my garden in the UK I do have a photo.
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