Celebrating things!

Today is "festivo", a public holiday, the Feast of the Assumption, when the Virgin Mary is supposed to have been transported up to heaven, I think. It's a public holiday in Italy as well: "ferragosto", when everyone has a big family meal ot set off on holiday somewhere.

Tomorrow is also "festivo" in Vigo, but not, I was told, in the rest of Spain or even in the rest of Galicia. It is the feast of San Roque, whoever he is. Maybe he is the patron saint of Vigo. On the train the other day I heard two young women taking about the "festivos", one of them wondering why there are so many. The other explained that it is because there are so many saints in Spain. Not just that there are so many saints in general; she was quite possessive about it, declaring, "We have so many saints". She made it sound as if there are more in Spain than elsewhere. Is that even possible? Surely a saint is a saint everywhere! No doubt somebody will put me wise.

As there are two "festivos" on the run, I found myself wondering if those who like to make a bridge connecting the weekend to a public holiday will make one at each end and take the whole week off. It would make sense, of a kind anyway. But maybe Wednesday is too far from next weekend for a "puente" to be realistic and feasible.

This being Spain, the supermarkets close for "festivos", unlike the UK where just about the only one that leads to a mass shutdown is Christmas Day. Not even Easter Sunday makes them close, just reduce their opening hours. So when we got back from Pontevedra yesterday in the early evening I decided to pop into the supermarket next door for a couple of things. With the chess tournament on in Pontevedra we have been doing so much coming and going that very little shopping has been done. 

Well, either everyone had been in already, emptying the shelves while stocking up on food as the place would be shut for two days, or the supermarket was applying a policy of not restocking shelves until after the two public holidays were done. The place looked as though it was in the last stages of a closing down sale. Whole shelves were almost empty. There were only about three cartons of fresh milk left, of which I took two. I got the last box of six fresh eggs. There were however plenty of boxes of hard-boiled eggs! Almost no oranges! No packs of chicken fillets!

 It felt as if I was in a disaster movie, shopping in possibly the last supermarket in the world! And, clearly, I had arrived too late to get the really good stuff!!!