Luarca - Santiago de Compostela - Cudillera

This little town named Luarca was a seaside town we stopped off in on the way to Santiago de Compostela.


Here is a few of another small pueblo I saw down below on the way to Luarca.

And here is part of the little town of Luarca. It's built into the edges of the mountain that surrounds it and is inhabited mostly by fishermen.

After a about 40 minutes we hopped back on the bus and continued on our way to Santiago de Compostela.

This is the view from a bridge really high up. The land mass protruding on the left side is actually a town on a small island connected by a little bridge to another part of the mainland which you can't see from here.

Once we finally arrived in Santiago de Compostela and dropped our stuff off at the hotel we went walking. Here is a view of the street our hotel was on. Cars would fly by occasionally doing about 45 mph on the cobble stone surface wide enough for one but meant for two.

So apparently the big attraction to this town is the cathedral. We took an organized tour of the inside later on in the day.

Here is a view of once you first enter through the large front doors.

Here is a snapshot I took of some of the didactic carvings from the inner part of an arch I walked under as I looked up. What you see are demons consuming the damned. When this church was constructed most people were illiterate so the doorways and stained glass windows throughout the church were decorated with various depictions of things the church wanted you to be aware of at that time.

Here is another depiction of some part of the bible. It's just one of several panels on this special door at the back section of the church that is only opened twice a year on two specific days during a holy period.

These are the organs. Note the horizontal angle at which the pipes protrude from. I've never seen a church or cathedral with an organ in this style before.

Here is the backside of the main altar. On the other side is where the priest performs the services. This structure is about 25 feet tall by the way, and yes that's all gold, not just gold leaf either. Where was that money in the collection basket going to all those times again? God right? Anyhow I won't criticize the old catholic church system...

We were in the church touring it long enough for a mass to begin actually. Here is a video clip of the brothers starting up the incense. Note the pulleys and 3 or so brothers it takes to haul the container up into the air.

Here in this clip you can better get an idea of how vigorous the brothers pulled on the lines to get the incense container swinging throughout the massive cathedral.

After the ceremony ended we exited out the back using this doorway.

I was staring at the carvings above the doorway and happened to notice this. Can someone tell me how a flying monkey from the Wizard of Oz managed to get carved into a centuries old church?

Just outside of the church was an open air market. In this part you may note the green basket in front of the woman contains rabbits. No they aren't dead, and no they're not to take home to the kids as pets either, they're just farm fresh... As I walked away I turned around one last time and saw an elderly woman approach the farmer and watched as the farmer grabbed a rabbit by the ears from up out of the basket and held it up showing the quality and size to the prospective hungry housewife.

There wasn't too much more to see in Santiago de Compostela aside from the cathedral. The following day we left. On our way back we stopped off in another seaside pueblo named Cudillero. Note the V-shape of the house staggered down the cliff sides.

The houses literally were built along the incline all up and around, forming almost an ampitheater like shape around you. This was an extremely tiny town, what you see from this shot is basically all you get.

Some of us decided to climb through the alleys between houses and work our way up the incline. Here is a shot part way up right before sunset.

Here is another shot now higher up than before. This is of the whole town.

And lastly, before we left our hilltop perch, I turned around and snapped this photo of the lighthouse guarding there tiny harbor. This shot was taken in complete dark with no flash. I had to set the camera down on a safe spot where the lighthouse was in view, set the shot timer to wait 2 seconds so me pushing the capture button wouldn't shake the camera, and have the lens set to stay open for a full 15 seconds gathering light and pixel data until it closed the lense and rendered and wrote the picture to memory. Try to click on it for an expanded size to get a better view of the detail of the lighthouse.

We then descended, made our way to the bus, and rode it home to Oviedo. Now I must go shower before I walk to the bus station to get to the airport for my flight for Amsterdam. Next update will be the 28th!

Weekend in Madrid - Parte 2

So as we were walking past the royal palace we noticed a stage nearby had been setup and some music had started. Here is a vid clip showing the beginning.








Later on we walked down to this park that had an ancient Egyptian temple in it.








Apparently this temple was transported from Egypt to Madrid and reconstructed on this spot. After leaving this park we decided to hop the metro to the Zoo, for we had heard Madrid had quite a large one. Those pictures I took using a friend's camera because my batteries died after snapping these photos you see above. Therefore I'll have to post them at another point whenever I can get those pictures from that other memory card. That probably won't be for a while because I am going on spring break on Thursday.

Several friends and I are taking a 9 am flight to Amsterdam first and staying there for 4 nights. After that some of us are seperating and the rest, including myself, are taking a bus to Paris at 9 am the fifth day. Then we are staying in Paris for 3 nights. On the 4th day then some of us are taking an 8 am flight to London, where we meet up with some others from the program with whom we've rented an apartment for a week with. The 2nd to last day in London we are going to a concert of some of the members of Wu-Tang Clan and few days after finally returning home to Oviedo. Of course I'll be taking lots of photos but I won't be able to do any updates between March 13-29th.

Therefore tomorrow I'll post a bunch of photos I took from the latest excursion I went on with the UMASS group. It was a weekend trip to Santiago de Compostela, located to the west of us in the province of Galicia.

Weekend in Madrid - Parte 1

About a week ago I decided to accompany some friends I made from the Iowa group to Madrid for the weekend. Round trip by plane was cheap, about $50 american, and the hostel they had picked supposedly had a bathroom inside each room! How luxurious.






Even better, I had not realized the room came with a balcony as well. The view was sort of interesting, but only one at a time please, I don't know if you can tell from the picture but the balcony was only big enough to comfortably fit one person. What you might be able to tell from the view's height is the fact that we had to ascend and descend about 5 very long flights of stairs to go anywhere.







We decided to walk around after finding our hostel and get familiar with our surroundings. If you are familiar with the famous Prado art museum it's to the left of the rotary that encloses this arch, which I later learned was apparently a present from Italy.




This building was some sort of government building, can't recall what its function was but I thought the architecture was pretty interesting.

Later in the day we made our way to the royal palace. We only walked around the outside, we couldn't go in.

Next to the palace a little further down, a street performance of quite a large scale began as we walked up to it. I'll post those pictures and the rest of Madrid tomorrow.