El Camino de Santiago (Part 1)

As of April 16th 2014 myself and about 40 or so other exchange students from all over the world successfully completed the walk of Santiago (Portugal branch) reaching from Tui (or Tuy) Spain up until Santiago, Spain. All in all this is about a 120 km (75 miles) plus walk all  completed over the course of four days. It was without a doubt the most physically demanding and trying experience of my entire life, but at the same time one of the most special and rewarding experiences of my entire life as well! Here I am going to try my best and do a day by day overview of my experience, but to be honest it is just a huge blissful blur so the details may be fuzzy.

Friday April 11th two of my AFS friends (Quinn from California and Alice from Canada) came to stay at my house so we could make the early morning drive to the airport the next day together. We ended up going to bed around 12 which was really smart considering we had to wake up at 4:30 am the next day.

Saturday comes and the alarm goes off 4:30 sharp. We got ourselves and our things ready to go and are in the car by 5, possibly cutting it a little close considering the gate to our plane closes at 5:55... ehh whatever. Roman drops Alice and I off at one gate then goes to drop Quinn off at hers because we had to take separate planes. We were flying with Ryanair and I had heard they were a bit difficult, just making it as hard as possible to enjoy flying with them. If only I had known just how true that was. 

I walk up to the front desk to get my ticket signed, one of the regulations they have with foreign travelers. I hand over my ticket and visa and the man behind the desk shakes his head, hands back my ticket and tells me I can only go with my passport. I don't have my passport because I was told one or the other and I figured traveling and staying in hostels I don't want it to be super easy for someone to steal my passport. Tough. I have to call my host dad have him run all the way home dig through all my drawers to find the thing and hand it over so I can get my damn signature and hop on the plane.

At the same time while I am waiting for him to come back I get a call from Victoria, the other AFSer I am traveling with saying her alarm didn't go off until 5:30 am and she was just leaving now. So literally as my passport is being thrown to me through the car window her taxi pulls up. We race to get those stupid, stupid signatures, run our butts off to security cut the line, of all of four people, don't even take the time to put our shoes on and are off through the airport as fast as our legs can carry us. Thank God the Ryanair part of the airport is its own separated part so we were able to find the plane and meet up with the other AFSers just as they were boarding the plane. Moral of the story for the morning of day one, always, ALWAYS get to the airport two hours early / nothing ever goes as planned.

Keep in mind this all before 6 am. We get on the plane, the ride goes really quickly, we are in Santiago caught up with Quinn by I'd say 9:30. From there we had to take a bus to the train station. The bus was very easy. Everyone else happened to be traveling to do the Camino as well, just different parts (this same walk has about 100 different paths you can chose spreading all through Europe including Russia, France, and even Ireland). We met a very nice guy who asked us where we were from (when AFSers are together they all speak English, don't know why, but we do) since we weren't speaking his language. So then we had a nice back and forth until we reached the train station were we caught our first train from Santiago to a town called Vigo. 

(Left to Right Haoxian (China) Alice (Canada) Victoria (Illinois) Me (New York) Quinn (California))

This train lasted about an hour and a half and we were in awe of the nature around us. The west coast of Spain could not be anymore different than the east coast. It is so incredibly green and covered with fields of grass, rivers, mountains you name it and I quickly found myself home sick for the country side that I live on at home. We arrive in Vigo to a seaport. We decided to split up half of us going to get some last minute sports gear while half of us went to grab some snacks from a grocery store. We met up later and had a nice lunch. Then we walked to another grocery store to get even more snacks along with a ginormous box of strawberries to eat at the train station while waiting for the train. We gave ourselves an hour of extra time, traumatized from our early adventures.

Our second train comes and the thing is two train cars. It was nice enough on the inside, but by far the smallest train I have ever been on in my entire life. This one was only about a half hour long and we made it to Tuy at about seven. However we still had to navigate our way to the hostel itself. We walked that town inside out and backwards until finally being given accurate instructions to the hostel in which we were staying, but the joke was on us because there was no more room in the hostel. We waited there for a half hour with all the other AFSers, totally overwhelmed and on the verge of sleep, doing our best to form accurate sentences reintroducing ourselves to these people we hadn't seen since September. 

Just a little while later we were lead to a nearby hostel, then off to dinner shortly after which was just a blur of getting reacquainted, then back to the hostel to a mad rush for the showers and bed to prep for our first day of walking ahead.