Everyone warned us that A Coruña, a small city on the Northern coast of Spain, was going to be cold but that didn’t stop Eve, Lauren, and me from taking the risk! However, upon arrival Friday morning, the foggy, cold air left us all a little skeptical upon exiting the A Coruña airport. LUCKILY, after putting our bags down at the hostel (which smelled funny but had wonderful mattresses) it warmed up significantly, and we were able to sit in the sun, drink coffee, eat croissants, and play cards. That sentence pretty much defined our time in A Coruña… we drank a lot of coffee, ate a lot of pastries, and managed to get up to 2,000 points on the Gin Rummy scorecard. When we weren’t doing these things, though…
The first day, after our tummies felt satisfied, we explored a little bit. We realized A Coruña is much smaller than Seville when we managed to get from one end of the map to the other in less than a half hour. In that time, we stumbled upon a cool looking building that we decided to go into—why not? After passing a few rooms with chalkboards, we realized it was a school. We REALLY realized this when a short man in a sweater started yelling at us. We were about to scurry out of there, when he told us to stop and wait. Uh oh. He went into a little office and came back out with a key, which he used to open the door of --- the torture chamber. Not really, (I’m reading too much of The Princess Bride, sorry) it opened an auditorium with a huge ornately decorated ceiling and some statues of fancy people. Another teacher with glasses, a sweater vest, and no hair on the top of his head came into the room and asked what was going on. After an explanation from the first short-sweatered guy, he asked to see our map. We handed it over and he proceeded to mark which clubs and bars we should go to. His little bald head bobbled over the map, telling us to “start here around 8:30 and then go here and then around 2 this club will be great!” Did I mention he was about 50 years old and teaches microeconomics? Only in Spain. We giggled the whole way home.
When I say “home”, I mean the grocery store. We spent the majority of our visit there. We stocked up on bread, cheese, apples, carrots, peanuts, yogurt, and three boxes of Special K (which we ate in total due to the Authentic Chocolate that is unheard of in the US). The last morning when we could no longer stay in the hostel, we took our yogurts and Special K outside to a street corner to eat breakfast. We looked a little bit like homeless people who had splurged on the cereal brand, but we managed to have at least 10 people tell us “buen proveche” which means “Bon Apetit!” Even a passing policeman, who we feared was going to tell us to not loiter on a corner, wished us a good breakfast!
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| Special K is going to be calling for new models real soon |
A Coruña isn’t a huge tourist city, which gave it a friendly, peaceful feeling. Also, I think we were the only non-Spaniards we saw (one lady asked if we were French--score!) which was pretty cool. Everyone was really helpful and smiled when eye-contact was made (unheard of in Andalucia!), and it was interesting to hear how much slower the people of Northern Spain speak than those in Andalucia. We did manage to do a little cite-seeing—we walked along the beach, found some cool-looking buildings (that I still can’t tell you the names of… I guess that’s not my strong point on this whole world-traveler thing….), saw the oldest working lighthouse in Europe (El torre de Hercules), saw an old prison, ATE MEXICAN FOOD (still haven’t had salsa… Chad, you know how that’s torturing me!), and went to the cemetery. And I think I’ve mentioned the cards, coffee, and pastries, but if I hadn’t, just know that those were definitely thrown in there on more than one occasion….
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| Lauren and I pretending to be tourists haha |
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| "Piper, you look so happy..."--Holly Lowrey, my mother...what can I say, I have a sweet tooth?! |
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| A sweet tooth for wine, too? And style. |
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| Brr! More power to them. |
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| BEST BREAKFAST EVER. |
Well, I think that's enough conversation about my predicted weight-gain. Next weekend I’m headed in the opposite direction of the world to step foot on my 3rd continent— I’m off to Morocco! I have a feeling this will involve even more sun, and hopefully, for my heart’s sake, less pastries, but until then… “que todo pase bien!”
P.S. Lots of photo credit to Eve Kaiser. This blog is becoming her's slowly but surely....
Ahh this place looks like it was beautiful!! Lovin the pic with you in your sun glasses, playin cards and drinkin haha and those chocolate croissants look like they tasted sooo good!
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