Completo

Day 34

I was up early for several different reasons. I had gone to bed around 8pm the night before, I wanted to be out the door early for a day trip to Braga, and because I had a night bus and the more tired I was on it the more I would sleep.

After an hours train ride I was in Braga. It looked much more modern than Porto. There were more new building and high rises than the faded elegance of Porto. I quickly was on a bus and on my way to Bom Jesus, the reason for coming here.

For some reason about 150 years ago someone felt that they should recreate the crucifixion story in Braga. Over about 350 steps you walk through scenes from Jesus´s death. When I got off the bus most people headed straight for the funicular to avoid the stairs. This meant you walked through the story backwards making it more like Easter Sunday than the crucifixion. I would be huffing and puffing my way up all of the stairs. It wasn´t really that bad. There were rarely more than 30 stairs before there was something else to check out.

Each circular building enclosed another part of the crucifixion story in gory detail. The sculptures were made of wood and quite good. I had the walk to myself. The cool breeze, birds chirping and mossy atmosphere just added to the experience. When I reached the top I was greeted with a spectacular view and a nice cathedral. There were probably about 200 people milling about the top. I thought, oh great, it will be like a herd of cows going back down. The weird thing is that they never walked down. I had the path to myself once again. I don´t understand why you would go to look at the top and not check out the rest of it.

I had expected Bom Jesus to take a lot longer than it did, but I was greatful to have the time to check out Braga. From the bus ride I could tell that there were loads of cute plazas and fountains to check out. When I got back to the train station I set off to explore. After walking for over an hour I hadn´t found a single fountain or square. I was about to give up but decided to get my haircut instead. When I had finished that I was going to head back, but someone managed to stumble upon the Se Cathedral. My guidebook had said that it would be closed on Mondays, but it was clearly open.

The cathedral itself isn´t all the interesting. What was interesting was the room full of relics and brain boxes. I don´t know why I find bits of saints to be so interesting, but for some reason I do. I spent some time trying to figure out just which bit of each saint was there. Most of them were too far away, or too deteriorated to tell.

I managed to make a train with about 1 minute to spare. That never happens! I still had some time to kill at the hostel and ended up talking to a nice Canadian girl named Gisela for a bit. She was doing a 9 month Europe trip after spending some time in Chile.

After walking the 30 minutes to the bus station I waited for it to be time to board the bus. I had no problem checking my big bag, but for some reason the bus driver wanted me to check my smaller backpack as well. He told me that I could only have one carry on. I simply stuck my day pack in the book bag and boarded. He then can and found me and said no, that I can´t do that. I tried to explain to him that I had important things in the bag and wasn´t going to be checking in and that I had one bag now, so what´s the big deal. He was insistent and I have learned that there is really little use in arguing with people who have minimal English skills. I simply took a plastic bag I had on me and put most of the contents of the small back pack in it. Now I had my purse and a plastic bag. How this was ok and the backpack alone was not, I don´t know. But really, whatever.

The bus ride was uneventful, but I didn´t sleep much. I was meant to be dropped off in Salamanca at 5 am, my plan was to hang out for an hour at the bus station and then find my hotel. For unknown reasons the bus arrived at 2:30 in the morning. The bus station was locked and there was no one around. I couldn´t even find a cab. I had no map and really no idea where I was in relation to, well, anything. This is my own personal travel nightmare. I found a hostal (hostal seems to be the word for cheap hotel), completo was all the man said. Apparently this means full. I checked a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th hostal. Completo, completo, completo. Same thing with numbers 5 and 6. I was growing desperate at this point. There was still no one around and not only where my bags growing heavy, but I was becoming very tired. I walked up to a hotel, a 4 star place, thinking that I would be so out of my price range that it would be ridiculous. It was expensive, but not obscenely so, and best of all they had a spare room. I was sold.

The room was a real treat, but I was too tired to appreciate it fully and passed out on the bed exhausted.