What a city. I really don’t think any words or pictures can do this incredible place justice, but I’m going to try anyway. I arrived in the Santiago de Compostela airport last Friday, after flying about eight and a half hours to get to Madrid Barajas. After making our connection, our group of about twenty students had about a fifteen minute bus ride into the city and we were able to see a little bit of the countryside. One word: green. Galicia gets more rain than anywhere else in Spain, and it definitely shows. Everywhere moss and grass tries to overtake the footpaths that criss-cross campus and the city proper. Ivy makes its way up forty foot palm trees, which cross branches with sixty foot pines. Where else does that happen? And people keep reminding me this is the middle of January…

The city is split into two sections: the old historic zone dating back to the middle ages and the newer zone surrounding it. Walking around the old zone is, to use the cliché, like stepping back in time. Restaurant owners display the days catch in the windows (we are only 30 km from the Atlantic), and artisans play their instruments in the narrow, winding cobblestone streets. These streets, turned into canyons by the four and five story apartments lining them, could at any time open up into huge city squares containing fountains or gardens or statues.

As for the cathedral, it is the one thing I don’t know how to describe here, besides saying that it is very, very big and very, very old. Ernest Hemingway called it the most beautiful he ever saw. I guess there is a reason Santiago is the third holiest site in Christianity, behind only the Vatican and Jerusalem.

That is all for now.