October 09th, 2013

Yesterday we spent the day touring around Leon and seeing the sights, including the famous Santa Maria cathedral and my favorite, the Plaza San Marcos, site of the old San Marcos monastery built in the middle ages to care for sick and injured pilgrims.  the monastery was beautifully rebuilt in the 1500´s and it´s massive, , the size of a city block! - okay, maybe a small city block, but it is huge!  The buildnig is no longer a monastery but is now a very upscale tourist hotel called  the San Marcos Parador. (That´s where Martin Sheen and his friends spent a night in¨"The Way").  One other place of interest in Leon is the Patatin Patatan Hamburgeria, a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant where we ate lunch.  We ordered the Number 4:  two sunny-side-up eggs  (my favorite style of egg!), a pile of fried polish-style sausage and the specialty of the house, fried potatoes as thin as potato chips (maybe they were potato chips).  While we waited for our food the restaurant owner threw in some appetizers, razor-thin pieces  of Spanish ham (not like US ham) sliced from a big ham-bone sitting behind the counter and served on thick slices of crusty bread.  We washed this feast down with two beers for Tom and two diet cokes for me and the meal was awesome! - until a few hours later when I started to wonder if all those fried eggs, fried sausages and fried potato chips were planning on taking up permanent residence in my stomach.  When we returned to the Santa Maria Benedictine Monastery where we were staying I had to lay down and missed the 7:00 service where the nuns of the moonastery sing vespers.  Tom went, though, and when I asked him how the singing was he said, "Well...there were only about 15 nuns, most of them very elderly, so..."  He let the rest go without saying, but I knew what he meant. When we arrived at the monastery earlier in the day we  were intending to stay in the regular 5 euro albergue with our brother and sister pilgrims until we learned that the brother pilgrims had to stay on one floor and the sister pilgrims on another!  So we opted to pay 30 euros for the one double room in the monastery which turned out to be a  tiny, spare, two-single-bed room behind a door off the men´s dorm. This ended up creating kind of an awkward situ for me since,  the genders being separated, the guys seem to be letting it all hang out in the dorm even more than usual.  So I tried to look straight ahead and pretend I had blinders on while walking through the dorm to get in and out of our room. But we did have our own tiny bathroom and shower, though the water was cold and the shower leaked all over the 50-year-old linoleum in the bathroom and even creepd a little into the 50-year-old linoleum in our bedroom, which is probably why we were given several extra towels, all of them faded and frayed . Though you couldn´t say the floor of our room was clean enough to eat off of, still it appeared that somebody had anyway, since I found a fruit stem on the floor.  Our beds caved in the middle and I figured the bed sheets were okay once after I´d brushed off a few hairs and crumbs.  Still, at least Tom and I had sheets and blankets, which was more than the pilgrims in the dorms had. No sheets and blankets is pretty standard in many of the municipal albergues, though pretty unheard of in the private albergues - except at this one!  But maybe it´s just as well there were no sheets and blankets on the dorm beds here, since soon after we arrived we saw the little old nun  who runs the albergue hurrying after  a woman with a clip board and a large magnifying glass dressed in a white lab coat, plastic gloves and a headlamp. It didn´t take three guess to figure out what the woman was looking for when she started shining her headlamp along the sides of the mattresses and carefully looking through her magnifying glass.  Still, when I asked the elderly ladies manning the reception desk what the lady with the headlamp was doing they said they had no idea. (Yeah, right!) Still, there are three areas where I have to give the Santa Maria Benedictine Monastery snaps:  1.  The sisters may be past their prime when it comes to singing and housekeeping, but they do run a knock-up laundry service.  2.  The computers actually worked, and they were fast, and they gave you an extra 10 minutes for your euro.  3.  The 9 euro pilgrim meal was as good as any we´ve had anywhere - which is very good!  So, though I expected to wake up in the middle of the night to an itch-fest, we left the mmonastery this morning miraculously bite-free!  Then we set off from beautiful Leon and walked several hours through city and suburb until we finally were back on the Meseta where we walked until we reached our destination 22.2 kms later, the small village  of Villar de Mazarife where we are staying at a lovely, friendly, CLEAN 8 euro albergue, the "San Antonio de Padua", where the owner came by a moment ago while I´m typing this to offer me a chocolate!  Whatever your destinations today, may you all end up in a happy place!