Day 32. Arrival in Santiago

I stayed last night at Monte de Gozo, the first place travelers used to be able to see the Cathedral of Santiago. I wanted to arrive in the city fresh. I arrived in the rain, but was too lazy to go back up the hill to try to see when things cleared up in the evening. And this morning as I start, the valley is shrouded in mist.

Last night I did have a good conversation with one of the young folks working at the desk. She is from Poland and last year walked the last 100k of the Camino. And found that on the walk, the faith she had been raised in became real to her and became her own. This year, she and a friend returned to walk for 13 days (the Camino del Norte, a different route than the one I took, and then to serve at a hostel for an additional 13 days.  B

This is the monument on the top of the Monte de Gozo, the Mount of Joy. 

Artwork on the way into the city. I'm not sure whether this is meant to be a dancing star it an octopus, but I liked it. 

Pilgrims entering the city.  There is a steady stream of ones and twos and tens and forties. Two days before I arrived, over fifteen hundred pilgrims completed their pilgrimage in the city. Yesterday 1300. 

This strange and cheerful fellow was begging near the Cathedral. The beak clacks. 

I tried to go into the Cathedral museum but they sent me off to collect my Compostela certificate. I'm glad I went when I did.  There was a long line for the many folks who sit to inspect your credential booklet with all its stamps and issue certificates. It was a long line when I got there but it got a lot longer. Ozone one told me that they talked to someone later in the day who waited more than five hours. I waited less than an hour for which I am grateful. 

They give you the Coompostela for free if you have gone more than 100k by foot or 200 by bike and will say that part of your reason for doing this was religious. They hand out a different certificate of completion of it wasn't religious. For 3e they will certify how far you have walked, and for 2e they will sell you a cardboard tube to get these documents home. I happily paid the 5e.  The fellow behind the desk was willing to add up the different segments I had walked, but I had trouble remembering the name of the endpoint of my shortest event, 7.5k. Because of the length of the lines behind me we just left this out. So I am certified as having walked 469k. 

It turns out you need to leave your backpack outside of the church. I decided to head for my Albergue, the Seminario Menor where I have reserved a single room (shared bathroom) for three nights at 15 e per night. My room turns out to be on the third floor of a building that I enter on floor -1. No elevators and it feels like I have to walk about a mile to get to my room. Seriously, the building is about the size of a football field. But it is nice to have the privacy of a room to myself. 

Interestingly, there is a sink in my room (cold water only) and no sinks in the bathrooms.