There are Rules...

There are rules... As we had been reminded by a sour waitress the night before, Spain has very definitive rules of etiquette for how things can be done, and of course, these rules are unwritten in order to confuse foreigners, And these rules vary wildly from region to region. Dinners generally don't begin till late in the evening, resulting in kitchens being closed till at least 8:30 pm, thus creating lines of emaciated pilgrims leaning anemically against each other as they stare imploringly at heartless barkeeps. As five of us sat at an outside table in the late evening Spanish sun in the town of Berducedo, our waitress yanked menus out of our hands, punctuating her demand that we could only eat inside. "This table is for four and you are five," she uncompromisingly said.. As we reluctantly moved inside, we added another pilgrim to our table which further sent our server into a downward spiral and by the end of our meal of mixing courses and using the wrong silverware, it was clear that our waitress actively hated us.

The following night in the adorable hilltop town of Grandas de Salime, a number of famished pilgrims stood in the bar section of a local restaurant.

"The restaurant doesn't open till 7:30."
"Can we see the menu?"
"Not until 7:30."

We stood watching the minute hand slowly inch from 7:20 towards 7:30pm, as a card game, populated solely by old men, moved along and Dimitri "accidentally" began drinking another man's glass of wine.

"Oh, Signora?!" Paul said, while signaling to our very male and very Spanish waiter. As our waiter brushed by, Paul dropped his hand sheepishly, his dimple appearing in his very red face."Well now, we'll never get service!"

Traditional blacksmith and woodworking demonstration!

We had descended a knee brutalizing 800 plus meters through pine forests to the sea level Río Navia, before climbing up again to Grandas de Salime. We had exclaimed over the lovely little balcony in our room, overlooking windmill topped mountains and we had learned details of the traditional Asturian life in the perfectly kept Ethnographic Museum..all before arriving too early to the restaurant and hungry enough to eat our fellow pilgrims.

Our waiter stopped, touching the shoulder of one of the beautiful Danish women sitting at the table next to us, before turning my way and inquiring over my delicious meal. I responded to his chivalrous inquiry with a smile and a "todo es bien." He returned my smile, his hand brushing my arm before he raced away without a glance towards my three male companions.

As we had discovered earlier in the day, the orange juice box attached to Dimitri's backpack had long since been emptied of it's oranges and actually contained wine. No one knows how he finished each day's stage, staggering to the end with swollen knees and severe dehydration. But in his way, he walked his camino completely on his own terms. About 5'9" and thin, with white hair and two children in their 20s, Dimitri traveled to Spain from his home in Kaliningrade, a tiny Russian seaport outpost sandwiched between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea. Dimitri had arrived for his grand adventure on the camino Frances, but upon discovering hordes of other noisy pilgrims, he quickly jumped over to the Primitivo, a path considerably more physically demanding, though slightly quieter.

Paul, who had in a sense, adopted Dimitri for the duration of the Camino, later told us that he asked Dimitri why he came to the camino. And his response..? "To learn English!" As if everyone wanting to learn English would choose to travel to a Spanish speaking country. But it is only on the Camino that a man would come from Russia to walk 300+ kilometers with a Brit from Oxford, a German with perfect English diction and two Americans... (We won't mention the questionable things that Americans can do to the English language..)

At each meal, Dimitri would wait for a lull in conversation. "I 'ave a joke," he would say with emphasis on the 'k,' and we all would turn towards him with anticipation. "Stalin humor," he would call it, and though at times the punchline may have been lost in translation, we laughed at the animation of the storyteller himself.