Travel – Page 8 – Pat the Expat

The other side

We visited Chapultepec castle the other day, and it was very interesting for a number of reasons. First, it has a dominating, 360 degree view of Mexico City. Second, it was the sight of an ancient retreat for Aztec nobility. Third, it was the seat of government for Mexico, both under the short-lived Latin empire of Maximillian I and then the 19th century Mexican Presidents which followed him. But mostly because it was the site of the last battle of the Mexican-American War. Or the American invasion, as it is known down here.

Views of
modern Mexico City
from Chapultepec

Most US historians now agree with Mexico’s view of the conflict, buttressed by ample evidence from those involved. Ulysses S Grant, who fought in the war as a lieutenant, said “I was bitterly opposed…and to this day, regard the war…as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Then congressman Abraham Lincoln thought the war was immoral, intended to further the spread of slavery, and threatened our Republican values. Former President and congressman John Quincy Adams called it “a most unrighteous war.”

The haunting monument to the Niños Heroes atop Chapultepec Castle

On September 13th, 1847, a combined force of US Army and Marines stormed the defenders of the castle, which included several cadets from a Mexican military academy there. The American victory sealed the fate of the Mexican government, gave the US Marine Corps the first line of its anthem (“From the halls of Montezuma”), and established the Mexican legend of the Niños Heroes or Child-Heroes.

Six teenage cadets refused the order to retreat from the buildings atop the summit, and instead continued to fight. Plaques memorialize where they died; one took the Mexican flag before it could be seized and jumped over the cliff literally with the flag as his shroud. Mexico does not make a big deal about the US invasion, but the story of the Niños Heroes is learned by all children in school.

Painted inside the dome (notice the US flag, bottom center)

It is a little strange being in a museum and seeing the US military playing the role of the heavy. Even stranger is seeing captured US battle streamers as prizes of battle.

So much of the US-Mexico relationship goes back to this war. The historical consensus is President Polk, a southerner, wanted more territory where slavery could spread, ensuring a majority of slave states in the US Senate. Polk sent the US Army into disputed territory in Texas, and US Grant’s memoirs confirm the Army was directed to act provocatively to elicit a Mexican attack.

As a result of the war, Mexico lost almost half its territory, including California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, and parts of New Mexico and Colorado. Try to think of the United States without these lands! The US became a Pacific power, and a generation of military officers honed the skills which they would employ against each other in nearly every major battle of the US Civil War. After this aggression, Mexico did not trust the United States again for over 100 years. The Mexican view was aptly summed up by Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican President and later dictator, who said “Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States.” It is nothing short of amazing the relationship has improved as much as it has, given how our mutual histories turned on the event.

Sights & sounds of la Navidad

Merry Christmas from the middle of Avenida Paseo de la Refroma, which is ironic for reasons below

Church and State are legally separated in Mexico. When that happened during the Reforma period after the revolution, it resulted in repression of the Church and the resulting Cristero war. In the end, the government seized all Church property. Which means that in a land where Church and State are legally separated, the government owns and maintains all Church properties! And Christmas shows up all over the place, from official squares to nativity scenes to toll booths (festooned with garland and “Feliz Navidad” written on the windows).

The Zócalo during the late afternoon, Christmas eve

The Zócalo after Christmas eve mass at the Cathedral

Christmas tree next to the monument to the Mexican Revolution

Feliz Navidad remains a common greeting, although a few “feliz fiestas” or “happy holidays” have crept into Méxican culture. Since “feliz fiestas” sounds so weird (are there any unhappy fiestas?) it may not catch on.

Mexico has a tortured history of religious involvement in political affairs. For a long time, all citizens had to be Catholic. The call for independence came under a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Still, México seems to have come to terms with a way to be officially secular without renouncing the essence of religious belief, which is after all communal and “other” facing.

The Cardinal Archbishop of Mexico City presiding at the Christmas eve vigil mass

¡Feliz Navidad a todos!

Big things in tiny spaces

Aztec temple, Spanish church, Apartment building

Winston Churchill once commented that the Balkans were so violent because they “produce more history than they consume.” CDMX produces a lot of history, too, and sometimes it is very concentrated. We visited two of its most densely packed historical sites today: Three Cultures Square and Tepeyac.

I expected the visit to Three Cultures Square to be a simple photo op: yes, you can grab an image with pre-modern (Aztec), modern (Spanish colonial) and post-modern (1960’s) structures in it. But as we toured the site, I came to realize just how much history was jam-packed into it.

First, it was the site of the Aztec town of Tlatelolco, where Moctezuma appeared before his people begging them not to attack the conquistadores. Instead, the Aztecs turned on Moctezuma and stoned him, resulting in his eventual death. There also the final Aztec chief, Cuauhtémoc fought and lost the final battle against Cortés, resulting in the end of the Aztec empire.

When the Spanish built this church there, it was the site of the baptism of a indigenous man who took the Christian name Juan Diego…more on him later.

Church of Santiago
Juan Diego’s baptismal fount

In 1968, students and workers protested against the corruption evident in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Military and police opened fire on them in this same square, killing between 300-400 on the eve of the opening ceremonies.

Finally, the apartment blocs lining the square collapsed during the 1985 earthquake, again killing hundreds in the neighborhood.

Quite a lot of history in a space a little larger than a soccer pitch. Its like the Boston Tea Party, Gettysburg, and Kent State all happened on the same spot.

Later in the morning we went to Tepeyac, better known as the hill on which the Virgin Mary (our Lady of Guadalupe) appeared to Juan Diego (yes, that Juan Diego), which I covered here. Now we’ve been to Rome, Jerusalem, Lourdes, and Fatima, and we have never seen a denser pack of churches than around the grounds of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

yes, its sinking
The new & old basilicas
The Indians’ Church
The Church of the well
A Chapel just to “swear off” something
The original church on the hill

One cannot overstate the Mexican people’s deep devotion to this Marian apparition. As our tour guide put it, not all Mexicans are Catholic (80% are), but all Mexicans are Guadalupanos (or devotees of Our Lady). Any time of day or night, you’ll find common folk working their way across the central plaza of the Basilica…on their knees. During the days immediately before the annual feast of La Guadalupana (12 December), almost 11 million people visited the shrine, again in a space about the size of your average mall in the States.

I counted seven different churches, including the original chapel directed to be built by Our Lady, and the second, larger church which is sinking into that soft lake bed which underlies most of CDMX. Mexican families come for the day: there is always a Mass underway, there were long lines for confessions, and people celebrating marriages, good fortunes, or just giving thanks.

Look closely & you can see the cracks
Church of the well is…
moving away

One can always visit the famous tilma, the cloak on which the image of the Virgin appeared, by standing on a series of motorized walkways that take you slowly past; there is always a short line. The tilma is out of reach, as it has already survived an acid attack and 29 sticks of dynamite!

The tilma
A candle stand after 29 sticks of dynamite
Close up

The grounds of the Basilica are not large, but they are full of churches, chapels, images to place votive candles, and a few tastefully obscured shops. Of course, just outside the grounds are all the plastic religious gee-gaws one could want. Looking at the various sculptures and watching Mexican families enjoy their visits, you can see just how much this particular icon means to all of them.

Juan Diego, in roman garb…doesn’t he look classical?
Another Juan Diego, with tilma
A pictorial representation of the peoples and their Mother

Another big thing in a very small space.

“You didn’t build that!”

Teotihuacan was on the agenda for today. It is hard to grasp the size and scope of this development, but I hope these pics and video give some perspective.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Teotihuacan is how little we really know about it. We don’t know it’s name; Teotihuacan is just what the Aztecs called it. It means “city of the gods” since the Aztecs found it abandoned and assumed the gods must have built it. We don’t know who really built it, as it predates the Meso-american societies we have named but is more advanced than the unidentified ones. We know the Aztecs came from Tenochtitlan to hold religious services in Teotihuacan, and we know the conquistadors named one area “the citadel” because they thought it resembled a ready-made fort.

Archaeologists thought Teotihuacan had astronomical associations based on its location and orientation, so they called the largest pyramid the temple of the sun and the next largest the temple of the moon. Once excavated, they determined both were dedicated to Meso-american gods: Tlaloc and some unknown female counterpart. They estimate one-quarter of a million people lived in and around the complex, but we don’t know what happened to them.

View from atop the temple of the sun, the largest pyramid

The pyramid steps are highly irregular and steep. Most have no handrails; some have a steel cable on which to grab hold. At various levels there are plateaus, where the lines to climb snake back and forth. There are no guardrails. I saw whole families, from grandparents to small children, clambering up the pyramid. From the video, you get a sense of the crowds. There are no signs, no park rangers, no one overseeing safety. Yet I saw no one fall, and everybody seemed to be looking out for everyone else. One way to ensure safety is to make more rules, emplace more equipment, hire more inspectors. Another is to make people responsible for themselves.

As to the title of this post? Well you’ll recall President Obama’s comment that ‘if you own a business, you didn’t build that.’ In the case of the Aztecs and Teotihuacan, it’s true!

Getting history right

We visited the National Museum of Anthropology; random thoughts follow:

Mexico does a good job of memorializing its distant past. The story of the Olmecs, Toltecs, Aztecs, Maya, and others are all captured in a single museum, with each culture given its own hall tracing its origins, rise, and destiny.

Tláloc, reclining, with the pumping station/gallery behind

Likewise, Mexico City made a major effort to add art to its public spaces in the past twenty years, and art drawing on its indigenous roots is featured. One great example of this is Diego Rivera’s statute of the rain god Tláloc, which is situated at the mouth of the Lerma river up on the Chapultepec heights overlooking the city. The pumping station there is set up like a mini-gallery of Rivera’s work, along with a chime system whereby the wind, the water, and pumps all combine to make music.

The Anthropology museum is huge. The central atrium contains this stunning pillar which uses rain water to generate a continuous fountain. The pillar is full of symbols celebrating the merger of Mexico’s indigenous and Spanish past.

While the vast majority of the artifacts on display are originals, there are recreations of some of the temples done is actual size.

Actual jade burial mask of Mayan ruler Pakal

Re-creation of Aztec temple decoration (life size)

There was no sugar coating, and the museum is constantly updating its displays based on new research. For an example of the former, the blood-thirsty nature of Meso-american culture is on full display, from skeletons of human sacrifice victims to discussions about the importance of slavery to the growth of these empires. There is none of the noble savage gloss which sometimes colors other North American histories of the Amerindian cultures.

As for keeping up-to-date, the museum noted new research which shows the Maya were quite adept at human sacrifice (a recent change, whereas previously they were considered more humane), and that the Aztec calendar we have all seen is not a calendar, but an Aztec representation of the universe. The museum is yet to capture some of the interesting, very recent finds in the Yucatán about the size and spread of the Mayan empire. But that is very recent, and we don’t really know how much will change as a result of the LIDAR (Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging) of the Yucatán, although it looks like our previous estimates on the Mayan population were off by a factor of ten.

More from what the Aztecs called “the city of the gods” tomorrow.

Ciudad de México

Live blogging from the Mexican capital, Ciudad de México, or México City as you know it. We’ll be here all week, and I will try to give you a sense of this massive, historical, and vibrant city.

But first, let’s clear up some confusion. All over México, you will see signs–along the highway, in the airport–pointing you toward…México! You may ask yourself, “how did I get here?” and you may say to yourself “this is not my casa!” (Apologies to the Talking Heads).

Here is the short answer: México is the name of a city, and a state, and a country. Ciudad de México is the capital of the country of Mexico. It is surrounded by the state of México, but is not within it. In fact, the capital of the state of Mexico is Toluca. Got that?

Mexicans refer to the capital as just “México” but they mean the city. The city used to be in something called the Distrito Federal or DF, which was akin to DC in the States. So old-timers may call it the DF, but the new appellation is CDMX.

CDMX is the political, historical, and cultural center of the nation and an overwhelming influence on México. At between 25 and 30 million people, it dwarfs Guadalajara, México’s second city, and is either the largest or second largest in the western hemisphere (Sao Paulo, another uncountable metropolis, is the competitor).

The city was built (literally) on the ruins of the Mexica (Aztec) capital Tenochtitlan. I’ll cover all this in more detail as we visit, but one amazing point is Tenochtitlan was built on a man-made series of islands in a great freshwater lake. Practically nothing of the original lake remains, but the unsteady foundations of a lake bed remain a challenge to the skyscrapers that increasingly mark the CDMX skyline.

Did I mention the volcanos and earthquake faults? More on that later!

Savvy Traveling

As someone who loves to travel, lives as an expat, and tries to be well-informed, I spend much time deciding where to go and when to visit. Security is always the overriding issue for me: I don’t care how cheap or comfortable or easy it is to go somewhere if I don’t feel safe in traveling there. On the internet and social media, I run across lots of opinion (mostly ill-informed), but also some fairly authoritative advice. One place I always check is the US Department of State (DoS) website for travel advisories. I have often encountered misunderstandings about the State Department warnings, so here is some (insider) guidance.

Our travel map: we need to hit a few more continents!

First, the purpose of the DoS site is general education. It is not meant to dissuade Americans from traveling: in fact, you’ll find State Department employees to be probably the most travel-friendly federal workers. They are interested in the rest of the world, and they want you to be, too. Neither is the site meant to be critical of foreign countries, or a comparison with the US. I often see folks opining on social media “what about gun violence in Chicago? Why don’t they talk about that?” Well, the State Department does not cover Chicago, and in fact, no federal agency is responsible for telling Americans where, when, or how to travel within the United States. Americans are free to go anywhere they want in the US, anytime.

Unfortunately, this leads some Americans to think they can go anywhere they want, anytime they want, throughout the entire world. Some think “I’m an American, who’s gonna mess with the US?” Others think “I’m just a friendly tourist, who’s gonna bother with me?” Maybe they just don’t think. Americans do things like backpack along the Iran-Iraq border, open the car window in a safari park, or tour authoritarian nightmares like North Korea. Note that I am not criticizing such folks, or suggesting they deserved what happened: just stating for the record what they did.

As an American traveling abroad, the US DoS is responsible for you. Did you know you should go online and enroll in the STEP program showing where you’re going and when you’ll be there, in case of a natural or man-made emergency, so the DoS can account for you? Few Americans do; in most cases it doesn’t matter.

The travel advisory website exists so that no American should ever travel without being forewarned about the risks. You may be well-read about international news, and know all about the how the regime in Turkey has a nasty habit of rounding up anybody (including Americans) it suspects of anti-government activity, or that terrorists there specifically target western tourists. You may already know the Philippine government has declared martial law in Mindanao, or what the rules about spitting are in Singapore. But in case you’re not that up-to-date, they are all noted on the appropriate DoS travel pages.

One insider tip: read carefully the entire section of the travel advisory, including where it explains the restrictions on the travel of US government personnel. Here is a screenshot example from my expat home of Jalisco:

If you just read the headline for my state (“reconsider travel”) you might think “whoa, not going there!” But if you read the entire thing, you’ll see the very detailed guidance on where US government employees can and can’t go. This is very important. DoS controls (for the most part) where US government employees can travel, and this very detailed guidance represents the specific information they have about what is dangerous. When you read the Jalisco guidance, you see that my town (Ajijic) has no restrictions, while some other places, roads, even businesses (like casinos or cantinas) are placed off limits.

So be a savvy–but nor scared–traveler. Read the DoS material and consider it in light of your own tolerance for safety. Don’t do stupid things you wouldn’t do at home. So many terrible travel tales begin with too many drinks the first night in country, an attempt to buy drugs because they are decriminalized where you are visiting, or just being out in the middle of the night in a place you don’t really know.

¡Que te vaya bien!

Customer Service

I don’t really care why a business treats its customers well: because they have to (by law), or because they want to (for more business), or because they really do care. What matters is that they do provide good customer service. Two recent examples herein:

I promised y’all an update on the post about EU rules, and the verdict is in: they rock! You can review the whole story here, but the punch line was when you have airline travel delayed or cancelled and any part of your trip falls within the European Union, they have very strict rules on what the airline owes you.

I received a sizable compensation claim in one week from SAS for a flight they cancelled on us, even though they flew us to our destination later that same day. In effect, the flight was free. Our flight home from Gatwick (London) airport was also cancelled, leading to a three day stay in the English countryside. I filed the appropriate forms with Norwegian Air, and waited.

And waited. And waited. Two months to the day after I filed, they responded with an e-mail explaining that they would reimburse me the standard compensation (which amounted to a total of E1200, or about $1400 USD), but they would only pay for one day’s room and board, because they contended that we chose to stay in London that long and did not accept the first flight they could arrange. Harrumph, I say! They also refused to reimburse me for the second flight (which we ultimately took to get home).

This was more than a little aggravating. I stayed the extra days because they sent me a text message telling me their customer service was overwhelmed and I should arrange my own follow on flight and room to stay. If I had waited in line for four hours or so, they could have stuck me on any other airline that took me to LAX at any time, which was not what I was willing to do. Since I insisted on flying their airline, and their next flight availability was three days later, I felt the delay was justified. Unfortunately, my cell phone was stolen in the interim, and my text message history was gone, so I could not prove it. Argh! So I decided just to eat the extra costs of the rooms and meals.

However, I applied for the reimbursement of the second flight because their forms required me to list a dollar value for everything I was claiming. I thought, “well, I paid for the first trip, but only got halfway home, so they should cover the second trip.” Plus, how do I value part of a flight?

Regardless, I had paid for two separate trips home, and I only took one. I sent them back an e-mail asking for a refund of the part of the flight they cancelled, and this time they responded in three weeks and admitted, yes, they should have included this refund in the first place and thanks (not really) for bringing this matter to their attention so they could refund my credit card. Bottom line: after reimbursement and compensation, our flight home was free, too!

I had a chance to witness some good German-Mexican customer service this week, too. We went up to Guadalajara to have our VW Tiguan get its second annual service. Volkswagen is maniacal about maintenance, going so far as to forbid you using anything but their specially formulated antifreeze in your auto radiator. I managed to navigate the dealer’s website (en español) and make an appointment for our second annual service. We arrived, dropped off the car, and asked how long the service would take? “Five hours” the service manager responded. ¡Ay, caramba! But he offered us a taxi (gratis) anywhere we wanted to go, so we went to the nearest mall, did some shopping, got lunch, saw a movie (The Wife with Glenn Close, in English with subtitulos en español), walked back to the dealership (it was very close) about an hour early and they rushed to complete the paperwork and get us back on the road. We could have just stayed at the dealer and had espresso from the coffee machine or popcorn from the popcorn maker and surfed the internet.

My VW. German engineering comes with German prickliness about maintenance… “Mann macht es nicht!”

The VW dealer was very thorough, explaining everything they did in Spanglish so we understood, cleaning the car from top to bottom, and doing an inventory to show that everything we left in the car was still there. Total cost was around $150 USD. Muy bien.

Both these stories are relevant to expat life. The first reminds one that the rules vary from place to place, and it literally pays to know a little about the rules where you are travelling. The second is more mundane, but something as simple as getting a car serviced can be fraught with difficulty if you don’t speak the language, don’t understand the culture, or aren’t flexible. We all regularly experience poor customer service; makes the good service stand out that much more.

EU rules!

Here’s an update on something I think most Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans may not realize: your passenger rights when flying into, among, or out of the Europe, specifically the countries of the European Union. It (literally) pays to know about this!

During our extended European trip, we encountered two flight delay/cancellation situations. Both resulted in my applying for compensation from the airlines involved, in addition to being re-booked and given some immediate support for meals.

First, we were flying SAS from Stockholm to Vilnius, Lithuania. This is an offbeat route; on most days, only SAS flies it, and they have two flights a day: one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Seasoned travelers will immediately know where this is going. Since we arrived in Stockholm on a red-eye flight from LAX, we stayed overnight in the airport to board the morning SAS flight. We arrived at the gate and waited. No plane showed up. No crew showed up. More passengers began to fill the gate area. Boarding time came and went. Finally a gate check agent arrived and announced the plane was cancelled due to “crew illness” and we were all being re-booked on the afternoon flight. They gave everyone script which was good for a lunch in the airport, and printed out new boarding passes.

An amazing coincidence: there was just enough room for everyone to fit on the second SAS flight! Back when I was a frequent business traveler in the States, I knew some airlines would avoid flying two half-filled planes by cancelling one flight and re-booking everyone on the second flight. There was little penalty for doing so, and great cost-savings. I am not suggesting this is what happened here, but the important thing is, whatever did happen, it happened in the EU, not in the States. The EU passenger rights provisions applied.

When we got home, I pulled up the SAS website and filled out a simple form, which just required the basic facts of the incident. Within a day, I received a response from SAS customer service indicating yes, the delay was longer than allowed, there were no extenuating circumstances, and based on the flight distance I was entitled to 250 Euros per person in compensation. Note, they already gave us coupons for a meal at the airport, and they re-booked us at no cost. This compensation was over-and-above all that.

The second incident was during our return. We flew Norwegian Air from Madrid to London/Gatwick, connecting there for a flight back to LAX. The flight from Gatwick was scrubbed at the last minute (we were on the runway cleared for take-off when the captain pulled us back off) due to equipment malfunction. The plane was a full 787 Dreamliner, and apparently Norwegian had another flight cancellation at the same time, so this was a customer service nightmare which I already recounted here.

Again, I went to the Norwegian Air website and completed a form. I had re-booked myself and Judy, since waiting for the customer service line was a non-starter. Because I had numerous receipts with this claim (over 500 UK pounds in hotels, meals, and transportation, and my repurchased airline tickets), I had to attach a picture of my original receipts. I also requested 600 Euros each as compensation (the amount allotted for cancelled flights of over 3500 kilometers), and noted in the comments section that equipment failure is not an unforeseeable circumstance, per several European court rulings (thanks, Google!).

I have already received the compensation from SAS. Norwegian has acknowledged my claim, but I am still waiting on their response; I will update this post when I receive it.

So remember, when flying to/from/among the EU, you may have EU passenger rights going for you. Which is nice!

Be Careful What You Pray For

During my social media sharing of our adventure on the Camino Frances to Santiago de Compostela, some asked me what was my spiritual goal for becoming a pilgrim. I had a ready answer: to give thanks and praise to God for a life filled with blessings. After all, what can we give God: He needs nothing from us. He desires our love, and merits our praise and obedience. but how do you operationalize that, especially during retirement?

So I chose to go on a pilgrimage as a sign of respect and obedience and faith: God has given me so much, I should accept what He has in mind in this endeavor, too. I naively anticipated spending a lot of time in prayer at exquisite, ancient churches, long hikes on a smooth trail under a favorable sun, deep discussions with fellow pilgrims about the meaning of life.

What is that old saw? “If you want to make God smile, tell him your plans.”

What my wife and I got was something far more physically and emotionally challenging than we anticipated, despite many hours of training and over a hundred-and-fifty practice miles of hikes in the mountains of Mexico. The biggest challenges proved to be the keys to what God wanted me to learn, or at least that’s what I have discerned upon further reflection. Those challenges were: first, the overly positive view of the camino I absorbed from guidebooks and online sites, and second, the relentlessly, freakishly bad weather which seemed to follow us like Joe Btfsplk! (Lil’ Abner character if you don’t know; he always has a rain cloud over him)

(Blogger’s note: I covered this first learning point once previously here, so if you want to skip forward, please do. Go to the paragraph which begins “The second challenge was the weather.”)

Some who walk the camino have a remarkable spiritual experience that helps clarify the rest of life. They truly love the camino and want others to have the same type of experience. They often go back and do multiple routes or the same route multiple times, learning new things all the time. In their passion for what the camino has provided to them, they have a tendency to overlook how the camino might be experienced by other new pilgrims. They begin to describe steep hills as “gently rolling terrain,” forget about the dreadfully bad trail conditions going up and downhill, or just how truly dangerous the weather can get. I took such advice without the necessary grain of salt, and we (my wife and I) found ourselves in some very bad circumstances.

Up and down and rocky: this was a good part!

When we survived these situations, my relief quickly changed to anger, then rage. Neglecting to mention such challenges, or minimizing them, puts people at needless risk. This isn’t a question of “learning to overcome challenges”; as a former soldier, I know how that works, and it doesn’t involve exposing others to risk by failing to inform them. During my long camino hiking days, I wondered why God led us into such situations, and was I overreacting? Anger is a tricky emotion, as it can easily lead to all kinds of sin. I kept coming back to the notion of righteous anger: anger that is justified. Think Jesus with the money-changers in the Temple, Saints James (yes, Santiago himself) and John calling for vengeance, or “wipe the dirt from your feet” (Matthew 10:14).

Why would the Lord want me to experience such anger? What could it teach me? Prompted by the Holy Spirit, the thought occurred to me that I was tasting a small sample of God’s righteous anger at humanity as we fail him day after day after day. His justice would seem to necessitate severe punishment, and yet He relents, due to His Divine Mercy. My take was I was given this taste of divine anger to learn how to show divine mercy. Long way to go on that one, but at least I think I know what I am working toward.

The second challenge was the weather. If we had experienced even average weather for May in Spain, our camino would have been more enjoyable. I have to admit, the weather reminded me of the major military exercises I was involved with over 30 years ago in Germany (ReForGer, anyone?). It seemed like those exercises always occasioned long periods of gloom and rain. Bad weather is just one of those things that can affect any trip: so what?

This one was harder to understand. The poor weather interfered with my ability to pray as much as I intended: I had to focus on the slippery trail, the foggy route, or how hard the rain was falling. We had to spend more time on simple things like doing laundry, or finding something warm to drink, and less time visiting shrines or taking in the beauty of the countryside. So my initial reaction was that the bad weather was just bad luck.

When I returned home, one conversation I had on the walk up the mountain to O’Cebreiro kept coming back to me. The weather was cool that morning, and the fog dissipated. The clouds were thick but nonthreatening, permitting a little better view of the climb ahead of us and the valley behind us. For once, I was a little less obsessed with the weather, but still tired and not looking forward to the long uphill climb.

Another pilgrim approached me along the way; I recognized him as someone who had been staying in some of the same towns, someone we had passed or had passed us numerous times. As he passed by me, I gave him a lackluster “Buen camino” and he responded with a hearty “it sure is! What a lovely day.” “Really?” I intoned. He explained that this is one of his favorite parts of the camino, and the weather was perfect for it. He had walked the Camino Frances several times, the earliest being back in the 1980s, before it was so popular. He remembered when O’Cebreiro, our goal for the day, was little more than a church and a few barns on top of the mountain. Now it’s a quaint little purpose-built village of bars, albergues, shops, and that church.

I admitted that I wasn’t feeling that warm, fuzzy glow about the camino he clearly was. He took that as a challenge. “Where else can you get a view of beautiful mountains and lush green valleys like this?” he asked. He didn’t expect my retort: “From my house.” “But what about the weather?” he parried. I replied, “Clearly better at home. I would be in shorts and sunglasses at home.” “Fair enough,” he continued, “but here on the camino you can meet total strangers and make quick friends over a meal, or a walk. Can you do that where you live?” Why, yes, I thought, that is exactly like where I live! But I didn’t say it: I simply smiled and told him, “Ok, buen camino!”

That conversation eventually came back to me as a second spiritual growth point. Many people fall in love with the camino because it is so different from where or how they live. That wasn’t going to happen for me, because I already experience those advantages every day. I went on the camino in thanksgiving for blessings received: God was showing me that it need not necessarily have been that way. It is easy to accept blessings and become accustomed to them, especially when they seem so constant. I think the constant bad weather was a little reminder to enjoy what I already have, and to not take it for granted.

So I met my spiritual goals, even if it didn’t work out the way I anticipated. Pilgrims like to talk about finding “your way” on the camino. Sometime we have to remember what Jesus said: “Yo soy el Camino…”