Sunday, June 17, 2007

A town with legs

As I walked the camino it started to seem to me like a small town with hundreds of feet. A town that moved through time and space at a walking pace.

Actually, there are many smalls towns moving along the route--yours is made up of the pilgrims traveling at about your speed. And as in any small town, you see the same people again and again. Your first impressions are often altered, sometimes dramatically, as you see someone first in one situation and then another.

The woman who at first so impressed you now seems like a bore who won´t let anyone else get a word in edgewise. And the man who speaks 6 languages and seemed a bit shifty now appears to be a perfectly nice guy who happens to have a wandering eye.

2 comments:

KJP said...

How do you think other pilgrims saw you, apart from the facile 'anti-Americanism', of course?

Erin Van Rheenen said...

kjp, good question, one that I'll have to think more about. I didn't feel all that much anti-Americanism. They were busy being anti-German.