Santarem

We took a bus to the next stop, Santarem, because the wind was gale force. We could not stand up with our packs against the wind. The wind chill factor is bad too. It penitrates your clothes no matter how many layers you have on. I want to invent a sleeping bag you can ware while you are walking. Only in the bag can I get warm. I feel discouraged. Everyone says that this is unseasonable weather. They are appauled that we are trying to walk with our packs in this cold.

Walking has it’s advantages however. After a hill or two, I am sweating in my layers, yet the wind strikes the sweat and makes it ice cold too. I am forever zipping-unzipping, layer on-layer off, hood on-hood off, gloves on-gloves off. I think that I might get the hang of keeping myself an even temp someday. But now, I am a newbee and I’m just trying to master this walking in the cold thing. It’s a humbling thing to have the upper most thing in your mind being to keep warm. It kind of puts everything in a different perspective. I empathize with the homeless who must put up with this all the time.

We got our Camino passports stamped at the Senoria da Conceicao Church. However, we had to go back several times to get the important stamp at Santuario do Santissimo Milagre de Santarem, or in English, The Church of the Miracles. The mircle is this little story about the holy sacrament turning into actual blood. There is a little vile in a gold box that holds the actual wafer and it’s blood. They say that if you ask for something in this church, you get the wish of your heart. I wished that my children will forgive me for all the mistakes I have made raising them and knowing them as adults. I hope I get this wish.

At each church I buy a little medal of their saint. I got Saint Antonio at the Cathedral of the Martyrs in Lisboa. At The Church of the Miracles, I got Saint Benito, the saint of the open door.

The beauty of each church is so over the top I can’t even discribe it. I can’t even see it all. There are so many displays of symbols and statues of well know personages such as Mary and Jesus, but also saints and cherebs and scenes from stories and glass boxes with little miniture scenes represented.

It is an interesting thing that Mary is represented in so many different ways, waring so many different outfits, with light coming from her head, her hands and even her heart. She is definately the one represented most often as a being of light.

We found a pensionas to stay called the Residential Muralha. They put a heater in our room! What a luxury! But it turned out that there was no hot water we found out later. The place was owned by a father and his son. The sons name was Antonio. He was very nice and spoke fairly good English. He told us that we must go to Fatima. The father and the son both showed us their medals of Fatima and said that their grandmother was a special fan of Fatima. Antonio chose a picture from our collection. We let each person we have a significant interaction with chose a picture. Antonio chose the picture of the pier full of sealions in Astoria, OR. We exchanged email addresses. By the time we finished talking with them, we were treated like family. It was fun.

In fact, we were in their home. Everything was antique and beautiful. We stayed in one of the bedrooms. Eric was invited into the other part of the house to see something and said that it was decorated very lovely. It made me think. If we can be treated like family by strangers, then being treated like family by family shouldn’t be so hard. Yet families seem to have more falling outs because of judgements about eachother. Judging is almost automatic. Trying not to judge is very hard. Even defining judgement is hard. However, I feel committed that I will learn not to judge people. Being here is good practice because everyone is judging us.

Teenagers chant “ Americans” as we pass. People try to pick our pockets because they think we are rich maybe. People definately are wary of us until Eric begins to try to communicate in Spanish, or they know a little English and we tell them stories and laugh with them. So we are conscious that we stick out like sore thumbs here in our rain gear and back packs walking up the road. In outerlying areas we talk to whomever we see. We say “Bom dia” and nod. We ask questions about them and what they do. It’s important to us to learn what makes people happy here in Portugal.

We still feel a kind of “shell shocked”. It’s just so overwhelming being in a new environment and knowing nothing, like to big babies. We are beginning to settle a little, but we still don’t feel comfortable with our adventure yet. On to Tomar!