Sept 29: Santiago day 2

The attached pictures are of some more scenes from Santiago.  The first one is of the cathedral at night.  A lot of the churches in Spain are lit up at night with the lights pointing up at them, making them look even more spectular (of course, they look even better if they don't have scaffolding covering them).

The second picture is of the wooden choir loft that used to be in the main Santiago cathedral but is now in the Saint Martin's church in Santiago.  The amazing thing about the choir seating is it was all carved out of walnut back in the late 1500s.  As you can see, there are two levels of seating.  Looking vertically, there are typically 3 sets of carvings, but each set of vertical carvings is of one of the Catholic saints.  The first, lowest level carving (which makes up the back of the first level seat) is usually a carving of the saint from the waist up.  The middle level carving (which is on the back of the second level seating) is a full body carving.  And then the uppermost carving, which is above the second level seating, is from a key moment in that saint's life (for those saints who were martyred, they typically depicted the martyrdom itself, which in some cases was pretty gross).

The final picture is of a band of guys who were dressed like minstrels that we found on the big square right in front of the Santiago cathedral.  We were walking back from dinner a little after 10pm, and we thought we would go by the church to see how it looked lit up at night.  When we got to the main square, we could hear this music and clapping, and saw a bunch of people gathered together.  So we walked on over to see what was going on, and we came across these ministrels.  We stayed for some songs and also to talk with some people we had met along the Camino, but around 10:45pm we decided it was time to head to the hotel to go to bed.  We are getting up tomorrow and renting a car to drive out to Finisterre and Muxia.  These are 2 other sites that are often associated with the Camino, even back to medieval times.  It is becoming more popular nowadays for pilgrims to continue their hike on out to these 2 locations, but it takes at least 3 days to walk to Finisterre and another day to walk to Muxia, and we just don't have that kind of time.  So we're going to drive out there, and then back to the airport for our flight to Barcelona.  Then Wednesday, we'll fly from Barcelona back to the States.