Black and White Aurora

I've spent a couple of days in Santiago de Compostela this week (I usually go there once a year). Santiago is the incredibly beautiful, charming capital city of Galiza. The historic center is impressive, pedestrian streets with old homogeneous buildings (not one fucking new building breaking the harmony). You can breath the centuries of History on every step. It looks even better on rainy days (there many of them in one of the most rainy cities in Europe), when the cobbled streets turn into small rivers by the moment, the colonnades welcome you and the moss living on every wall and tree looks greener. This little gem is absolutely worth a visit (for me it's quite more beautiful than cities like Cambridge, Oxford or even Bratislava, and just a bit below such an incredible city as Edimburgh). It's mainly famous because of Christianity (Saint James Way and all that) but the religious thing has no influence on my devotion for this city (for me churches are just historical buildings with architectonic interest).

The main reason for posting this entry is that one day at night I enjoyed a really beautiful visual effect. I was in Praza das Praterías and when looking at Praza da Quintana through the space between 2 buildings, the sky gave me a nice present, the combination of the lights that point to the back facade of the Cathedral, the heavy rain, the clouds moving very fast (we had like 100 km/h winds in nearby towns) and my view angle gave place to something that I could almost qualify as a poor guy "Black and White Aurora". I've never seen a real Aurora, so sure I'm exaggerating, but anyway the view was fantastic. This crappy picture below does not make any justice to what I'm trying to describe, but I think all blog posts need at least one pic.



Another curiosity. I'm quite a fan of what I usually call "Turkish fast food" (I'm vegetarian, so no Döner Kebab, but Falafel, mainly in Dürüm). There are a few of these restaurants in Santiago that are managed not by Turkish people, but by Kurdish people. They had a nice map there of their Stateless Nation that called my attention:



The Falafel that I enjoyed there was a bit above the average, but I think the friendliness that I tend to feel for oppressed territories (and particularly those forgotten ones that very rarely do headlines like Western Sahara, Chiapas, Kurdistan...) made it taste even better.