In and Out of the Vortex: Trains, Vigo, Porto

Life can feel like a whirlwind, is it though? Might just be an adrenaline fueled trick of the mind. I haven’t written for a few days. Time has felt compressed. Living space felt compressed. It is only Thursday, feels later than that. Tuesday we had to check out of our rental in Oviedo at 11am. I had booked a 3pm train out of town. Before then we had one last extensive walk through Oviedo. Finally, some pictures of the mountains rising out of Oviedo, and a few last sculptures, and “very noble, very loyal, deservedly invincible, heroic and good for the city of Oviedo”.

My hope was to find storage lockers at the train station in order to allow us to wander through town not carrying 60 extra pounds. Many train stations do have storage, but not Oviedo. The result was a rather long wait for our train departure. We were scheduled to take three separate trains to the city of Vigo Spain. Along the way was a delay and we finally arrived in Vigo at our hotel at close to 2am. Nice hotel though, nice beds and pillows.

For the following day we had 8pm train tickets to Porto Portugal, and the hotel stored our bags until we left.. There is one morning train, but we chose the later train because we were told that Vigo is the culinary seafood capitol of Spain. We wanted to take advantage of that. It turns out, Vigo is also another vibrant beautiful clean European city. We enjoyed walking through the old town with its mixture of old and new architecture melding effortlessly.

Two things stood out in town. Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, abbreviated MARCO is a 19th century building housing an art museum for contemporary art. It started as a prison that lapsed into disuse, but was declared a Cultural Property in 1990 by the Galician regional government and transformed into a contemporary art museum between 195 and 2002 under the name of MARCO. The inside is spacious, the art uncluttered and ever changing. There is no permanent collection.

Generation 25 is an ongoing annual exhibition with new renderings every year that offers a reflection on artistic interests and institutional criticism in Spain over the course of these decades. I realize that does not convey much information, but it is the best I can do at the moment to attempt to convey some of the most philosophically interesting art I have seen. Below you will see short blurbs about the works of three of this year’s presenters. The exhibition grabbed both Sheila and I by the emotional and thought provoking heart strings. For me it was a cross breeding of art and philosophy that I had not previously experienced. We pondered, what kind of leadership does this museum have that promoted something so unique.

For those of you whose interest is piqued, I hope you are able to blow up the explanations to where you can read them. Here are a few photos of Vigo abstract sculpture interest.

The second thing in Vigo that fascinated us was the “mountain”. We were looking for a park in the old town that is the site of some ruins. Being unsure of myself I asked a man if we were close. He said yes, just a block away, but it is not a park but a mountain. I kept saying that we like to walk, and he kept saying, “it’s a mountain!” He eventually shrugged and walked away leaving us to climb the “mountain”.

The mountain has quite a history as it is topped by ruins of a centuries old defense battlement/towers that was begun by the Romans and also features Celtic and Viking influence; hence the anchors you will see. It is not a mountain, but it is a significant climb, as evidenced in some of the long range photos.

As we came down the mountain we were looking forward to our seafood dinner. We had been convinced we needed to go to La Ableana, the home of the pulp maestro/ octopus master. We have a tremendous soft spot for octopus cooked properly, not so easy to do. Unfortunately, I had forgotten where we were – southern Europe – where most every restaurant is closed between 5 and 7. La Ableana informed us at 4:45 the kitchen had already close. Every other restaurant we approached gave us the same message. Bad news if you train leaves at 7:56 for Portugal. Good news, we made the train easily, we are in Porto Portugal and tomorrow will be the first report from Porto.