The Unspoken Spoken

The path changes from moment to moment, from rocky to pavement, from village to country side, to forest.  Things you start talking about as the walk moves on, are things you would never mention in you life back home.  Maybe because your defenses are down, you let it all hang out.  Those things are bathroom practises, feet swelling, blisters, along with the many things that can wrong with foot have been looked at, talked about, and treated stranger to stranger people on the path.

Me, I've been fortunate not to have foot problems.  That's not to say that my feet haven't hurt.  After mile upon mile at some point you just want to take your shoes off and let your feet air out.  Coming into Burgos I saw this poster

advertising for care of feet, massage,  and osteopathy.  One person in our crowd already stopped in the middle of the day when he saw a sign advertising blister treatment for the foot.  These  services are getting more and more common as we go.  Me, I wouldn't mind a massage, finding one maybe challenging today on my day of rest.

The other topic is snoring.  A good night is when your in a dorm of 50 people and no one snores.  This doesn't happen very often.  Early on in a room of eight people, one person owned up that she snored.  But in the night the snoring was so loud and so continuous, I was sure it was the guy in the bed next to me.  On the walk the next at lunch a woman who slept in the room owned up to noisy snoring all night.  The I guy I thought was snoring sat next to me.  I apologize to him for thinking that it was him.  In my Camino family there's not a lot of snoring.  Maybe this is one thing that bonds us together and why we book ahead to try to take up whole dorm rooms.

Last but not least going to the bathroom on the Camino, or is it the toilet, the water closet, the bano?  Mostly we talk in innduendos, little hints, rolling eyes, blushed faces.  There's very little detail of our bathroom practices and I won't bore you here about the details.  What I will say is that there never seems to be a bathroom when you need one, trees are hard to find and hills far apart.  You can make up your ideas of what bathroom practices are for all us pilgrims on the Camino.