Diverge is back

Message from Anne Pinder: Diverge newsletter

(photo taken from Spain, looking over the Miño river south into Portugal, with the Atlantic on the right).

Ack! So this is very embarrassing, Diverge is back after such a long absence. But as the say, Life Happens, or rather Life Happened, in this specific situation.

Looking back, my last Diverge newsletter was in October 2021. COVID winding down, sort of, and my university studies revving up. Since then, COVID still slowing, I got it once (June 2022). Did not lose any close friends or family – that is one of the things you / we wonder, but hesitate to ask, right?

My biggest reason for not writing Diverge: university studies, an undergraduate mini-degree in Spanish history at Spain’s distance learning university (the UNED). Started fall 2021 with pre-Roman, six terms later have completed the 18th century. Next year is last year, 19th – early 20th century in the fall, and rest of 20th-early 21st in the spring. It was pretty strange to realize how much of the spring term I have experienced in person. That will be interesting to compare memories to official history, and hopefully learn more about the inner workings of the“Transition” from dictatorship to democracy, building a modern democracy from almost-zero.

As an aside, even though studying is the reason I haven’t written, probably should have written precisely because of studying. The Spanish university system is very different from the US system, as well as being a larger university instead of small classes like my college in Iowa. And…. my program is distance learning, meant mostly for adults who are working or too busy to attend in-person class. (zoom zoom zoom); all of that means, no class discussions, which is where a lot of learning or idea exchange happens. And I really missed throwing around ideas in class, so maybe could have thrown ideas around in Diverge?

Partly to solve that, I finally started a Notebook Of Strange Ideas, or at least ideas to research later, to have them all in one place instead of scattered in different notebooks. Or instead of adding a small bit of pondering to the end of an optional paper, clarifying it was not part of the paper, but the prof was grumpy and said my word count was too high as well as my pondering being inappropriate for a scientific discipline like history. History a scientific discipline? Hmmmmm.

(ahem. By the way a small brag: University grades have been pretty good, except first year, back at school after forever length of time. Spring semester B+ in history and A in Physical and Human Geography. Trivia: Spain grades on a 10-point scale, history was a 7.6 and geography a 9).

Anyway. In addition to university, travel has picked up again since the last Diverge, four Camino trips in 2022, two of them mostly-Iowans (which is always fun). The Camino is busier with people catching up on missed travel, but not impossibly so, though reaching Santiago is always a shock of crowds, and returning to Madrid even more so.

To minimize the Madrid shock, I try to stay up in Galicia (NW Spain) a few extra days, walking or tourism, which for me means always thinking about walking, even if not walking. Last month that was four days in southern Galicia, visiting two towns on the Miño river, which is the Spain-Portugal border along there. Both are Portuguese Camino towns, A Guarda on the coastal Camino (right where the Miño river meets the Atlantic, see header photo), Tui on the interior Camino. A Guarda has a fabulous, pre-Roman fortress town on a small mountain over the river and the ocean, photo taken from near that site; Tui has a really interesting fortress-cathedral and a medieval Jewish quarter. Enough relax to not be toooo grumpy upon return to Madrid, and enough seafood to keep me happy until my next trip to the region.

Oh, and my websites are down, hopefully temporarily, host did a change they said was necessary and totally messed things up, right when I was studying for exams. Need to try to fix, they say they cannot. Which sounds wrong to me……

Sorry this is mostly catch-up blather, I do have other things to say but decided to jump in with this, because waiting to write something more interesting would mean even more delay.