Toady we docked in La Coruña, a pretty looking Spanish port but this was not to be the destination for the day. Instead we boarded a coach that drove us an hour to the town of Lugo.
Guide but not Guided
This excursion was titled “Lugo on your own” which, to my mind, meant a coach would drop you at Lugo and then you were, well, on your own. As it happened on the coach there was a local guide who gave a talk as we made our way across.
From this guide we learned that the region La Coruña is in, the automomus community of Galicia, is unlike the rest of Spain. Sited in the North West, atop Portugal and separated from the rest of Spain by geography, it has a different climate (180 days rain per year), language (Galician) and attitude (they are more Celtic and play the bagpipes). It is also a rich town based on finance and home to the owner of Zara, the 9th richest person on the planet at present.
Lugo
Lugo, an hours drive from La Coruña, is the capital of the province and former Roman town. It has the only complete set of Roman walls in the world. This set off a discussion of whether this was true and whether Chester too had complete Roman walls. Turns out that while Chester DOES have a complete set of walls not all of them are Roman as parts include modern foot bridges etc. whereas Lugo’s are all the original Roman.
We headed to these Roman walls and walked the 1.2 miles to do a complete circle. I have to confess that while the walls themselves were impressive and complete but the view was not that arresting as it was surrounded by a series of lacklustre buildings.
Centre of town there was a nice plaza surrounded by the usual cafes and bars. How come the Europeans do plaza’s better than us Brits? Actually come to think of it do we even have such as thing anywhere in the UK? Anyway, we whiled away some time here before heading back to the coach to return to the ship.
Luke Osey
I don’t normally talk about the entertainment onboard but for Luke Osey I am going to make an exception. Osey is a young magician doing the usual mix of tricks and jokes but there was one that left me scratching my head.
He asked the audience to take out the phones and open the calculator app. Then he took a beach ball and threw it into the audience. When it was caught he asked that person to shout out a number between 0 and 59. That person had to then throw the ball on the process was repeated six times. With each number called out we entered that into our calculator and multipled them together.
Plucked out of the audience was a young girl of about four who he then asked to randomly tap on the calculator number pad. He then read this number out and we had to subtract this from the number we already had. The resulting number was 306906 which is pretty unremarkable on it’s own but he then broke it down 3 (3rd) 06 (of June) at 9:06 (pm) and it was spot on. I was impressed!
