ENG:

This letter (or rather “retrospective diary”) was written in March 2014 in 20 pages, which was then sent to 20 of my friends. The unsophisticated style occurring sometimes is due to the primary audience of friends. On those reading through themselves, it usually had a nice impact: many of them reported meditative experience pulling out of everyday greyness, that’s why I make the whole of it available here, in 12 parts. Eventual supplements will be always in footnotes... This would be the Part II. (CLICK here for the Part I.) !

/.../ I toured the city in bright sunshine. People sunbathing in shorts and T-shirts meant quite a big buzz for me in the beginning of February, as being Sunday, already pretty massively at the afternoon. I saw the Gaudi quarter and besides, the Sagrada Familia which is a crazy big church without a rear part but with two fronts instead, and the line of those wanting to watch it from inside lasts from one of the fronts to the other. I’ve never seen so many people lining up for a church or any other building. And me… being chased by a curse which doesn’t allow me to see famous churches without any racks.  This was being reconstructed, just like Santiago Cathedral’s “Porta de Gloria”, from my first arrival to the second. Ditto is the Leon Cathedral, and now the famous chapel of Muxia (where I am just now), Virxen de Barca is also being reconstructed, after having its roof burned by a lightning at Christmas – hmm, some food for thoughts. In front of another big church of Santiago me and the donkey were even photographed by a journalist in November, and we appeared on the front page with the text that “Franciscans’ San Francisco Church is being reconstructed which pilgrims are visiting for 800 years”, and I was the pilgrim representative, however I feel even more so becoming a reconstruction representative.

Barcelona is a city with an awesome multicultural atmosphere: university students, street musicians, catholicism, transvestites, football mania, many-many tourists and foreigners living there etc. And at night, anyway, the party mood didn’t really differ from that of Kazinczy street, and the beach part from the Hajógyári (famous party places in Budapest)…

My plane was to depart from Barcelona to Santiago only the next morning, so towards the evening I set on the coastal sand to chill, and a Peruvian guy of the same age found me to offer his beer and fragrantsmoke, so, me in turn offered him my pálinka. Then, as it was getting dark we found a Brazilian group playing music around a fire lit in a metal barrel. He says, according to his current knowledge the Hungarian girls are beautiful. And that the Hungarians are something like the Polish, aren’t they? ‘Cause Polish people are very cool, he thinks. It turned out, the previous day he was partying with Poles, and now we just ran into one of them: a girl with dreadlocks who was trying to roller skate in a really funny way. You find a lot of sucking roller skaters in Spain, however I’ve never seen a roller skater who does it well. (This may be a fashion, something like fluting bad, from which I used to collect the donkey’s price, then I’ve seen in Santiago at least three other guys fluting bad. This is the Zeitgeist!) And I almost learnt how to say in Polish that „Polak, Wegier dwa bratanki / drink tugedör something-something”. For some months, the girl has been working as a volunteer, she seemed as one to have sense, so I asked her about Catalonian life. She says in overall it’s peaceful, everyone is more relaxed than anywhere else she’d been living, and also everyone herbage and according to her these two are associated. I would complete this picture with one more thing: everyone plays football. Everyone! On the squares and streets grannies are playing football with small granddaughters and stuffs like that.

With the Peruvian we went up to one of his Ecuadorian dudes, to a pretty interesting flat of a many centuries old building. You have to crawl a fucking steep spiral staircase to reach the umpteenth floor, like in some minarets (before daybreak, half-drunk & peed it can be troublesome), a little hole with a big feeling, exactly like fucking in the ass, ha-ha; I’ve never seen any apartment like that. The guy is some dancer, the kind of Latin (s)expert from whom our bored women come to life in case we let them go to salsa nights. He also started with sharing his knowledge about Hungarian girls as the most beautiful. Or Bulgarians? He doesn’t remember exactly. Well, both can be beautiful I guess. Anyway, I like this stereotype more than some of those I ran into earlier like “Hungary? I read that racism is a big deal over there nowadays” or “Hungary? I know, where it used to be communism, and there’s again some dictatorship”, or there was the 18-year German couple being just passing through Budapest, when some pitiful son of a bitch suggested in the Parliament that Judean representatives should be written on a list – and they remembered this, Germans are pretty sensitive to this topic.

Nah, but the Ecuadorian obviously prefers the Brazilian big booty. Showed every kind of South-American ass-wriggling music’s on Tube, e.g. an aging fellow with enormous googles died of heroin overdose in the 70’s. I say it doesn’t look like a pop star; he answers that’s why he’s the biggest, ‘cause he’s natural! I had to repress my laughter, respectively, there was some “Love Boys Twins”-like band name, too, with some alcoholics in their 60’s, wearing seal rings and unbuttoned shirts. We consumed our residues and I told them that I certainly know only Sepultura from South-America. Then it turned out to be an equally common cultural treasure for them! Cavalera brothers are national heroes, not only for Brazilians, but for the whole continent. They two told stories of them, and also showed yellowed ancient-Sepu live recordings… So I was just getting and getting cultural shocked.

This southamericanization was especially interesting to me ’cause in the Autumn I made friends with an Argentine lad, who was just preparing to move to an eco-commune in the surroundings of Montevideo, where I could also go maybe, and now this was just the first sign among the later ones that after finishing my camino mission, I may take the direction that way.[1] On the Camino your focus is getting to be sharpened to signs. And obviously you generate them, too, which in turn results in deeper self-knowledge. Just before leaving, I’d spent some days at CH, and almost every day somehow Sepultura came to our mind, however neither of us is a big fan of it... Something like this is how coincidences make up into being meaningful, and if it has somehow any destiny-shaping effect, than it almost doesn’t matter whether coincidences were sent by God (and this way they are not even coincidences any more), or they are created by the person himself, or they were created just like that – or these three are the same, only with other words... South America: storaged in mind.

For example the topic of my philosophy thesis doesn’t reflect my interest at that time at all, was just thrown by the machine: I wrote about Friedrich Schiller’s teleological approach who used to muse a lot whether history is going to somewhere, whether it has a development line, whether it has a goal. He concludes that it has. And many people conclude this, and their reasoning even makes sense. And my thesis had a part, too, that it’s also true on the individual level, as ontogenesis repeats phylogenesis already in the womb: within a few months organs develop in an order and the nervous system differentiates in a way that had been formed at our ancestors through evolution over millions of years. Characteristic behavior patterns of children of certain age always correspond to the characteristic acts of a certain evolutionary step (e.g. peer relationships become important around the age of 4, like people also gathered into tribes in a certain level, and even in the kindergarten there’s always the boss etc.) And then all die, but meanwhile through the many seemingly ad hoc events they get somewhere, and by the end, respectively, a life-career line can be drawn, with causes and effects. Probably this is what Eric Berne calls “Scripts”. And this is what Schiller calls teleology at the social level. It was a coincidence that I wrote an essay on this, and all at once it found a place in my life, as lately everything directs my thoughts towards these kind of things. The cliché that there are no coincidences, shines in a new light along the pilgrimage. This truth comforts me, because if the natural development line of the things are anyway given, then I can’t screw up anything. Enough to live in the belief that the whole comes out well. And if in the end it didn’t come out well, then it’s all the same, why bothering. But anyway, I think this approach itself facilitates the things to come out well…

By the way, the dancer dude wants to start his pilgrimage just in the summer, on a less crowded Camino route, maybe on the Norte, so he in turn took my appearance a sign. Ever since he wrote that he is preparing for it, so we may see each other again.

(to be cont.)

[1] Later, signs leading towards Uruguay peaked long after writing this letter, with the first creature I got to know from this country: a girl.