Wow - 9 days. In some ways it seems like 3 day, in others 1,000 days. Dare I say it - it was another beautiful sunny day with temperature maybe 25 to 27 max. We left Gonzar around 8am and arrived in O Coto about 3:30 after pounding away for 25 kms. The hills are still linear, but not as high or as steep. When we first got into the hills, we traversed them by walking up or down along their linear length. Now, we seem to go straight onto the hill and over their top. The runs up and down can be up to 2 kms of steady work. I have definitely increased my strength to do this and can climb the long trails without rest. After doing this 3 or 4 times in a day, it gets tiring. In fact today was the first day that I really felt like quitting early. I was tired and thirsty. But no, we have to go on. I said a little prayer for strength and pushed on even though I was tired. Would you be surprised if I told you that our intended stop point for the day did not work out, and we pushed on a further 3 kms. Figures! The day I'm tired early. Something comes to mind about not counting chickens before ...
Well, the place we are staying in is really quite nice and we had a lovely dinner with very nice people who run the place. I find it surprising that we can get along at being understood even though I speak hardly a word of Spanish, and they have only a few words of English. It all works. I'm now getting a sense of what they are saying even though I don't know the words.
We crossed paths again with Anna from Indiana - a nice reunion. She made me a sandwich from a long loaf and some type of olive sliced meat. It was yummy. We also met 3 young German girls who had surprisingly good English. It was interesting to hear them switch from German to English in the same sentence. They even had all the little phases that a native english person would use. Language is so fascinating.
Well, it's off to bed. 22 kms tomorrow - the average day.
A little linguistics for you, switching languages in the middle of a sentence is called code switching. We actually do this all the time, even monolinguals! That's because it is not restricted to different languages but even our individual speaking styles. We talk differently depending on who we are talking to or what we are talking about (baby talk, office talk, talk with your family, talk to your kids, your friends, etc. We have a different way of talking to different people and different words for that target audience. I believe its called an idiolect (if I remember correctly) and that is an individuals dialect/ vocabulary. So you do this as well! Neat! :)
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