November 6, 2007 - Tuesday afternoon

At Washington Square Park in North Beach

Reading Ensayo sobre la ceguera (in English--Blindness), by José Saramago, a Portugese writer who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1998. It's about a city of blind people. She's not sure what happened to cause this.

Her favorite author is Gabriel García Márquez. Favorite book--Cien años de soledad or, in English, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

She reads all the time, mostly in Spanish--she's from Bolivia. The last book she read was set in Spain and France, about a woman who walked the Santiago del Compostella, a pilgrimage to the burial site of the apostle, St. James (compostella means cemetery), which she might like to do one day. Here's a website that tells about the pilgrimage. When I did a trek in France once I got lost and mistakenly followed it for two hours...the trail was marked with the same double red line as my trail, the GR10, and I was very confused, not knowing that all of the GRs (Grand Randonnées or, in English, Big Treks) were marked the same way.