We have cookies!!!!

Gather round, friends, as I tell you about the most Chris Shannon thing to happen on the Camino so far:

Chris and I had a little bit of energy after resting at our albergue, so we decided to visit Castrojeriz’s three churches. We decided to visit the Convento de Santa Clara first. This convent is run by cloistered Clarist nuns who make their living by baking specialty cookies.

Since the nuns are cloistered and don’t have contact with the outside world, you write your order down on a blank slip of paper, spin the giant lazy Susan around to give the order to the nun who’s on the other side, and then wait until the nun sends out your cookies and a slip of paper with how much you owe. (There’s no price list.)

Chris thought he was ordering two of each 6 kinds of cookie. The nuns working the spinner thought he was ordering two BOXES of each kind of cookie.

Chris tried to explain the mistake, but it turns out that the nun working the order counter was a native French speaker who maybe spoke less Spanish than Chris. Thanks to Google translate, the nun let us know that she couldn’t sell us just a couple of cookies since she’d already boxed so many, but she did let us buy only half of what she had originally boxed up.

Each box contains at least a dozen cookies (some varieties have way more). Our fellow pilgrims have committed to helping us eat cookies at dessert, and our albergue host says the chocolate cookies are his favorite and will happily take those off our hands. Even so, we’ll be shipping a bunch of cookies in my backpack and might be eating nun cookies for at least the next several days. Fortunately, they’re good cookies!

It’s worth noting that the temperature dropped by at least 5 degrees and the clouds rolled in after we made our sizable cookie purchase/donation. I’m not saying that we just bought a little bit of good weather, but I’m not *not* saying it either….Read more