Pamplona

On our third morning we left for Pamplona. We spent the day there, poking around the cathedral, which houses a really stupendous number of virgin and child figurines. The collection is crammed into one room; blonde ones, brunettes, smiling, sad, round-faced and chubby cheeked, long-faced and serious. And one baby Jesus bore a more than passing resemblance to James Belushi.

We ended our day at an outdoor café perched on a cliff. From the terrace, the small city is obscured and you feel like you're in a chic café isolated on a mountain top, surrounded on all sides by farmland and, further on in every direction, mean-looking cliffs.

More Güesa

The area around Güesa was so small that as you took a walk, you'd stop and talk with each person you encountered along the way. One evening we crossed paths with a woman who had been Güesa's last schoolteacher. She lived in the schoolhouse until some time in the sixties. She left her pedagogical imprint on a good number of people in the town.

Güesa

The next morning we boarded a train to Pamplona. A friend of Ben's family picked us up at the station and took us to her country house in the Pyrenées.

Their house is in a tiny, tiny Basque village called Güesa. It has only one street, and no businesses.

Next door to Becky and Mikel's house is the old schoolhouse, now a cozy town social center where ice cream, snacks and drinks are sold at cost. You put the money in an envelope on the counter. There is a kitchen that's used for the town fiesta, Christmas meals and the like.

Thhe Pyrenées loom large above tiny Güesa. They are beautiful and cruel looking -- huge naked rocks that ooze greenery from giant fissures. There's something about the light, the distance, the weather - something - that makes the mountains glimmer a tiny bit, like the watery mirror landscape of a fijord. The shimmer gave me the feeling that at any moment the surface of the water would be broken and the mountains come crashing down.

We spent an idyllic couple of days taking trips to the swimming hole, a hike straight up a mountain to a small chapel where tradition dictates that those who reach the top ring the chapel bell, which rings out across the valley and lets the people down in Güesa know that you've arrived. We had big lunches and quiet siestas. At night we gathered on the lawn to watch the falling stars.

I spent some time alone by the river. I waded around, poked things with sticks, let the minnows nibble on my toes. It was the same kind of dreamy, constructive nothing I engaged in as a child.

Tapas

On our last night we headed out with the intention of getting a drink. It was about 8:30 and the city seemed deserted. We turned a corner on a small street and came upon a throng of people spilling out into the street from a bar. We gently pushed our way inside to find people drinking cuartos and eating immeasurable quantities of fresh potato chips that the bartenders were frantically frying in the small kitchen in back.

We ordered our drinks and waited for the chips... but none appeared. We eventually ordered a media ración and received more chips than we could ever eat.

Having eaten our fill of warm, shiny (well, greasy) chips speckled with red pepper powder, we left the bar with no particular destination in mind.

But just around the corner was another place, again with people spilling out onto the sidewalk. We got our drinks (dry rioja in bulbous glasses) and our tapa, thin ham on bread.

We continued in this manner well into the night, finally ending up chatting with the bartender at one of the cafés. He gave us something special to try... cow's tongue. And, it wasn't bad at all. Maybe it was the long night, or the comforting cushion of bread that supported the thin slice, or maybe the fact that it was smoked. I suspect it tasted good, though, because receiving it at all was a friendly, unnecessary gesture on the part of the bartender.

Day in Léon

On the first day we made our way through the rain to the cathedral. It was damp and musty inside and, although there was hardly any light, specks of vivid color pierced the gloom and stretched up and up, indicating just how high the ceiling was. A church with the soul of a kaleidoscope.

During our wandering we saw a stork padding his nest on top of an old column.

Later in the day we had an agua con gaz in a bar hung with bloody pictures of Christ illuminated by the blue glow of a TV set showing scantily clad women on MTV Europe.

Journal 8/10 - nights in Léon

In Léon we spent two nights in a hostal on a floor of a modern building in the new section of the city.

When we arrived, we thought the hostal was a small place presided over by one woman. It turned out to take up an entire floor of the building and be staffed by a small army of women. People were constantly moving in and out, entering through one door only to exit through another in this huge warren. The place seemed like a good setting for a play.

The hostal turned out to be a boarding house. Our room contained two single beds, a small sink below a cracked mirror, a musty wardrobe and a lot of empty space. The high ceilings and the tiled floor gave me a feeling of immense lonliness. The room seemed like a good place to look one's demons square in the face.

When we went to pay our bill, we did so in an enormous kitchen at the end of a long hallway. One of the women who runs the boarding house wrote us our receipt while stirring a big pot of potatoes coated with spicy oil the color of the sunrise. The residents of the boarding house -- mainly senior citizens -- sat eating at small tables in an adjoining room.

back from the dead

I've decided to finally finish my posts about Spain, and maybe add some more recent trips. I don't imagine anyone reads this anymore, but, well, that's OK.