We are taking our first rest day today. From the start of our journey we decided to take about one rest day per week, to let our bodies catch up, see some spot we really like, etc. Had a good night's rest. Awake a fair bit, especially after about five am. My mind going lots of places that I don't much care for it to go. Redirecting consciously, focusing on this trip, on trying to re-form my sense of self, trying to feel secure in a future that does not include my other half-trying to be content re-growing my half a self into a whole self that does not feel empty, incomplete. Trying to feel positive and self assured about moving to the UAE sometime late Winter or Spring to teach ESL. Seems right now like going by myself will be truly scary, leaving what and who I know behind, creating new relationships, learning a new place and a new culture. I know it's the right thing to do, just have not yet gotten to a place of comfort with it. It will come.
Got up, showered, went out with T to the local grocery store, made purchases to have food for three meals today and two tomorrow and to buy beer and brandy as well. We also got salt and pepper, finally! Dumped some of each in ziplock bags to rid ourselves of the weight of the glass containers that they come in. Here's what our receipt looked like:
1apple. .74
1 carrot. .15
1 onion. .24
Sliced cheese.1.75
Stick of butter. 1.95
Medium sized pizza. 2.64
Tomato sauce. .70
Raspberry preserves. 1.49
Pasta noodles. .59
Brandy fifth 6.19
Pepper .99
Albondigas (meatballs in can) 1.10
Jar of pate .99
Six pack beer 1.92
Salt .59
Yogurt drink 1.80
Grocery bag .2
With tax 23.85 Euros
We also bought thin sliced steak and five mushrooms at the carneceria for 4.5 Euros
And two baguettes for 1.5
So for about 30 Euros, or 40 dollars, we got food for five full meals for two and booze, pretty much for one! Eating out costs about $5.00 per bocadillo (sandwich) or $10.00 per person for a pilgrim's meal, which we had last night, our third on this trip, and, frankly, it was not good. I had chicken soup for a starter and it was easily the worst soup I've ever had-only a thin broth devoid of any other thing at all, as though the guy in back had poured broth from a can into a cup and heated it in the microwave, then chicken and fries for the main course, perhaps half or less of a breast sliced into three thin and small (about two to three inches in length) pieces, sautéed, and about nine fries. We do better, we realize, getting tapas, or a larger portion of a particular tapas, called a ración.
Had pan toasted baguette, butter, jam, and cheese and a banana for breakfast, and cooked up the pizza in a frying pan (ovens are a rarity in this part of the world, something we forgot when we made that purchase!), and half an apple each for lunch. Cooked up the steak, two half pound (1/4 kilo) pieces, for tomorrow's steak, onion, mushroom and cheese and mustard sandwiches for lunch-we have had too many cured meat and cheese sandwiches to last a while! Also sautéed carrots, onion, and mushrooms, added the albondigas, little red wine and butter, then the tomato sauce, sitting in a pot right now, to put over tonight's pasta. Patè and baguette and or jam, butter and baguette will serve as a breakfast and mid morning snack, usually taken after two hours of walking each day.
Okay then, enough of my fascination, and, hence, over focusing on food! Those of you who know me are certainly in no way surprised...!
Sitting on my tile patio now as I write, sipping an Aurum Iberica can of beer, listening to music on my everything tablet (iPad). About to roll a cigarette, about $20 (American dollars) worth of tobacco and rolling papers is what I brought on the trip. Should last the majority of my seven weeks here, will update later.
Funny story from last night's dinner. You may recall a small, possibly 57 year old, shorter, gray haired, white stubble, smiley Irishman from our first pilgrim's meal in Roncesvalles way back about a week ago. We'll we have seen him intermittently over our walk, and he will fly out of Logrońo in a day. He, Cecilia, a British gal, and another British gal, Julie,both in their fifties, we're seated in the bar/restaurant when Menno, Brian, T, and I appeared. We pulled a table to theirs and the seven of us supped and drank together. A festive lot, with Garrod always laughing his impish Irish, contagious chuckle, Brian, a tall man, telling tales, wine flowing.
About the end of our meal, yeah, the shitty one mentioned above, this old, one eyed man, the not functioning eye being one of those Vincent Price, clouded over balls that you work not to look at when he directs his words at you, especially given that the non functioning eye, his right, is permanently distended and pointed off to his right, began to push this local liquor, called patxeccua, on us. The first one's free, right? It is a young plum, meaning small plums, not quickly fermented, wine/liquor, and it's pretty sweet but pretty darned good. A nice tartness, purplish red in color, and, boy will this surprise you, it turns out that this grizzled old fellow in an avocado colored sweater, makes and sells the stuff. This is the part where all the kids run home, search their parents' couch cushions for loose change, then come back for seconds....
Teo got into a conversation with him as Menno and I went outside for a smoke. Fifteen minutes later we paid and left and Teo told us that he was working him to buy a case of the stuff for about $5-$6 Euros per. I'm sure it's a good price, but how in the fuck are we gonna take a case with us. We could, as some peregrinos do, pay others to drive their packs to the next stop, but, no thanks. Brian took to calling him the 'one eyed avocado'!
Back to today. T and I did our laundry in the kitchen sink. Two wash 'cycles' and two rinses, squeezed out and hung up. Hopefully early enough in the day to assure that they are dry by tomorrow am when we need to repack our bags and head out for Logrońo. The rest day is turning out as hoped for. Chillaxing, cooking, laundry, writing, I even cleared 3.9 gigs on my everything tablet and downloaded OS 7.0.3, a process, just the downloading and installing, that took maybe almost two hours. I actually thought I had fucked my iPad up yesterday cause I couldn't get internet for a long time, thought that maybe, even though I have it in a tough and more or less waterproof case, it got rain inside and through one of the cracks in my cracked screen and it bummed me out. I heated it a few times with the provided for hair dryer, even laid it on my chest for a few hours during the night to get it up to 98.6, hoping to drive out any moisture.
Well happy ending. I re-entered the password, that had worked for a few minutes yesterday, and my anxieties were quelled. Shit, how dependent I've become on my little 'bot. My R2D2. That thing, well, this thing, actually, cuz I'm currently typing this entry on it, is like, we'll, everything. It's my camera, writing tablet, music box, weather station, telephone (been Face Timing for free!), book (currently reading James Lee Burke's Feast Day of Fools), TV, travel guide (have a Camino guide book on it that I refer to as I walk each day), source of email and iMessage correspondence, alarm clock, game station, address book, map, and calendar. Boy would I be bummed if it stood working.
But above all the other things going on, I feel this terrific sense of loneliness, filled on and off with great joy and wonder at what I'm seeing and doing on this grand adventure. The person I am so used to sharing all with is not here and is not on the other end of any communiques at this point either. A huge, unexplainably sorrowful hole in me. Steeling myself for my future now isn't really a possibility. All I can do, and do do, is to try hard to stay in this moment, to make this moment, as Gibran says, my temple and my religion.Tragically and ironically enough, it is she with whom I most want to share even this new outcropping of growth with. It is too God damned hard and it is too God damned unfair and so much of me is so God damned mad about it and that and fifty cents, as they say, will get me about nada. Damn it all. New beginnings and all that crap. The things you tell your teenager when their love life goes South, but which, when applied to oneself, seems so impotent, so inadequate. Yet there is undoubtably only one way through it, and that is to move through it one little second at a time, let the grieving happen, try to honor it. Though at times, like, well, all of the time, honoring it feels too much like honoring the man who wants to take your child from you.
Grrrr....let me turn to a brief historical note about the town in which we are taking this rest day, with the hopes that it will provide both me and you, dear reader, with a respite from my broken self/heart/dreams...let me quote from T's guide book, John Brierley's not so imaginatively titled Camino de Santiago!
"Back in the 15th century Viana was a major pilgrim stop with no less than 4 hospitals de peregrinos and it was during this period that Cesare Borgia became linked to this town. [Illegitimate son of Roderigo Borgia, who was elected Pope Alexander VI in the pivotal year of 1492, Cesare was appointed commander of the Papal armies and patronized both Leonardo de Vinci, who acted as his military architect, and Machiavelli who, no doubt, helped form some of his political ideology. When Pope Alexander VI died, his successor promptly banished Cesare to Spain where he was killed defending Viana in the siege of 1507. Colorful to the end, it has been suggested that Borgia's strong countenance may have been used by artists of the period, such as Leonardo, to model the popular image of Jesus Christ.] Owing to its border location the town has always been something of a hot spot and its defensive walls are well preserved on its western side (as you leave)." (Page 98)
By the way, the reference of 'its border location' is a reference to the fact that we are some 6.2 kilometers from the (former Kingdom of) Navarra border with neighboring La Rioja.
This evening, around seven o'clock, we went out for a walk. The sun was very low in the West, not but twenty minutes from sundown, as we explored the remains of La Iglesias de San Pedro (I know, right!!), a 13th century Baroque/early Gothic church/fortress that was mostly demolished during the First Carlist War, not that I have even a scintilla of a clue as to what that might be, probably something related to a really famous guy named Carl? Anywho, it was busted apart in 1844, leaving two of the walls, in a big L shape, still standing. The rose window, think that is what they call those large circular windows with the intricate stone swirligigs winding their way through the center, is still there but only small parts of the stone swirligigs remain. Looks like what you would expect to see after an aerial bombing raid.
This church/fortress sits atop a stone wall, on the West and South sides which are the sides that edge the hill that the town is built upon. Most all of the towns we hit now sit atop hills, the housing vertical and adjacent to the next as a sort of circular defensive set up. The walls below and around La Iglesias de San Pedro (okay, I admit it, I just wanted to say that again!) are sheer walls perhaps fifty feet tall. We walked around the grassy courtyard, admiring the incredible view stretching twelve to twenty kilometers around, spotting the city of Logroño, our next walking destination, some ten klicks off to the West, laid out below the now setting sun.
Two groups of four to six local women, maybe eighteen to twenty five year olds, sat and stood in the courtyard clucking away, smoking, drinking, laughing. I remembered my Uncle Jose saying that now during 'The Crisis' more and more youngsters buy their booze in the store and go outside to hang due to the higher cost of partying in the bars.
T and I then walked to a small bar called Mibar, got a couple a frosty mugs of cerveza, and watched the second half of El Classico, the futbol match between Spain's two biggest clubs, Real Madrid, and Barcelona. All the bars were packed with men, mostly forty to seventy year olds, sitting or standing in rows watching this most important game. It was enjoyable to share that experience, a small town gathering full of oohs, aaas, and curses as Barcelona beat Real Madrid based mostly on a totally piss poor non call on a shove in the penalty box when Ronaldo (who lives in Pozuelo de Alarcòn, the posh Madrid suburb where T and I spent three nights Couchsurfing with Gonzalo) was clearly about to score. A child of about six rode his Big Wheel around the bar, clearly all the men knew each other. At one point an older gentleman won a shit ton of coins playing an electronic slot machine and others yelled something to him probably to the effect that the next round should be on him! T and I cracked open and ate the small bowl of peanuts that the bartender, a nice woman of about forty five handed us with our beers.
After the game ended we went back to our place and made pasta and pan toasted baguette, ate the yummy stuff and watched The Thirteenth Warrior on my iPad, a show that I used to own and that Teo has seen about seven times. We got to bed at about ten, me writing in mine until close to eleven.
I slept well, and with the aide of daylight savings (tie pro cambio here), got the better part of ten and a half hours of horizontal. We breakfasted on small bowls of leftover pasta, pan toasted bread, butter, and raspberry preserves plus a banana. Me also with my two mugs of instant coffee, and left by ten.
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