"nunca le dije nada, pero a veces cogía sus lápices mordidos y los guardaba."
So, I was up in Pamplona this weekend and had a smashing good time in the company of Caroline (the Bourbon), plus an assortment of other characters and my former flatmates. There are a millions pictures of this whole adventure, and I will post them soon enough, tho time's fairly pressed at the moment so little more than a brief update will have to do, and photos generally complicate such a process.
But - yeah, it was awesome: I got into town at 6 on Friday morning, wandered about the city and had a pretty great stretch of time to revisit my old haunts and discover that fairly little had changed since my early-morning runs from a couple of years back, which would always happen after spending the night methodically reviewing for the Selectividad (back then I was a largely nocturnal fellow, and would start my days at 11 p.m., have dinner, lounge about, and eventually begin studying at one, continue that process until 5 or 6, then go for a long run around the citadel and an equally extended cool-down walk around the old city walls, grabbing some bread on the way back to the flat just as the bakeries opened for the first customers; then it was shower, dress, and off to class for a few hours, before coming home around noon, having lunch, attending to sporadic business, and retiring no later than 3 in order to repeat the entire process again later that evenings - as grueling as it sounds, I actually liked having days largely comprised of quiet moments while the rest of the world slept, and the dawn's-break runs were amazing, and the whole thing ultimately paid off with a high-enough Selectividad score to get into the Complutense).
I did that for a long while, at any rate, before ending up in the Plazuela de San Jose around 8.30 and hanging around there for awhile, sketching and attending to some correspondence until Caroline called. Then it was off to her flat to drop off my things, then breakfast, then groceries, then off to the river where we spent the rest of the afternoon swimming and drinking and eating altogether too much brie. Later on we headed back, showered, ate some döners on the old fortified city walls, went to a jazz concert in the aforementioned Plaza, wandered about, drank at a couple of taverns, did alot of people-watching, and eventually hung out with some of her friends and had a jug of shots. We witnessed a very cordial drug-deal, walked some other kids to the bus station, and went back down to the river with aims to jump of the bridge, but were discovered by an unexpected night watchman and had to ultimately flee the scene and swim away with the tide, sadly abandoning our quest for the evening; we were home and passed-out by 3.
On Saturday we got up around 12; Caroline had to study, so I headed off on my own and walked about the citadel and the old San Saturnino section before trying my luck at my old flat to see if my old flatmates were in; Liz was, wonderfully enough, and she immediately buzzed me up and insisted upon my staying for lunch.
Elizabeth Naamorkor Caulley, or Liz, to contextualize, was my flatmate during the second half of the year that I spent in Pamplona; she is Ghanaian by birth but was raised in Manchester (indeed, early mocking of her voice eventually led, in part, to my current vocal affectations) and ended in our flat in Pamplona after having moved there with her Navarrese [and former Erasmus] boyfriend who she ultimately realized was a bit of a twat and subsequently left. Liz is also one of the most amazing cooks I've ever met and, after having recognized me as just the sort of fellow who appreciates such things, we spent many an afternoon in utter delight with her cooking amazing tings, my delighting in eating them, and the both of us just kind of glowily wasting away several hours over good food, conversation, quite a bit of drink and whatever movie either one of us had picked up at the local video place (we watched The Dreamers I-don't-know-how-many-times, and Out of Africa was another one that kind of captivated us on several occasions).
At any rate, on this particular occasion she apologized profusely for not having known I was coming, and thus not having prepared a right-proper menu, but as she made this apology she rapidly pulled out a series of random ingredients and before the hour was up she had thrown together an amazing meal of mountain ham, seared tuna steaks, a feta ginger salad, roasted prawns, pumpkin stew and some fantastic dark chocolate from Ghana; I did my best to contribute by fetching a couple of bottles of wine, bread, and a bunch of pastries for dessert. Half-way through cooking my other former flatmate, Susana I, showed up; Susana is actually one of those people you love dearly, one of those people who is just earnestly a good, naturally cheerful persons, and yet also one of those people who are absolutely impossible to live with because they are so aloof that this oft-times crosses the line into being outright inconsiderate. Not living with her, I love her dearly, but it was amusing to see how stony Liz grew when Susana joined the party, and how she managed to completely avoid offering her any of the food prepared, and only grudgingly acquiesced to letting her try some of it after Susana asked excitedly and it became clear that a denial would simply be unbearably rude.
Tho a bad flatmate, Susana I is a damned good 'creative' type, and when she joined us she had just come back from presenting her latest work at the book fair (a collection of stories; she gave me a copy, so I'll read / review it this summer); she livened up the lunch with a pretty hilarious series of anecdotes about just how sordid Pamplona's literary society is, before digressing into random talks about the Basque language, serenading us with peasant songs and from her native province of Leon (accompanying herself with an oversized traditional tambourine from the area), and eventually breaking out, suddenly, into the recitation of a poem by some brilliant Argentine fellow which was pretty much just too good to not film and append here:
Click to viewAfterwards I met up with Caroline and we did random things around the city, and I ended up buying some alpargatas, which make me really happy (they're all I used to wear as a child - that is to say, when I started to wear shoes, against which I notably rebelled for ages), then later we went to the Cathedral, we wandered about, we ran into giants dancing in the street, avoided a rainstorm, cut through the park, and taxi-ed on home.
Then a huge crêpe dinner with Caroline's awesome posse (within which was a really awesome Dutch girl upon whom I would've developed a hard-core platonic let's-hang-out-all-the-time crush had she lived in Madrid, as well as a pretty great Uruguayan girl who made the meal all the better by contributing an enormous jar of dulce de leche), then bags-packing, talking talking talking, then back to the center for pints, a brief rendezvous with the flatmates for one last hurrah, and back to Madrid, where I arrived promptly at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning.
And so that's (mainly) what I've been up-to, besides the last test this morning, and the epic paper upon which I must get to work on momentarily - after which I'm done. I have to get down to Seville before the end of the week (hopefully Thursday - Friday, or maybe I'll just switch plans and spend the weekend there, dunno) and really get on the ball about wrapping things up in Madrid and etc. And, so, uh...yeah.
Other things:
I did burn my back fairly badly during the river day and, ow, that's a bit uncomfortable, isn't it? I daresay I really will take efforts not to let that happen when I go down to Seville and the beach this weekend, so as to avoid last year's horrible plane flight home with epically tender skin.
I may give up the BBC for the summer, maybe, in favour of exclusively French and German news podcasts to, you know, keep in touch with the Gauls and the Krauts. I was listening to Merkel talking from the G-8 summit and my mind definitely lingered on a few words, so methinks it's probably time to get to listening to the languages a bit more often (the German more for comprehension, the French for vocabulary building and pronunciation and the like).
Two films:
1) Tu Vida en 65' - okay, right, so I recommended this film in December, after having seen it on the flight home, and I re-saw it this morning and reiterate my recommendation. Really, I know that I gab about alot of films, but I actually think that my particular film kids might really, really enjoy this, because while I enjoy alot of films, I guess I might qualify this one as a great movie, or atleast a great example of the new wave of great Spanish films that have come out in recent years, and certainly just a lovely-beautiful thing to watch. The acting is great and it's nicely shot, but I really do emphasize it for the plot, which is just wondrously creative and has equally wondrous dialogue and lines like "Yo me enamoré locamente de un chico que vivía cerca de mi casa. Era un chaval curioso, recuerdo que siempre mordía los lápices, se los comía enteros. Nunca le dije nada, pero a veces cogía sus lápices mordidos y los guardaba. Pero nunca le dije nada," and, so...yeah. Check it out, use it to while away the moments until I get back, or if you can't imagine rousing your attention span for a great movie, just tell me and we'll arrange a collective screening this summer and that way it'll be a social event.
2) Rope - I remember my parents having rented this out and watched this with me when I was tiny, but I found it unbearably slow because, you know, I was in second grade. Upon re-watching it tho, yeah, loved it, loved the actors, loved the fantastic single-takes which nicely divide the film (despite Hitchcock’s best efforts to make them merge seamlessly), just generally really enjoyed it overall.
All for now, kids; more to come soon, perhaps from Seville at week's end.