northern light
So a couple of months ago, in the midst of finals, I opted for abandoning the capital and jump onto the night-bus, heading northwards to the foothills of the Pyrennees in order stay for a few days as a guest of Caroline in the charming, forgotten provincial outpost that is my beloved birth-city of Pamplona.
(Windmills in the distance.)
(Tho the Kingdom / Province of Navarra (and the capital city of Pamplona, specifically) is traditionally españolísima, conserving regional customs while still fiercely identifying itself with the greater Kingdom of Spain, as well as being home to the Opus Dei, cradle of Carlismo (ultra-traditionalist movement that sought to place an absolutist king on the Spanish throne throughout the XIXth century) and one of the first cities to align themselves with Franco when the Civil War broke out in 1936 - there is, nonetheless, a small, alternative radical subculture that aligns itself with the extremist Basque nationalist movement and generally busies itself with scrawling messages about town and sporadically burning trashcans or ATM machines on Friday and Saturday nights. This is a largely disingenuous minority, however; I recall reading, with some surprise to the irony, that within a small gang of these separatists (arrested during my time studying in the city) not a single one of them actually spoke Basque with any fluency, and most all of them actually came from families with deep Spanish roots - factors which, in more authentically radical areas, would likely make them as odious to true nationalists as a flamenco dancing Civil Guard from Seville.)
(This was the hospital were Pieter Quackenbush went after his AIDS scare [product of a night with a Nigerian hooker], in which he was famously told by a doctor that he "shouldn't worry yourself. So the condom broke - it's happened before and it'll happen again thousands of time - you were playing safe enough as it is, so my advice to you is to not stress yourself and go about your business, because this HIV business is all hullaballoo and hype, anyway.")
(Pamplona is one of the cities on the northern track of the Camino de Santiago ["Way of St. James" - pilgrimage routes that cover all of Europe and lead to the holy shrine at Santiago de Compostela, in western-most Spain; it's a lovely trek to undertake, most popularly in the summers, and Txikia did it some years ago, hiking from Aragon, across part of the Pyrennees and over to that which happens to also be his own birth-city, as well as major holy point or whatever - I've kind of always been intrigued about doing it, and so one-day maybe I shall, as methinks it wuld be nice to basically walk and camp about the [fucking beautiful] northern Spanish countryside over a few months in the summer]. These medieval posts are all over the region, and mark the track that pilgrims take, leading them from church to church and points of refuge at which they [still] might crash and find food and lodging during their travels.)
(The area, indeed, continues to be largely agrarian, tho on the other side of the old section a newer [read: uglier] part of the city has exploded, and there one finds some minor industry, mainly the most important Volkswagen factory in Spain.)
(Parque de la Media Luna, one of my old haunts. I liked this park because it had a few palm trees.)
(The provincial side of me would love to someday live in a Basque-style house, tho I fear that minor fantasy could never really be complimented by the much more real prospect of wanting to mainly live in cities during this life of mine; in the summers, perhaps, something exactly like this and overlooking a river [as this one, precisely, does] would be awesome.)
(That which we were following before [Parque de la Media Luna, etc.] was all upon the old city fortifications - this used to be the capital of a small but proud Kingdom, mind you; we came down to the river, and we rejoin them again now; they were originally constructed in the 1500's, and the one's you see now were updated in the XVIIth century. I used to go on terribly romantic picnic dates back in the Age of Grace on the stretch of elevated grass you see in the picture directly above, by the way.)
(This crest dates to the post-autonomous period, however, when Navarra was a Kingdom with actual leadership deferred to the Kingdom of Castilla and Leon, itself, at the time, just part of the reigning monarch's {probably Carlos V or Felipe II} Holy Roman Empire.)
(Basque anarchist sticker.)
(Anti-conservative-mayoress-of-Pamplona, pro-leftist-Basque-nationalists sticker)
(The Archbishop's Palace.)
(Everything up to this point effectively covers part of my morning runs, which I would take after long nights of studying and before class in the Spring of 2005, when I was largely nocturnal and would get up at midnight to spend 4 or 5 hours prepping for the Selectividad examinations, then go run and later go to class, only to come home a noon, collapse into bed and sleep until beginning it all over again.)
(Caroline! and River!)
(God bless the Arga River.)
(The building in ruins there, by the way, is an old mill. I still haven't figured out how old it is, but in a print I saw last year, featuring plenty of fellows in powdered wigs and the like {so circa XVIIIth century at very latest} it appeared in working order and, apparently, with a small inn attatched to it. It's seen better days, but it's a damned lovely building nonetheless.)
(Rear entrance to the XVIth-century Ciudadela, which used to mark the outer borders of Pamplona but now simply serves as the demarcation point between the old section and the new [read: atrocious] post-war neighbourhoods.)
(The Ciudadela is a star-shaped fortification {much like the U.S.'s Fort McHenry in Baltimore}, and this one was, in fact, the marvel of pre-XXth century warfare, being absolutely and positively impermeable, completely capable of resisting any siege and rejecting any attacker, effectively never being taken by force, tho it was, of course, succesfully taken by Napoleon. Indeed, in 1808 he camped some troops outside of the Ciudadela, which was no problem as France was a friend of Spain at the time, and his fellows were on their way to fight the Brits in Portugal, after all. It was winter, and the soldiers of both nations were appropriately frisky [read: homoerotic] and so they began a snow-fight. So the balls start flying, and the French after the Spanish, doing alot of chasey-chasey, throwy-throwy, touchy-touchy, follow-you-into-the-fort-y, and WHAM: off fly the coats of the frogs, exposed are their drawn rifles, and effectively captured and quickly surrendered are the Spanish troops and the city of Pamplona. Twas so that Napoleon took the most perfect fortification in Spain without firing a shot, and 'tis for such things that I sigh admiringly as I finish writing this sentence.)
(Since reverted to a public space, a traditional navarrese wedding was underway.)
("My people!" - Not really, but I did used to dress like this as a child, beret and all.)
(Fantastic native contraption, by which the banging of those sticks upon those planks produces some really great hollow musical sounds, to the collective pleasure of all.)
(One of the statues that line the Paseo de Sarasate; these were actually built to line the balustrades of the Royal Palace in Madrid, but as we all know the good Queen Barbara of Braganza dreamt that they came to life and crushed her, and so the hundreds of statues were scattered, some to be placed in the Plaza de Oriente, some to be sent to the Parque del Retiro, and all those depicting Navarrese kings were sent up to Pamplona.)
(The booths here are temporary; they're put up for a big summer raffle which I used to play alot as a child, tho I don't recall ever winning anything except bottles upon bottles of cider, which they readily gave me and which I would drink with equal readiness.)
(Plaza del Castillo, center of the city.)
(City Hall; the San Fermines are declared open from the lower balcony, by way of proclamation, firecrackers, and gallons upon gallons of cider at precisely noon of each 6th of July.)
(Vanitas, Vanitum.)
(Liz and Susana I preparing my lunch.)
(The Plazuela de San Jose, quite possibly one of the most peaceful and one of my most favourite places on earth; I grew up here, in part, spending tons of childhood midsummers in this square.)
(There's a convent on the left and the Cathedral on the right.)
(And here, on the left side of the Plaza, I used to live as a child; the place belonged to Padre Pastor, the good priest who was practically my godfather in everything but name, and as he lived within the residences attatched to the Archbishop's Palace he would always have us stay within his old lodgings, a splendid flat that wound about curiously, like a snail's shell, and which was decorated with largely modern appliances but all the original furniture that his parents had brought with them when they moved into the place in the 1910's.)
(This alleyway ran between my building and the convent, which housed cloistered Carmelite nuns, who took great interest in my siblings and I. We had befriended the "concierge nun", the only one permitted contact with the outside world, and apparently she had told them about us, and the sisters within the convent could hear us playing and singing outside. They apparently became quite fans of ours, as before we left that summer they asked their higher-ups and were summarily granted permission to allow us to come into the convent and meet them, albeit with the required rails between us and them, as cloistered nuns are strictly forbidden from any direct contact with the outside world. As it was, this was tremendously remarkable, given that they are only allowed visits from family members once a year, so as one can imagine permitting unknown children to come in and say hullo was highly unusual. They were lovely, as sort of crowded about and smiled at us and blessed us through the rails, and it must have been a curious thing for them, given that I usppose many of them hadn't see children, properly, since they entered the place, and that's rather fascinating and kind of a warm-fuzzy memory for me now. At any rate, the alleyway was called "Salsipuedes", literally "Get out if you can", not in reference to the convent but rather because the alley was actually a cul-de-sac.)
(The Cathedral.)
(Another anti-mayoress sticker.)
And that's all, hurrah.