Leaving Barcelona: Third time's a charm

Well. After the disaster that was yesterday morning, I got onto the right train this morning and ended up in Pamplona. Why the first information officer didn´t suggest this option is beyond me, as it is by far the fastest - the train all the way through to st jean takes 9 hours and involves four changes, and you can only book two of your four tickets in advance, with only 15 min between the other two to disembark, get a new ticket, check in your baggage and get onto the next train. and if you miss it...well then your other pre-booked ticket goes to waste. while the train to pamplona is just 4 hours with no changeovers, and then a further one hour to st jean. so all in all, it would have been much better just to take a direct train to pamplona in the first place, which is in any case part of the camino route itself.

so now i am in pamplona. it being easter weekend, there isn´t much going on in the way of public transport, so when i asked the taxi driver at the train station to bring me to the bus station, he shook his head emphatically several times, got very excited, and eventually got across to me that there was no bus to st jean (the rail information officer INSISTED there was. twice). well, according to the taxi driver, there was no bus to roncesvalles either, but he only scored 1 out of 2, because roncesvalles - which is your second stop on the camino and therefore about 20km from st jean - is mercifully on the schedule today, although st jean is not (ever). so i am taking a bus at four and will just kak en betaal a taxi for the last 20km. I am now gatvol and I swear I would actually just walk there if I thought it would do any good. Camino backwards, as it were.

This city (pamplona) is beautiful and just crawling with pilgrims (these two observations are unrelated). when i get here on foot i think i will take some time to explore the city, because it seems fascinating, but having found the bus station once, i am not about to leave until i am safely on my bus and then some. this bus station, i will say, is a bleak place. it is the station colour forgot - everything is grey and there is no window in sight and i just ate the WORST sandwich in the history of sandwiches. i think someone took a scoop out of a decomposing pig, drizzled it in plastic, stuck it on a styrofoam roll and hoped for the best. but, having slept through breakfast, i did not care and probably would have eaten the plate as well if i´d had half a chance.

yesterday turned out to be absolutely magical. i had spent the morning running around trying to cancel my wasted train ticket after I missed one of the four abovementioned trains. well, actually i first sat down on the floor of Sants train station and had a good cry (in situations like this one should always cry first). i was SO frustrated as i´d been on time for the train, but the station was terribly confusing and I misunderstood the instructions on the ticket and ended up on completely the wrong platform and in fact mistakenly going through baggage check twice (it got a bit circular i must say) and i missed my train while standing two feet away from it on the other side of the glass, tearing great chunks out of my hair. well, needless to say i was in a pretty foul mood by this time and spent the best part of the rest of the morning trying to change the ticket in my broken spanish and cursing the phrase book, which usefully includes sociable phrases like ´I want to make love to you tonight´ but not, for example, words like left, right, straight, up, down, north, south, here or there. 
so basically i would have been all set if i did not want to catch a train but instead fancied some sweet, sweet love from a sour-faced train conductor. (remind me to bear this in mind next time.) once I´d changed my ticket, the rest of the morning involved trying to find an open internet cafe - well nigh impossible on public holiday - and cancelling my booking at the bed and breakfast in st jean. this, too, was an adventure since i don´t speak any french and st jean is in france. (google translate, i love you.) anyhow, i muddled through with the help of a lovely girl called Daniela and i *think* there will be room at the inn tonight.

after i´d sorted everything out admin-wise, i felt very sorry for myself so spent what is traditionally lunchtime in my hotel room with the blankets over my head (this, too, is an important part of the ritual). anyway, once I´d sat like that for about an hour i pulled myself together and tried to find some things to do in barcelona. most things were closed owing to the public holiday, and exploring was a damp business because it started pouring with rain, but undaunted I decided to try my hand at map-reading and what do you know, I got to where i wanted to be without even getting lost once. i walked for about six hours in total; i covered about as much of that city as a human being can. i walked to catalunya plaza, the city centre, and drowned my sorrows in a chocolate croissant as big as my head and a giant ´farggipuccino´ - farggi is a super-trendy deli that i grew to love because they pour liberal amounts of liquor into one´s coffee and dish out free chocolates. and let me tell you, failure tastes better when it´s washed down with fat, sugar and liquor. you can quote me on that.

after that, i wandered down to la rumbla, the longest road in barcelona

(11km) which is tailor-made for tourists and sells useful things like gaudi-inspired plastic lizards and garish heart-shaped pillows with BARCELONA written on them in gold. the souvenir i really wanted was a t-shirt that said ´I AM LOST IN BARCELONA´but they didn´t have it in the right size. more´s the pity.

it was a magical night, actually. saturday is the day of barcelona´s patron saint, and the tradition is that all the women give the men books and all the men give the women roses (i think the men score here). to give you an idea of how seriously it´s taken, the population of barcelona is about 7 million and last year, over 5 million roses were sold. when i wandered down the streets they were littered with roses and there were flower stands every 100m with everyone celebrating and buying roses for people they loved. i stayed out until after nine (it only got dark then) and explored everywhere, all the way down to the harbour, where i climbed on stone lions and ate ice cream and took photos. 
walking down la rumbla i hit a massive crowd of people that made it impossible to walk; i climbed up a pole to see what was going on and it turns out i´d caught the easter parade, which involved several gloomy-looking fellows who closely resembled the ku klux klan, only they wore black; plus a number of floats covered in flowers and a giant life-size statue of the Virgin Mary. A huge marching band was playing music and it was terribly festive. i took a million photographs and climbed up a few more poles, and eventually when it was over, i walked to the gothic quarter, which is one of the oldest parts of barcelona and boasts some of its most historic relics. this was the most special part of my evening in the end; i wandered after the smell of hot waffles and instead found, right next to a gorgeous fresh food market, something much better: the santa maria del pi, a catalan gothic church dating back to the 1300s. 
i missed a concert of rodrigo´s works, performed by spain´s leading guitarist, but arrived there bang on time for easter mass, which was something incredibly special - beautiful, peaceful singing, prayers and such a feeling of quiet. near me, a grandmother was showing a little boy the saints, and the tombs of the church´s various patrons, and he was flitting up and down with great excitement and a little reverence for good measure. i knew just how he felt and, after the service, did some flitting myself.


now i am in pamplona, patting myself on the back for sorting out some internet problems at the station here - i tried to log in and found that my mail account had been hacked and i was locked out, with all the troubleshooting pages in spanish (oops). sorting it out was a rather laborious process involving a great deal of back-and-forth, but again, google translate, i love you. and now i am going to try and find something to drink that does not involve battery fluid. (there is not a lot of good coffee in pamplona station.)

i know i say this every day, but if i do get to st jean today, you *really* won´t hear from me for a while again. honest.