Weeks before we were due to arrive in Pamplona we started looking for somewhere to live, and thought we’d struck gold almost immediately. A lovely new flat, very near to the town centre (or so we were told), with a nice woman in her thirties who had a car and was happy to drive us out on little sightseeing trips every now and then. It was around this time that the other students going to Pamplona from Jo’s uni started sending us panicky little emails. Did we have somewhere to live? We smiled, condescendingly. Of course we did. We’re organised. We’re efficient. We’re... about to get screwed over. Naturally. In hindsight, we should have been aware that something was a bit off. The woman who was renting the rooms wrote all of her emails to us in caps. It might seem like a small thing, but I’m way too much of an internet tragic not to be instantly on my guard when I see an all caps email. She also wrote in a slightly odd version of Spanish that we couldn’t unpick with our basic knowledge of the language, or with the help of Google translate. We weren’t worried by this though, until we showed the emails to a native Spanish speaker, who told us that it wasn’t just us that didn’t get it, and that they genuinely were odd emails. We started to feel a bit apprehensive.
Over the weeks we got regular emails asking us if we were still interested in the room, to which we always replied that, yes, we still wanted the room. Then ten days before we were due to arrive at our new flat, we got an even more odd email from her telling us that the people who were living in the room she had been planning on renting to us had decided actually not to move out after all, and she wasn’t going to rent to us anymore. I may have used some particularly foul expressions that made Jo look at me in a slightly worried way, but at that moment I genuinely would have been a threat to this woman if she’d been anywhere near us. So, we arrived in Pamplona with nowhere to stay, and spent the first week or so in a hotel.
All that is to say that we were not in the best frame of mind to like it here. Jet lagged. Homeless. Nursing homicidal fantasies. And yet, we did like it, almost instantly. It really is a nice city. Small enough to feel that you know it really well after a few days, and yet big enough that it has everything you need in terms of entertainment, shopping, restaurants, and with that slightly rural flavour that means the world to a middle class girl from the suburbs.
And then we found our flat, which I think we were pretty lucky to get. For some reason, people seemed unwilling to rent a room to a non-Spanish speaking couple who were only going to stay for four months. And yet we did find somewhere, actually in the centre of town (not in the fake centre of town that we had originally been fooled into thinking were going to be living in), in a nice clean block, above a great bar and across the road from the bull ring.
But even more than that is the fact that it is in the Casco Viejo, the old part of town, which is so much a part of my fantasy of living in Europe that I get a big grin on my face every time I step outside. To someone who grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches idolising Europe and Europeans, everything about life here is constantly thrilling to a degree that if I confessed it to an actual Spanish person, they’d probably think I was slightly mental. I hang my washing on a line outside my kitchen window! The streets are all paved with cobble stones! I buy fresh bread every day from the same little shop and take it home wrapped in a bit of paper! At night we eat ice-cream and walk around the Plaza like real Spaniards! I find all of this endlessly exhilarating and enchanting.
Obviously, not everything is perfect. The bar below can get quite noisy. Um. I can’t think of anything else to complain about. I like it here a lot.
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