Saturday was an unusually warm day, and in the evening we decided to potter out and have a glass of wine in the Plaza de Castillo before dinner. It’s getting pretty cold around here now, and we wanted to take advantage of what might have been the last chance we had to sit outside comfortably, something which had occurred to everyone else who lives here as well, and the plaza was packed with flaneurs, drinkers, and people watchers. People watching is one of Pamplona’s most popular past times, and it takes a while to get used to the fact that people will stare at you quite openly. To begin with it made me a bit self-conscious, but I don’t really notice anymore, mostly because I spend so much time staring at people myself.
Dusk is the best time to start people watching around here, because as it starts to get dark, the buskers start to come out. This is great because it means I can combine three of my favourite things; listening to music, judging people based on what they wear, and drinking wine.
And we were sitting happily at Bar Windsor having a drink when a fire twirler set up nearby (we’d already had a short, one act play performed for us at the next table, where an American girl had complained to the waiter about some aspect of her drink and was subjected to a pretty severe talking to by him about her manners before he’d go and get her another one, so it was a red letter day for entertainment). We watched the fire twirler for a bit. He was a bit inept, but not dangerously so, and everyone walked away unharmed. The adults in the vicinity were not especially interested in him, but he did quickly amass an audience of small children, and in the eye of every one of those tiny potential arsonists I could see a glimmer of the primeval recognition of “fire... good”.
The best bit of his act was when he battled the invisible Jedi;
After a bit of lacklustre twirling he did a spot of fire breathing, with an air of ‘I really hope I watched that instructional youtube video enough times to get this right.’
Our next stop was The Boozer Triangle (a convergence of streets that doesn’t quite qualify as a square, this is a little strip that has the Casco Antiguo’s best and cheapest bars – including el Mejillon, more on which later - and consequently, more hippies and students lounging on the footpaths and in doorways than can soberly be countenanced without feeling that you need a wash) for a bit of dinner, and along the way we saw three of the area’s resident buskers. Two are phenomenally good guitarists, one plays electric keyboard and is, how can I put it delicately...not good. Though he does also play the tambourine with his foot, so he gets points for trying. To these varied musical accompaniments we wandered around trying to decide where to go.
Then we saw this;
A mariachi band, you say?
And so that’s how we spent Saturday night. In a bar watching the best (and only) mariachi band I’ve ever seen, while all around us drunken students danced and sang (and in the case of the particularly drunk girl whose hand you can see in the photo grasping a huge cup of some luridly orange drink, trying to do both and succeeding at neither). Then we had an ice cream, and wobbled tipsily home. I don’t think I could have planned a more perfect evening.
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