The race that stops a nation

Race day finery (finery not pictured)

Well, it stopped a gaggle of slightly homesick Aussies in Pamplona. We met up with some of the other Australians and a couple of ring-in Americans at Pamplona's Australian bar, which is really only nominally Australian. It has all sorts of bits of tat on the walls that turn out on inspection to be mostly old-timey adverts for English beers, though they do serve kangaroo and Foster's beer (as a side note, last night was only the second time in my life that I had actually tasted Foster's, the other time being in England, which put me ahead of the average compared with the others - I don't think I've ever even seen Foster's at home). Oh, and they do have a themed menu. I say 'themed'. What that theme is is anyone's guess. There's a section of the menu called Hambre de Koala (hunger of the koala), though it isn't clear why. There are variations on 'a bit of kangaroo served with chips,' but then they seemed to have run out of inspiration, and the rest of the meals are called things like the 'Frankfurt Burger', making it both geographically and gastronomically confusing.

We drank quite a lot of Foster's, with no noticeable effect (as they say, it's not the kind of beer you buy, you just rent it for a while, so any alcohol that it may have once contained has been safely filtered out by the time you drink it). The funny thing is that the bar had plenty of other beers, and no one actually seemed to like the Foster's, but we drank it out of a sort of misplaced longing for home.

We had a modest sweepstake going, and the winner was, appropriately enough, one of the Americans who had come along. Jo came second, and we won a cool ten euros, which we immediately used to buy more terrible, mistakenly patriotic Foster's. 

The nicest thing about it all was just spending time with some other Australians, and I never thought I'd say that. I don't mean that to sound snarky as I'm sure it does, it's just that Australia has always been for me the place where my family, dog and job are, and it hasn't ever really felt like home. I'm not in the least bit homesick for Australia, though I do miss my family, and if it was up to me we'd stay here, or at least in this hemisphere, for a lot longer. So I was surprised at how nice it was to talk to a) English speakers, and b) Australians (not necessarily the same thing) just because it was so easy. Not just the same language, but the same experiences, the same shared cultural references, and the same sense of humour. Maybe homesickness will set in yet. Probably not, but if it was going to, this would have been the trigger for it.