Please find me a job

A couple of weekends ago we went to my cousin’s wedding in England, which was lovely. My family scrub up surprisingly well, the bride looked beautiful, and various people gave some of the best wedding speeches I’ve ever heard, and I say that as an expert in wedding speeches; I’ve been to three weddings now, not including my own. Yes, I’m quite the socialite. 

But I don’t really want to talk about the wedding here – the couple kept it all very small and intimate, and I feel weird about discussing something so personal that isn’t really mine to discuss, in a way, even though most of the people who read this blog are people who were probably there anyway (hi, mum!). Instead, here is a picture of me and my dad at the wedding that I am going to get enlarged and framed and placed somewhere prominent, because I love it;

We don’t photograph well in our family, but we are masters at mugging for the camera. 

And the reason that I bring up the wedding at all is that being away from Pamplona for a few days made me realise how much I’ve adapted to the idea that it is home now. I don’t think I’ve ever felt comfortable somewhere so quickly. Over a couple of wines the other night we had a long discussion about the practicalities of making the move here permanent. I don’t think it’s just the fact that I’m basically on an extended holiday at the moment, I think I could actually live here quite happily. 

But it turns out that, while possible, making the move would be pretty complicated and would mean Jo giving up on finishing his degree, which isn’t worth it. And there’s the question of earning a living. I could teach English, but I’ve sworn only to do that as an absolute last resort. So, if anyone knows of any highly paid jobs in Pamplona that don’t require fluent Spanish, please let me know. I suppose the answer is to work hard on our Spanish now and when we get home, and for Jo to finish uni, see if the Spanish economy pulls out of its nose dive, then to see if we still want to come back. 

But I don’t want to leave with the feeling that maybe one day we’ll come back for a holiday, or worse, that we’ll spend the rest of our lives reminiscing about the time we lived in Spain for a couple of months but never went back. I want to leave knowing that we’ll be back.

This is why I love this city

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.

Pamplona, Pamplona

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.