Day 15 or A Gaggle of Germans

Notes on my day in Burgos, March 10



So I added up my mileage, and my "kilometerage" so far and my little purple pies (feet) have walked 179.9 miles or 289.6km. I am a badass.

This morning I checked myself into a little hotel only a few blocks from the Cathedral as soon as I left the Albergue at 7:30 in the morning. I swear the rules in some of these Albergues (your ass gets locked in at 9:30pm, your ass gets kicked out by 7:30am) are positivly draconian. When I was happily ensconced in my private haven I crashed for another two hours. The Cathedral didn´t open until 10:00 anyway, and I planned to start my day there.



And it is such a glorious thing to be without my pack for a whole day and in my other pair of shoes. I feel so blissfully light, even with the two pastries I ate for breakfast. In a cafe in my hood I was enjoying my desayuno of pastry and cafe, when in walked German Andre and tattooey French Veronique. I had not seen them for a few days and assumed they were probably in Fromista by now. They sat down to join me and then Veronique leaned over the table, all conspiratorial like, and asked me if I had seen Carlos the Argentine lately, and when I told her that he had left the albergue this morning (but without saying goodbye to me), she raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows and looked knowingly at Andre. ¨I sink ee ees in love wiz mee or somezing, because ee waz very nice at furst, tres sympathetique, you know? But zen ee ees changing and I sink eet ees because ee does not like to see mee and Andre so much togezzer, you know?¨ Ahh. Another episode of As The Camino Turns.

And after the drama-rama over Carlos was pondered and pronounced positively inexplicable, I left the two petite amis and headed for the Cathedral.

First let me just get this off my chest. How sacreligious is it to say ¨Holy Fuck¨ about a church? I mean really? Sometimes nothing else gets the job done but Holy Fuck, and this is one of those times.



Every inch of every surface, be it wood, stone, or metal, is elaborately carved. And each motif, and there must be thousands of motifs covering this place, is symbolic. I could have spent a week in there. The sepulchures, sarcophogi, and tombs were carved right down to the marble threads on the marble tassles of the marble pillows on which the marble effigies rested their marble heads. There was a collection of gold and silver chalices (caliz) that blew me away for the sheer minuteness of their intricacies. The most mundane door to the most mundane room in the cathedral was adorned with carvings like it was the entrance to heaven itself. One has the feeling it would take a lifetime to know this place intimately.



Its architecture is mostly Gothic and Renaissance. And the famous El Cid and his wife are buried there, but I was so busy looking up at The Crossing (the glorious Renaissance dome that replaced the collapsed Gothic spire in the central nave) that I fogot to notice I was standing right next his dead self.



But the building is as much a political statement as a religious one, and I don´t feel it is a spiritual place as much as a museum, so saying ¨holy fuck¨ about a museum is not quite as damning I suppose.



It was a blustery day, a good day to spend a lot of time indoors, and for lunch (comida) I stopped in a little restaurant and ordered more paella and some vino tinto (big surprise there), and my very good looking Spanish waiter brought me a whole bottle. And why shouldn´t one drink an entire bottle of lovely red, produced and bottled right there in Burgos, at 2:00 in the afternoon on a cold and drizzly day in early March? That´s exactly what I thought too, so I made a good stab at it. I sat at my little table and nursed my wine and wrote notes on the day for my blog (at one point I scrawled: ¨can´t write. very drunk.¨).

About eight nights ago Elena and I had a discussion about American movie stars after a hospitalero in an albergue showed the movie Seven on a large screen. I asked her if she thought Brad Pitt was cute. ¨Ci, muy guapo,¨ she answered. So embolded by my 3/5 of a bottle of wine I decided it would be a great idea to tell my waiter he was muy guapo. I am sure he thought, ¨Madre mia, what is this pudgy, sunburned, limping American woman doing hitting on me?¨ But Graciously he took pity on me and only said, ¨Gracias."



After comida I returned to my hotel for siesta, and this time it really was a pleasant little afternoon nap instead of an exhausted and desperate bid for unconsciousness. And after siesta I went out window shopping in the old town, and ran into Stephanie from Friebourg, who I had to leave behind in Santo Domingo because her knees were shot. She inivted me to dinner with her and some friends and that´s when I learned that the enitre country of Germany has emptied of citizens and the Krauts have invaded the Camino.



It was a postive gaggle of Germans. Sacha, who played that twangly little mouth instrument that you pluck with your finger, Eva, whose pack is an astonishing 21 kilograms owing to her 7 month old son who she is carrying on her back, and the sweet and lithe Corina, who got soaked in the rain today and had to keep borrowing spare pants from others and changed them five times. There were about 10 Germans in all.

It turns out a popular German actor wrote a best selling camino memoir called ¨I´m On My Way,¨ and it seems to have hit a nerve there and the camino has lurched into the collective awareness of the German population.

I guess I can´t really blame them. I´m on my way too.