From Hemingway to Shakespeare



SATURDAY, April 15, 1995.

When I got to Pamplona last night, there was a procession going on! Boy, the Spanish are into these things. You'd think Easter is a big deal or something. After managing to find my hotel through the crowds, I went up to the room, flipped on the TV, and was greeted by Beavis and Butt head! I spent the evening wandering around the city, my shoes squeaking absurdly on the smooth stone streets. I hit a couple of tapas bars for some patatas bravas, tasty fresh pickled sardines, and beer. There was lots of activity, but what I was really looking for was an English speaking companion. I did not find one. I went to bed on the early side.

Pamplona has proved less majestic than my lofty expectations. The bull arena isn't open (like you can just waltz into Madison Square Garden), and Hemingway's statue stood in disappointing shadow this morning. No bulls will be running around here until July, most likely not coincidentally about a week after Il Palio in Siena - it's summer festival time! Reading The Sun Also Rises makes me wonder "what happened to the years when conversation was an art, and artists mingled in cafes poisoning their livers and lungs and enjoying it without warnings from the surgeon general?" The book has a way of glorifying what I might objectively call stupidity and super-decadence. Though it sure sounds like fun.

Underwhelmed with Pamplona, I decided to spend the afternoon in Olite. Let's Go called it "absurdly close to the stereotype of the little Spanish town." It is very endearing. The local Palacio Royal is a true storybook castle with plenty of pointed turrets to trigger the imagination. I even saved several damsels in distress from certain death at the hands of corrupt royal officials. Use your imagination.

Believe it or not, it's cold again. I had to pull out that ol' black wool hat I bought in Burgos. So strange to go from the heat in Seville and the beach in Marbella to the cold wind here in the Navarra region - the San Francisco of Spain, I guess. Wasn't it Twain who said, "The coldest winter I've ever spent was a Spring in Navarra"?

Photos of Pamplona

Photos of Olite

When I first arrived in Spain, I had the impression that it is reasonably functional, somehow more up to American standards than Italy. I'm not sure what gave me this impression, but I was wrong. It's just dysfunctional in different ways. For example, Spain's pay phones take AMEX and Diners Club. This is very convenient and pretty high tech. In Italy it can be challenging just to find a functioning pay phone. But in Spain, figuring out a train schedule or buying an international train reservation is a challenge. Shawn had a hell of a time buying her reservations to Paris. Mom and I struggled with the train schedules. In Italy the train schedules are easy to read, and I never had a problem with international reservations. Other examples? Of course, there's the laundry thing.

When I was still with everyone in Madrid, I went back to the station with Shawn for another attempt at buying her reservation to Paris. We arrived just before 7 PM and found out for sure which windows were for international reservations. There was a pick a number and wait system. When it was your turn, your number appeared over one of the windows. This is a good system. It's first come, first served, and it allows you to sit down. One problem though, the machine was out of numbers. (Homer Simpson... doh!) About half of the people had numbers, about half didn't. So there we were, standing on line in front of a window, but the line couldn't advance until all the people with numbers were finished preempting us. Finally, the line was moving. Then a disorganized, indecisive and mostly blind old lady with thick bandaged ankles took about twenty minutes before paying for her tickets, changing her mind, and taking ten more. When we finally reached the head of the line, we were told that international reservations end at 8 PM. It was 8:05.


TUESDAY, April 18, 1995.

Here I am in Verona, Italy, the city of rose colored marble that served as the backdrop for Romeo and Juliet. I survived the brutal trip here from Pamplona. It began on a bus to Irun which stopped to drop off newspapers, pick up milk bottles, and fetch passengers at the oddest places on the side of mountain roads. Out the window, I saw several bikers training on this serious mountain road on a drizzly, gray Easter day. Can we say hard core? When we arrived in Irun, I met an Austrian woman who'd been on the bus and walked with her to the train station only to learn that we needed to take a taxi to the French station across the border - how retarded!

I caught a train back to Toulouse and arrived there at 4:30 PM. That's when I got the bad news. There was a direct train to Milan, but it left at 1:26 AM! This gave me nine hours to kill. Ouch! I stuck my pack in a locker and headed out. Remember, I've already wandered around this town for an evening and the only thing (that I cared about) I hadn't seen was the interior of St. Sernin. Somehow I passed the time. I read MacWorld for two hours at McDonald's. I hung out around the station people watching and playing with the ticket computer for about two hours. I spent an hour in a cafe next to St. Sernin reading UBILAB papers. I even visited the interior of St. Sernin, but there was a service going on that kept me from looking for the sculpture my aunt had mentioned. I even went to an arcade and played video games including a decent driving game with enough force feedback to keep me on the road. They've come a long way since Pole Position, baby.

Photos of Verona

The direct train to Milan was no express. It took 14 hours and stopped a million times - including a good hour long stop in Ventimiglia at the Italian border. Just as we were pulling into Ventimiglia I decided I needed to go to the bathroom. It's forbidden to use the train WC while in the station (for a good reason), and of course I had no idea how long the stop would be so I wasn't about to get off the train. I had to hold it. If only I'd gone five minutes sooner. Anxious, I went out into the corridor to stretch my legs and spotted a girl wearing an LL Bean pull-over - an American give away. I ended up moving to her compartment and hanging out with her and her two friends. The three of them were cool, laid back, grunge-pseudo-hippie college students from North Carolina who were spending the semester in Merano, living in Ezra Pound's family castle, studying Italian, and working in the vineyards. Neat-o.

I finally got to Milan, grabbed a sandwich, some water, and an entire box of sugar wafers. A half hour later, I was on a packed train, standing in the corridor for an hour long journey to Verona. After arriving, I managed to walk around for about an hour (maybe more) with my pack having trouble finding a vacant, reasonably priced room. When I finally found a room (only available for one night), I was so relieved to be at a destination (36 hours after leaving Pamplona). I stripped off my sweaty clothes, showered, put on my good clothes and headed out for a well-deserved meal.

Absolutely perfect, delightful evening weather, and fresh air greeted me. I was so happy. Happy to be there and happy to be alive. From my table at a sidewalk restaurant in Piazza Bra next to the Roman Arena (the Roman Colosseum Jr. in pink marble) I watched a lively pedestrian scene. I was enchanted by the fading light of dusk and watched the streetlight and arena lighting go on. My two beers left my tired, empty head pleasantly spinning, my pizza funghi satisfied my hunger, and the ambiance was heaven on earth. I was happy to be back in Italy where I "know" the language, though I'm having trouble switching back from gracias to grazie. After dinner, I had the gelato I'd been holding out for in Spain. (I'd been refusing to eat the ice cream there after a bad experience in Barcelona with some horrible stuff they dared call gelato) The first lick of nocciola in my mouth exploded, danced on my tongue and reminded me why I'd missed it so. In bed by ten, I slept soundly and deeply and woke up this morning refreshed. Ah, Italy!


WEDNESDAY, April 19, 1995.

Today, I moved to the Verona youth hostel which along with its fifteenth century frescoes, offered lively company and plenty of fun - nothing like the hostel in Athens. At dinner, I met lots of friendly people including Jimmy, the law firm clerk night club drummer from LA, and his long time girlfriend Julie. They're in Europe spending their insurance money from the latest earthquake. They've done a lot of traveling in the past six years and told great stories about Moscow and seeing the greenish dead face of Lenin. I also met a tall, cute, brunette who's an architecture grad student from the University of Utah. I told her to look up Jim Goddard. Though she mentioned her boyfriend, it was a major flirt-fest. Then there were two friendly, street-smart, opinionated women from San Francisco, a guy from Australia, and two chatty English women. We all talked and drank lots of wine at dinner before heading out on the town - a rowdy, fun crowd wandering the streets of Verona in search of a satisfying Italian sugar rush.

One of the women from San Francisco told me about an interesting experience she had in Prague a few days ago. She was out drinking with a bunch of Americans from the youth hostel getting hammered on cheap beer. The nine of them were sharing a table with a fifty-something Czech woman. After some failed drunken phrase book communications, someone came along and translated for them that the Czech woman was inviting everyone back to her place for a party! Up three flights of stairs and through a locked metal grating they went to a small Czech apartment with two dogs, one named Eddie. The lady fed them soup and then brought out a huge homemade cake shaped like a dog. They say, "Eddie?" and she nods her head. Yes, yes. A photo of the eight (she had to take the photo) of them with this Czech lady, two dogs, and a dog-shaped cake was said to be a bizarre image through the view-finder. I'm sure I'm not capturing it here, but after she told the story, I had this wonderful chaotic image in my head. A dog shaped cake?


THURSDAY, April 20, 1995.

Yesterday, I day tripped to Trent and Bolzano. I was getting close to Austria and it showed. Bolzano seemed more Austrian than Italian. It's a shame that I didn't have a real meal because the restaurants had interesting hybrid menus, though I did eat some Wurstel from a street vendor and then grabbed some gelato. What's next? Bratwurst al pomodoro?

Last night, I hung out with the two women from San Francisco at a little Irish pub. We were a couple of Americans in an Irish pub in Italy. They are definitely sharply opinionated, but I generally agreed with their ideas and I loved listening to more of their stories. They had a Chinese landlord in a cheap apartment in San Francisco who they dreaded because even with his broken English, he could argue them into oblivion. Eventually, they learned that he was an ex-communist interrogator. This same guy liked to rake the dirt in the yard (no grass, just dirt) with a plastic grocery bag on this head. Strange. They also mentioned the blood stains on the ceiling (shot there from IV drug needles) when they moved in. More than before, I felt like I was getting my $790mmonth's worth with my Cupertino apartment.

Before heading up to bed I chatted briefly with some white South Africans and Canadians outside. The Canadians were in Italy ahead of schedule because they had to skip Spain because of the international fishing crisis and sudden visa requirement. I knew this was going to happen to someone as soon as Iheard about it on CNN in Athens. How annoying. I asked a South African guy about the changes going on in his country and he said, "history caught up with the country."

Photos of Trent and Bolzano



Copyright 1997 by Bradley Edelman
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