Another gorgeous but hot day as we walked to the next stop Estella (pronounced: Eh-stay-yah) across an ancient Roman road that lead out of the town in the very early morning.
We saw a beautiful sunrise.
It´s pretty awesome walking on a thousand years of history and knowing that thousands of pilgrims have walked it before me. The trail is not particulaly beautiful today but it is nice to be in the country and listen to the birds tweet as I walk on by in the sunshine. I don´t often get the time to be out in nature with all my homework and stress, so it is a nice change but I´m super tired.
Me and the Roman bridge.
Ancient Roman road, you never know Julius Caesar might have walked on it!?
The Camino comes with ups and downs. The dormitory sleeping arrangement gross me out! I find it challenging to share unisex bathrooms with strangers. You can imagine the snoring, farting, burping, sleeptalking in other languages, coughing and splutering in a room of 30 people. I woke up at 3am and given it´s holy week, I thought it was a procession down the main street but it was the guy on the bunk below me giving off plenty of gas.
Later that morning we crossed an old bridge and I thought that I just had to make a cairn-a little monument that pilgrims add stones to as they pass. I have added stones to cairns before but never constructed one so I decided it was time.
Here I am with my cairn.
I had just finished my cairn when two Spanish men, pilgrims from Madrid came by, just at the time we needed it. Our snack supply had run out and they generously stuffed our faces full of their snacks of chocolate and nuts.
This leaves me wondering if these chocolate bearers might possibly have been in the 3am procession and I judged them too quickly. I am now trying not to judge people so quickly cause they might become your best friend. This also makes me recall how other people judge you quickly as well. Now I am a pilgrim, in the boots and Ivé got the pack, people do look at you in a different way, a way I´m not use to. In Spain walking the camino you get two differnet looks, a good and a bad. Some are in awe, they look up to you and bless you, and some say to you ¨please pray for me in Santiago¨, this in most cases is a wise old person who respects pilgrims. The other look is rude. Thinking that they are at a higher level than you; a dirty pilgrim. They don´t know where you come from or what you nomally wear but they still judge. You can imagine the looks I got when I stepped foot in the Chanel store in Paris, the staff were nice but it was the toffie customers who looked you up and down and I could tell what they were thinking, but they are wrong! And now I have experienced this, I am stopping myself judging people so quickly. The lessons here are: ´not to judge a book by it´s cover´and ´that things are not always as they appear´.
Adios!
