Well, do you miss me yet?? Haha. My “study week” has turned into lots of traveling, as I left for Navarra on Thursday morning, after only being back from Paris on Monday night! Navarra is in the central, northern region of Spain, a place termed Vasco (pronounced Basque) country. The trip was sponsored and run by IES and they called it “The Journey”…. It went along with our day trip to Besalu and Vic during orientation week, as far as medieval history of Spain. IES wanted us to discover more about Spain as we also discovered more about ourselves. Neato, right? My bus left on Thursday morning at 9:30am. By 9:30 I actually mean 9:50am, because one of the girls was late…and she got up an hour and a half beforehand, as she told everyone who asked if she slept through her alarm. We drove through the Spanish countryside, which was beautiful during the 30 minutes or so that I was awake. Around noon, the bus stopped for a 20 minute snack break, and then 30 or 45 minutes later we left again. We stopped an hour later because some boy had to pee so bad that he couldn’t hold it. He was sitting in the front cussing up a storm, and all the stop did was put us even later for our lunch stop. We watched Marie Antoinette on the bus, which I thought was cool even though I’ve seen it before, just to see Versailles as it might have been during her reign. We finally reached Olite, the town where we were to eat lunch, at 3:45pm. It was very disorganized, but we were shown to a few places where sandwiches could be ordered. The town was too small for a barrage of 150 hungry college students. Luckily, I brought a lunch from the cafeteria and so I didn’t have to wait in any lines. Olite is in the Navarra region and was the seat of the royal court of the Navarran kingdom in the middle ages. We toured the Palace of Olite and the nearby church which all dated back to the middle ages, although somewhat reconstructed because of fires (Napoleon’s fault, supposedly). Our tour finally got started at 5ish and we were leaving Olite by 6:45pm. Keep in mind, however, that according to the schedule, we were supposed to have started the tour at 3:30pm, and left at 4:30pm. IES tends to be very disorganized and slow, but what else can be expected when there is such a large group of students who don’t want to be there. We didn’t want to be there because it was only 3 degrees Celsius outside, snowy/rainy, and windy! The palace was really neat, as was the story behind it, but it was FREEZING, and our female guide didn’t like us because most of the group was being rude, so she didn’t try to be loud, and I didn’t get to hear half of what she said. We drove on from Olite and it was only an hour till Pamplona, the town of 150,000 where we were staying for the duration of the trip. When we got to our hotel, we were assigned roommates; my class was told we would be roommates with whoever we wanted in our Spanish class. But no, they did it alphabetically, so my roommate was a girl named Clark whom I had never met before. She was nice, however. Megan ended up having no roommate because they had her down as Michael Hathaway on the list! I chilled with Megan in the hour before dinner. Dinner was a set menu for everyone in the hotel (3 buses worth of kids) and oh, was there some complaining about what was served, and oh did I have some picky eaters at my table! I mean, dinner wasn’t great, but it wasn’t horrible either. We had rolls, then Spanish tortilla (good but very bland), salad drenched in olive oil (pretty good), “white fish with sauce” (tasteless and very, very white), and then ice-cream (delicious). Girls who either were truly vegetarian, or who just didn’t like fish were served steamed veggies that looked worse than the fish. After dinner, Megan and I hung out with Crissy, Caitlin, and Colleen and we all talked as though we would go out. But, after not doing anything and it becoming 11 at night, I decided to just shower and go to sleep, and it was a great idea! We all snacked and shared stories from the day, as well as from the past few weeks since we hadn’t seen each other in a while. The next morning, after the really, really annoying wake-up call that was not at 7:45, but at 7:35am, I got ready and met Meg for breakfast (which was actually really good). We were back on the bus by 9:15 and leaving by 9:30, 30 minutes behind schedule yet again. We left for the Irache vineyards and monastery and got there after an hour or so, during which time the guide who was with us for the weekend told us all about the history of Navarra and winemaking in northern Spain. The tour guide was amazing!! He made the trip so much fun. He knew everything about Navarra and was hilarious and made jokes that us college students actually found funny. He gave us a tour of the monastery, and then the wine museum, current cellars for wine storage, and warehouse where the wine is bottled and shipped out. Some fun facts about the tour:
Wine started being produced in the area in the 2nd century B.C., introduced by Romans.
The Irache vineyards have the quality of Denominaciones de Pago, which only 6 other estates have and that is the highest quality rating Spain gives.
American oak is the best type of wood barrel to age wine
Spain is known for it’s Rosa wine (pink), but now for it’s red wine as well, since the French brought the right type of grapes to the area.
The Holy Mary inside the monastery’s church is Romanesque, which means she was seen as the “throne” of Jesus, rather than playing a motherly role. This changed in the Baroque time period, when a simple adjustment in her hand placement to where she held the baby meant her role had increased as a mother and therefore a more important part in Jesus’s life. (I found this really interesting) It gave women a more important role in general once this belief change occurred.
The winery has a pilgrim’s fountain, which has been around for years, for the pilgrims passing through on their way to Santiago de Compostela, since the monastery was an important resting point. The fountain has one spout for wine and one for water, to keep the pilgrims’ strength up on their journey. (We all were able to sample the wine from the spout; not bad, I’d say!)
After Irache, we went on to Puente la Reina, a crossroads of pilgrim’s paths, (the name translates to ‘the crossroads of the ways’) with a famous Roman bridge and Church. Here we had a short tour of the church and then the bridge, where our guide said the bridge is the model for the bridge on the back of the 10 euro bill. The bridge was also build as a metaphor for life, with a high point in the top so only half of the bridge can be seen at any time. This symbolizes how no one knows what the future holds. The guide also told us all about the scenes that referred to sex on the archway into the church, and then about the crucifix inside the church. It was a gift given to the town after German pilgrims passed through and were kindly met. The crucifix is German in that the arms of the cross point upward at an angle. The crucifix is also one of the most, emotional, I guess you could say, in the pain expressed by Jesus in it, and the graphicness of the scene. It was really interesting. After our tour, we had two free hours for lunch, which Megan and I spent in a warm café, where we ate our lunches stolen from breakfast and I drank coffee. We then took photos on the bridge and at the river, and played on a swing set near the river. It was great fun. We were back on the bus at 3, though our sponsor didn’t make it back till 3:15pm. Once again, late. I forgive him though, because Caesar is HILARIOUS! He was always saying Venga! Vamos! Come on! Let’s go! And cracking jokes and just making the bus an all-around good time for everyone.
Our next stop was the Castle of Javier (de Francisco, the same Francisco that San Francisco is named after).
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