villar de mazarife

hello!
it is about 5pm, in the next room, in a bar, there is a spanish soap opera on the tv.low soft voice interupted ever two minutes for rapid fire ads. it´s great. i am staying in the same albergue-bar that i stayed in last time. as i was approaching this village, there were 10 pilgrims ahead of me. i thought, wow, it´s a top bunk for me tonight. but they all went someplace else. 4 of them signed in and then left. i think i am here alone. hmm. it seems fine enough.
i left off somewhere at the beginning of the meseta, didn´t i? here is what it was like, short version. first day- beautiful soft white clouds scattered in a perfectly blue endless sky. butterflies, wildflowers. walked the last half with massimo, who was exhausted. we played what does that cloud look like to you? day 2- hot, cloudless, endless. that´s the day that ended massimo and antonio´s walk in the meseta and made me into a charging, ipod listening walking machine. day 3- cloudy, almost rained in the morning, spent most of the day walking off the road, next to a river. poplar trees, sunshine, a man on a combine gave me candy ( really),lots of little flies and two beautiful churches. day 4- long straight ( maybe roman) road. 16 km without a town, or chair, or tree, or water. i walked the first part alone and then the last with an 18 year old from poland. he is part of my new family.ended that day going further than others in my little group, spent an hour or two alone in rolling hills of barley and wheat. awesome. day 5 took another alternate route to stay off the road. it is described as looking like africa. i don´t know. but again it was 22 km without comforts. what it had was more butterflies ( they are so happy looking, always) and grains and flowers and birds. there were also irrigation ditches with frogs in them. i was trying to think- what did they remind me of? the sound was so familiar, and then it came to me. when you were little did you take pieces of broken balloon and make little balloons out of them and rub them against your teeth to make a certain skeaking rubber sound? my sisters and i did. and those frogs sounded just like that.i was with my sisters again every time i heard those frogs. i love them. that´s pretty much the meseta. i love it. if you think of north or south dakota, or wyoming, i think you can imagine what it is like.
storks have been a big part of my life lately too. i have seen them do two things that i didn´t notice last time. the first is that i think they are fanning there babies or maybe eggs, but they stand on the edge of these enormous nests and fann their enorous wings. i was in burgos the first time i saw that. it was in the hot afternoon and just watching them do that cooled me off. the other cool thing they do is make a loud clacking sound with their beaks. i have no idea what that is for, but they do it all night. if i wake up and hear that sound i have to smile in bed, knowing where that sound is coming from. what are they doing.
ok one more thing and then i´m done. this is about burgos, which was many days ago now, but i forgot to tell you last time. i arrived in burgos on a holiday. the feast day of san juan and pedro. to celebrate there are groups of people dressed in folk costumes bringing flowers to a statue of the blessed virgin set up in front of the cathedral. i think there was a judging too. the streets were packed, really packed. the tourist office told me the festival would end for the afternoon at 2 and then i could go into the cathedral. at 2:15 or so i started to the cathedral, swimming against the tide of all the people leaving the street. once i was in the middle, it didn´t matter which way i was heading, it seemed i was going against the tide. i tried to follow a tiny old nun through because people gave her room, but her wake was too small and she too fast so i got swallowed up again. then i found a mother pushing a stroller, once again people gave her room and i followed right behind and finally got through to the church. i learned an inportant lesson. maybe three.
later that night, when we all had turned off the lights and started to fall asleep, the band started. i´d say about 10 or 10:30pm. the last time i was here, i would have been so irritated, this time i just love how not like home this is. i only wish the music had been a little easier to hear. THEN at 12pm the fireworks started. slowly, people got out of bed and went to the windows to watch. there we were, in the dark, strangers in our underwear, all watching fireworks. not talking, because we were in our underwear.
next time i will tell you of my stay in leon. a pit stop, reinvigorating. i love that city.
mary