Day 6: Italian Cuisine in Spain (Puente La Reina to Estella)

The Spanish bloody love their Fiestas, at 6 this morning, setting out bleary eyed from my albergue and chewing contentedly on some cold marmalade on toast, there were hundreds of them still littering the street and clambering into coaches back to Estella and Pamplona! I was wildly impressed with their fortitude!

Very early on in today's walk I happened upon a baby faced Arabian named Khalid. Despite looking 25 he's actually 39 and has walked the Camino 4 times before! We also walked with 2 Italians (Paolo and Ameria) who could speak quite good English and joined in heartily with conversations and Khalid's appalling singing. It's been really good having a conversation and a laugh and a joke today, it made the 22kms fall away much more quickly.

The walk today was surprisingly easy and I'm hoping that my body is coming to terms with the butchery that it's going to have to endure as the days roll by. On the walk we began taking the mick out of Ameria for saying she slept with an obese Irish man that we saw on our way; obviously she just meant shared an albergue with him but she had an absolute tuning from everyone over it. This lead Paolo to leap into a robust explanation of the best places he's been for sex - I couldn't believe how open to a discussion about the topic everyone was. My British patrimony ruffled furiously but I resigned myself to ask whether he had been to Mykonos, as that's where I was thinking of taking Ben for his stag. He said that the chance of having sex there was 70%. 70%! He broken it down into a percentage!? Did he have an excel spread sheet at home or something? Needless to say, despite the price, Mykonos it is for Ben's stag!

The bells of Estrella's beautiful cathedral chimed 12 o'clock as we trudged along the cobbled street to our albergue. Rather than the traditional yellow arrows to guide you along the Camino there are bronze scallop shells stuck to the floor at regular intervals. The scallop shell is the symbol of the Camino as Pilgrims used to bring the humble mollusc shell back in order to prove that they had made it to the coast and Santiago. I can only hope that someone had the foresight to set up a scallop shell shop halfway for Pilgrims that weren't enjoyong and wanted to throw in the towel but save face when they got home.

Desperate for a shower, I was forced to go to the supermarket with my three companions to help select food for our meal tonight which we were all chipping in for. The Italians took this business extremely seriously and spent what felt like a bloody age deliberating over certain fish and spices; despite increasing exasperation I was really looking forward to the meal.

Back at the hostel, and after an lengthy nap whilst sunbathing, I got talking to a lot of the people at the hostel. I am always surprised and a little ashamed of how well people speak English and how poor a grasp I have of their languages. Lots of the people had studied abroad (in places like America and Britain) and were quite chatty although most of the Spanish and Italians keeps resiliently quiet with stern expression across their dark features.

At around 9, Paolo and Amaria cooked up and served a banquet of swordfish, salsa, bruschetta and salad: it tasted bloody fantastic, which is great as I feel they were both stressing about representing their country's cuisine. I know I would have been wildly nervous whilst serving up a steaming bowl of cawl and lightly sugared bakestones! Also, the morose Italians made a meal adjacent to ours so that the table looked something like a medieval banquet, everything from both groups was being passed around and after a bottle of red wine you couldn't shut the sods up! I was being hugged, having my back clapped, I couldn't wait for them to go back to being miserable!