Picante Pimiento Peligrosa

How many modes of transportation does it take to get our hot sweatty selves to la playa (the beach)? After the work out of our lives all we wanted was to rest our blistered feet and bruised backs in the salty mediteranian and how hard is that right? Danise and I finished el Camino de Santiago in Pamplona, just west of the Costa Brava where a cute little studio apartment was beconing our arival. Because of the historical rift between Basque country and the rest of Spain, Renfe trains and Alsa bus companies make it ridiculously difficult to get places. What should have been a few hours drive due East, ended up being a six hour bus ride down to Barcelona that got us in at approximately midnight, a taxi ride complete with our driver literally running up and down a small calle off la Ramblas (main drag in Barcelona) to find us a hostal (which is a hot mess of a story) and in the morning, a metro ride to the train station, a two hour train to Llanca, a very small town on the Costa Brava, and another short bus ride to Port de la Selva, home sweet luscious home.
Quickly, the Barcelona hostal called Serenity, was a quick over nighter for us. We contemplated buming around town with the locals until the bus station opened at 6 a.m. thinking, ´hey, it´s Spain, we have shit to do and nows about time everyone parties anyway right?´ But one thing to note about el Camino de Santiago is that the camino owns your legs, your backpack owns your body, and you personally are responsible for your feet which at midnight on Sunday in lovely happenin Barcelona, were not pointed towards la Fiesta, but la Bedtime. We ducked into a beautiful apartment building where two hostals hid on floors 2 and 3. Inbetween the floors were aunties in their large printed ill-fitting shmatas bantering about the chicas in with the big backpacks and what they should do with them. These women we realized, were residents of this apartment building, neighbors to the hip urban youth and now, these two hostals. We walked up and down the flights ringing buzzers while the aunties called cell phones to track down the woman who owned Serenity. We stretched our ears to understand that these wacked out godsends were making a case for us, calling us poor little girls etc. etc. It worked, we got ourselves a room in a gorgeous very large and generous hostal, bathed our sweaty, public transport germ infested exhausted and corn nut stuffed selves and slept for...four or five hours. I swear to god I am dreaming about cornnuts and I see them in every convienent store. If I never see another corn nut, it will be too soon.

Port de la Selva is a small town with some fisherman and a ridiculously small beach shared with a play ground. We are staying in the studio of family friends who have generously allowed us to crash with them throughout our trip. The studio is a one room (fold out couch, bathroom, kitchen bar, etc.) with a patio balcony that leads out onto another street. It has everything we could want from a washing machine to a freezer to stick our heads in. Finally, we could cook for ourselves. It was overwhelming to realize that we had eaten out three meals and then some a day, every day for over two weeks! We relished picking out our goods in the local grocery store and took our sweet time assembling the salad we were dreaming about on the camino. In case anyone is hungry, we strongly suggest the following salad.

Lettuce (optional)
Olives
Chickpeas
Roasted Peppers
Tuna or Chicken
Cucumber
Tomatoes
Avocado
Blue Cheese
Par Boiled Potatoes
Hard Boilled Egg
White Onion
Dressin: Light white/red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper and oregano

Don´t forget the Calimocho! Danise and I have also taken on a rather silly yet very important spiritual practice before we eat and really anytime we feel like thanking her higher being. We were getting sick of praying to Jesus especially when we literally could see him all over Spain, plus we haven´t really connected to Jesus the way most people do, so, in our Camino delerium (seriously folks, lay off the corn nuts, muslie and carrots-they´re practically haluciogyns) we created a deity to channel. Her name is Picante Pimiento Peligrosa which translated into english roughly means, Spicy Dangerous Pepper. Could this be because we couldn´t get the theme song to 1990s One Saturday Morning cartoon PepperAnn our of our collective heads? Maybs, but as you might have guessed, I like illiteration and as always, bring out the sass. How could Pimiento not share the spice we have for life and of course, she is dangerous because she´s gota have a life. Poor Pimiento (we call her Pimiento for short) gets blamed for every misshap (for example, Danise and I can´t catch a break with timing the shopping...stores are always closed when we go out!) but we do also thank her for anything a normal person would thank God for. She is our special Godess. The past few nights before we Salud (clink glasses in cheers) our Calimochos and dig into our goodness we do the Pimiento. Similar to the locomotion, the hustle, the slide and the superman (scratch that...Soulja Boy is sooo over) we groove to our goddess to whatever music is playing and that is our ritual call of thanks. Dam that Pimiento, she is one firey lady.

Yesterday Danise and excidedly woke to get ourselves to the beach. Well that may be overdoing it, we slept in, had a yummy breakfast and then walked the two small streets to the beach and spread out. Then it started to sprinkle...but it was hot. So we sucked it up and prayed to Pimiento. And then it kinda started to rain. So we packed up, went home, made about 15 cups of red tea, and finished another round of books in bed and on the porch under a canopy. We love love love to relax, but did have a nice conversation about the complexities of relaxing. Per my previous entry on life, it can be truley difficuilt to convince oneself that sitting and doing nothing is actually, being productive. Are we taking advantage of Spain? We nearly broke the bank getting ourselves here and trucking around the country...what the F are we doing inside all day? We need to get out there and experience experience go go go! Eh, but it doesn´t really work like that. We are still in Spain, we are still living by Pimiento´s climate change, we are pretty much acting like the locals, we´re having fun, we´re relaxed, we´re happy... we´re not turning a profit but our minds are active and we´re producing endorphins (we´re into stretching) and triptophan and knowledge (well I was at least. I was reading Eat, Pray, Love...Danise was into The Reader...not sure really how many smarts she gained from that but...we don´t judge under the sun of Pimiento.) and living life!

Today we took a day trip to Gerona, a very pretty Gothic town like Toledo but larger, much more open, bright, and historical. Gerona is actually one of the biggest historical venues in Spain as it was under seige more than any other territory in Spain´s history! And it´s obvious too. The cathedral was wonderful and our audio guides informed us that it under a new ruler, was reconstructed in the 1600s...which gives you an idea of how ridiculously ancient this place was. The whole town is cobblestone with many hills and curvy streets. We enjoyed a nice outdoor menu del dia of parma ham and melon, and pallea mixta. We trolled the local pottery shops and got suckered into buying some Cassis because after the owner of the store gave us a sample, we really couldn´t say no. Crack open the Champagne and we´ll do Kir Royals! We also visited el Museo de Arte which had everything from tapestries to tiles and pottery galore! There is a tall wall that boarders the old town which we spent most of our time in, and at certain points there are stairs that lead up to look out towers and you can walk along the tops of the walls. It sounds complicated but really, it´s like the hidden passages that aren´t so secret. My guess is that they were built to try and limit the ammount of times they were targeted at war...and they so lost that game. But the walls are pretty and they lead around to different back gardens that were glorious. It was getting quite hot and we were thankful to catch a train (lie...we actually ran for the train, missed it, and tooled around the station for an hour before getting the next one) and get out of the near 100 degree heat. As soon as we get back to Port de la Selva, we are diving into that Mediteranian and jiving to our soul sister Pimiento´s song of the day!

Much love,
MK