Day 3: Pamplona (My Excitement Also Rises)

a town in the fog the second morning hiking

along the road, as the sun was breaking

I have wanted to visit Pamplona since reading The Sun Also Rises when I was in high school. It was one of those books that really stuck with me, and subsequent readings have confirmed why I appreciate it. It is a fairly disturbing novel, in many ways, but also speaks of many things we all must struggle with.

In visiting Pamplona today, I would love to visit the Ernest Hemingway statue outside the plaza de Toros, find a nearby café to enjoy some vino and tapas, and people watch.

Hemmingway once said "Pamplona is no place to bring your wife." Uh oh.... Here are his reasons:

The odds are all in favor of her getting ill, hurt or wounded or at least jostled and wine squirted all over her, or of losing her; maybe all three. It's a man's fiesta and women at it make trouble, never intentionally of course, but they nearly always make or have trouble. I wrote a book on this once. Of course if she can talk Spanish so she knows she is being joked with and not insulted, if she can drink wine all day and all night and dance with any group of strangers who invite her, if she does not mind things being spilled on her, if she adores continual noise and music and loves fireworks, especially those that fall close to her or burn her clothes, if she thinks it is sound and logical to see how close you can come to being killed by bulls for fun and for free, if she doesn't catch cold when she is rained on and appreciates dust, likes disorder and irregular meals and never needs to sleep and still keeps clean and neat without running water; then bring her. You'll probably lose her to a better man than you.