Flamenco on Fire

It’s well known that the best cure for jet lag is daylight. So I spent this morning wandering the streets of Pamplona sampling the local attractions.

After walking Evan to his Spanish class (through a lovely park on top of Pamplona’s walls), the queue spilling out of a nearby bakery was just begging to be joined. All I knew about it was that it had a big queue, but they seemed to be locals, not instagrammers, so I joined it. Everyone was buying boxes of a delicious looking pastry, so I decided to join them by buying a couple, without having any idea what it was.

Back at the apartment, after a quick google search, I discovered it was a garrotica, from Pamplona’s most famous bakery, Pastas Beatriz. and not only that, the original home of the bakery was the shopfront in our apartment building! It’s basically puff pastry with a chocolate hazelnut-y inside, and was delicious with my third (jet lag busting) coffee of the morning.

Fortified, it was time for some culture. Pamplona is in the middle of a Flamenco festival, Flamenco on Fire, at the moment. That included a free concert from the magnificent Town Hall windows, with an amazing singer and guitarist. You could really hear the Arabic influence in the style, and the guitarist was just incredible. Around the corner, there was another one from the Hotel Perla, but by that time I was Flamenco’d out, despite the quality.

I was pretty pleased with that as a morning of local colour.

Evan joined me for a fine lunch after he had finished Spanish – we started a little early, at 1.30, when we were the first in the restaurant, I blame the jet lag for me not being fully on Spanish time quite yet.