Monteperdido

Zaragoza is perfectly nice but completely missable unless you´re reeaaallly into Goya or want to see all of Spain. I´m glad I came, though. Hanging out with Angel and Gustavo made me feel like kind of an honorary Spanish person for a few days, even if they did keep calling me gringa.

On the morning of my last day in Zaragoza, Gustavo and I did some limited sightseeing, limited because it was a Monday and almost everything was closed. Zaragoza has a former Muslim palace and we went to that; it was interesting but hard to get excited about after seeing the Alhambra in Granada. And one of the banks here has a very small collection of Goya paintings and we saw that. In the afternoon, I sat on the couch and watched TV--can´t remember the last time I did that. Passed out for a while from a migraine (maybe too much TV is that bad for me) and Angel woke me up for dinner. With Gustavo, the still-shirtless neighbor, shirtless neighbor´s girlfriend, and their drag queen friend. He wasn´t actually dressed in drag, but I´m pretty sure he dresses in drag. Maybe I overuse this comparison, but he really did belong in an Almodóvar film. I couldn´t understand most of what he said because my knowledge of Spanish profanity is embarrassingly lacking. Angel wasn´t wearing pants.

Anyway. Today I left Angel and Gustavo and their crazy friends to go to Parque Nacional de Ordesa in the Aragonian Pyrenees. It´s supposed to be the nicest part of the Pyrenees. After a five-hour hike today, I believe it. There are waterfalls everywhere, and these bright yellow flowers, and rock that looks all different colors when the sun hits it. The hike I did started out foresty; for a while the tree coverage was so thick you could barely see the sky. In the middle it opened up and got grassy, following a stream for a while, and the end was high enough up that you could see a little bit of snow left at the tops of some of the mountains and there was a huge waterfall. And there was this little herd of cow-like animals with fuzzy stuffed animal ears. (They were wearing bells, so they weren´t exactly part of the natural scenery, but whatever. I liked them.)

I´m a little bit stressed that my shoes don´t fit quite right, because these are the ones I´m planning to wear on the Camino, but I always stress about shoes. I didn´t get blisters, anyway.