Pamplona

Hello, everyone.
We spent two nights in Pamplona. Along with eating the Sepia a Basque (Squid with garlic/parsley sauce) we went to two museums, took a picture of the place the future Saint Ignatius of Loyola was wounded in battle, and found the camino supply shop Caminoteca. Where we bought me a pink fleece top so I could stop freezing to death. Caminoteca is a sweet little hiking supply shop--a selection of souvenirs, of course, some clothes for hiking in, and various books about the Camino. It's just down from the Cathedral and is well worth the stop if you, like us, are needing to pick up a couple of things.
Before the other pictures of the city, my sweetie took this of my feet:

This was all from the two days walking in soaking wet boots. They began to heal with the day of "rest" and no-boots in Pamplona. We wore our shower sandals all over the city. We also learned the value of taking Bufferin at bedtime to bring down swelling.

Pamplona has a lot of neat things to look at. We saw a cool sculpture of the bulls running:

You can also see in the background that many of the apartments have potted plants on their balconies. The northern Spanish towns and cities were full of lovely flowers, and often people who had only an apartment balcony cultivated beautiful pots of flowers there.
The place where, so to speak, grace struck Ignatius of Loyola:

Grace in the form of a cannonball, that is.
The Museum of Navarra had beautiful art on display, including beautiful floor mosaics, wall frescoes that used similar motifs as the floor mosaics from later years, statues of saints, and various altar treasures.
The Cathedral and the Church of St. Nicholas are both beautiful.
The Cathedral Museum had a very good exhibit on the history of Western culture. I learned that the Poema de mi Cid was written approximately at the same time as Beowulf. They also had archeological excavations that had been done there, which had uncovered a Roman village, now displayed with a walkway and some videos.
Many of the artworks from various village churches have been gathered into the museums in Pamplona, so you can see, for example, a great assortment of statues of the Blessed Mother all together and compare the different ways she is portrayed. Even in the Middle Ages, not everything was alike. Different villages had statues to her under different titles, and the anonymous sculptors certainly had different ideas of her face and the Holy Child, besides the customary clothing that is shown with the various titles (like Our Lady of Le Puy.)

Statues of the Blessed Mother, usually holding the Christ Child, from many churches in Navarra

Detail from a retablo showing thte Blessed Mother and many saints

Another retablo

The second night we stayed in Pamplona was Thursday night. This was the evening that we discovered the work week ends on Thursday, at least in Pamplona. All the prices at the bars and restaurants changed. Many more people were out and about for the evening--and the place we stayed was on the most "happening" street in the city! The last noisy drunks didn't go stumbling home until 5 am, kicking empty bottles as they went.
My sweetie's watch sounded at 5:30 am and we got up to begin walking again, in our newly-dry shoes.
We had about 716 kilometers more walking to reach Santiago.