My eight hour train through the Spanish north country passed by mostly in flashes, brief clips captured on an old film camera. Unfamiliar country roared past as I fell in and out of consciousness.

A small, simple cabin, built by hand from clay and stone, the sand on which it sat. A single wooden door and wooden windows, hanging askew in their warped frames, enduring the vast expanse of frozen hilltops.

 Distant mountain peaks, sloping ever so softly into the hills, and eventually valleys below. Gently they marry with the earth, as if painted by the stroke of a very lazy painter.
Flat, green pastures, iron colored soil, diligently tilled and squared off for seasons more wet than this one.

Many cities made only of ten-ish story apartment buildings, a sore capitalist thumb poking from the masetta. No doubt, erected around factories that had quickly gone under durring the last decade of financal turbulence. They all seemed like ghost towns. No padestrians, one or two parked cars for every hundred dwellings.

The series illustrated a country’s desperate scramble to consume and expand. From huts to agriculture, cities and collapse.

And then there was the Basque country. Sensible homes, and clean streets clashed with abandoned warehouses and graffiti “Independence!” or “Basque Country” scrawled in technicolor handwriting in a language that has no anscestor in Europe, Asia, or Elsewhere.

Nestled away in this confusion of identity is Albuergue de Peregrinos de Irún. A converted appartment building boasting over fifty beds, and two incredibly friendly hospitaleros.

This evening, I made my way into their office and presented my stiff, unsoiled credencial. The one who spoke very broken English flashed a smile up at me as he opened the blank folds, and proceded to stamp the first page with a blue scallop shell. I had a very hard time hiding the fact that something had gotten into my eyes, glassing them over and threatening to spill over my cheeks.

My stench was washed away by their hospitality, and their incredibly hot shower. My belly was filled by a pair of French pilgrims, who had made too much dinner and shared my dispair of finding food on Good Friday. From the back of my pack now dangles a virgin white concha, a scallop shell. It hangs as a reminder that a pilgrim gives thanks, as I intend to, and to pass forth the spirit of this pilgrimage, as others already have to me with food, kindness, and welcome.