Things I’m eating here that I would never eat at home: bread, lots of it; French fries, come with most meals; potato chips, for the salt; orange juice, for a fast infusion of pure sugar, always fresh-squeezed here (“xumo“); rice, a couple of times; beer, when I arrive tired and hot in the afternoon and there is a local specialty.

You simply can’t be a picky eater here. Pilgrims need to eat what they can get, when they can get it.

As I’ve written before, there is no “lunch” or “dinner” per se in Spain. There is a late afternoon meal and a late evening meal, both called la comida (“food”). This makes lining up pilgrim time with Spanish time a challenge.

I read somewhere that Spanish people actually eat at normal times, or at least normal European times. But everything shifted later when Franco put all of Spain into Central European Time, like France and Germany, in order to be more modern.

It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but Spain is just about as culturally distant from the US as you can get in Europe.

I spent the morning in the iconic Burgos Cathedral. Romanesque foundations with Gothic and Baroque augmentations.

The ticket agent pointed me to a small QR code on a poster in the lobby to download the guide. I couldn’t get it to download, and had given up when I saw another peregrino listening to the English version. You have to stand outside, she said, to get the cellular signal. Problem solved.

I’ve been in a lot of cathedrals, it this one is particularly ornate. Each of the 18 chapels is unique and has its own story.

Local hero El Cid (“el theeth” in Spain) is buried in the transept. Like many historical figures here, he is celebrated for having run out the Moors (Muslims) in the 11th century.

Stopped at the Farmacia to buy toothpaste. I couldn’t find it. I had the foresight to look the word up in advance, and asked the pharmacist for “pasta dental.” There was exactly one brand in the entire store, but fortunately I only needed one tube. I remember, when living in Paris in 1989, going out to buy toothpaste (“pâté dentifrice”) comprised a major outing of the day. I can imagine a European standing in the aisle of any US grocery store and marveling at the 75 different kinds of toothpaste.

In the afternoon I went to the Museum of Human Evolution. It was closed for siesta, of course (the website was wrong), so I went back later.

It is a sleek, modern museum inspired by the discovery in 1977 of 800,000-year-old pre-hominid bones in nearby Altapuerta. They are the oldest remains of their kind ever found in Europe, and reset the thinking of when man first migrated to Europe.

In addition to various bone fragments and skeletal models of early man, the museum had a full-scale model of Darwin’s ship, The Beagle, and a number of holographic displays.

It’s perhaps ironic that such a prominent museum of evolution is located in such a religiously conservative part of the world. There is even a life-sized sculpture of a nude pre-hominid family out front.

Last night for dinner, I ordered the pilgrim’s menu (pre-fixe) at a restaurant. It came with an entire bottle of wine. This is typical here, but I can’t imagine how I would have felt this morning if I had finished an entire bottle of wine with dinner.

Tonight’s dinner was a traditional Castillano garlic soup. Very good, and not too garlicky!