Rest day in Burgos. Sunday 9/22

Woke up this morning at 5:30 am - just because I have the time to sleep in doesn’t mean I will. Out the door for an overpriced 6€ breakfast at my hotel but really all I needed was coffee. I made it to the cathedral for 9 am mass. I find it really difficult to get into the program when all of it is in a different language. I have said the Lord’s Prayer for 65 years but do you think I can remember the words when everyone else is saying it in Spanish?

After church I took a taxi to the Centro de Salud where I was hoping to talk a doctor into an injection of cortisone in my knee. The first obstacle I encountered was the inhospitable clerk at the reception desk. She could see I was not a citizen so she babbled something in Spanish and pointed to a sign in Spanish all of which made no sense to me. Seeing that she was getting nowhere with me (although I knew it had something to do with payment), she enlisted the help of an English speaking nurse named David. I did in fact finally get to see a doctor, Melissa, but not before I became the brunt of a joke between the clerk and another patient. Not sure what they said about me but I know it wasn’t nice 😢. In any event Dr. Melissa checked me out and said I didn’t need any shot and even if I did they don’t give them in the knee only in the butt??? So I left feeling confused and resigned to just dealing with the pain.

Visited the Cathedral in Burgos this afternoon. It is an amazing piece of art and a ridiculous expenditure of money IMHO. To think that the people who built this place were just trying to buy their way into heaven is amazing. On the other hand look at the awesome art they left us.

The place reminded me a bit of Notre Dame from the outside with all of the saints and important holy people lined up over the doorways and huge spires but inside it was like a city of smaller churches each with its own overly resplendent altar, dome, sculpture and paintings. I gotta say, it was dumbfounding.

By the way, bulls are big around here. I saw a few of them depicted in the artwork in the church and there was even a bronze one located at the entrance to the eating/drinking area of the old town:

One more sleep tonight then onto the meseta. 190 miles under my belt. 310 left!