Someone warned me to be careful in Spain, believing that everyone doing the pilgrimmage must have something wrong with them. I haven't encountered too many crazy people, but I have come across a couple of characters.

I have a huge peregrina crush on Ingrid, a Dutch woman who works in advertising. She speaks five languages, hitchhikes and says 'shit' a lot. She's basically every fiery tempered hot tomboy in every German/Eastern European movie ever. I'm pretty sure that when she's not on a pilgrimmage, she'd dress a lot like Sarah Harmer (down to the shoes), but I totally want to be her best friend anyway. The only thing stopping me from bringing her back to Kingston to have sleepovers with me and Meg is the fact that she would embarass us by being so much cooler. (Sarah shoes notwithstanding.)

Duval is a French doctor I met yesterday whom I assumed must have gotten lost when his car ran out of gas in the countryside, but he's a pilgrim just like the rest of us. Just like the rest of us, except he's walking the pilgrimmage in a shirt and tie. (He's even wearing cufflinks. Seriously.) I'm completely in love with him because after we'd spoken for a few minutes in French, I told him I was Canadian and he said that he'd thought he detected "un peut d'un accent." This is such a colossal understatement that I was tempted to wash his feet with my hair.

Miladen is a young man (young man? it would seem that being old is contagious, and that I'm catching it on the Camino) from Chile whom I walked with for most of the morning, in an informal ESL lesson. He has spent the last three years studying to be a Catholic priest, but has decided against it, and now is walking the Camino "trying to find anything," in his words. He asked me if I like Beyonce, the song from Titanic, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and Cher. I have my own theories about why he abandonned the priesthood.