Pamplona: where it all began

History is something that finds you rather than you finding it, or at least that is how it feels. I sort of stumbled upon the discipline and hadn't realised I had decided upon it until I was half way through. I had had some inkling of historical interest during high school when I whimsically thought I could study both chemistry and history as a joint degree somewhere.  Somehow I ended up applying to study economics instead and I applied only to one university reducing my options considerably. In reality,  this story didn't start in Pamplona but on the road, both literal and physical, that lead to my living in that northern Spanish town. 

After a summer spent in Spain with one of my brothers I no longer wanted to study in Central America. The freedom of being halfway across the world was too much of an attraction. That is how, following my brothers advice, I played it safe and applied to study at the Universidad de Navarra. A small private, catholic university in the north of Spain. Why I choose economics is beyond me. I guess I needed to choose something didn't see the combination of chemistry and history anywhere and went for the wild card. What I hadn't taken into account was the hidden requirements for studying in Spain. The many intertwined and little known bureaucratic hops that need to be surpassed. Getting the visa and taking the transatlantic flight there was the simplest thing to do, no one had prepared me for the hidden potholes of the Spanish state examination that is part of the university entrance requirements. Having never studied full-time in Spanish nor learnt to write in white bloc paper I was navigating blind. In the space of two months I had to prepared a two day exam that my contemporaries had spent the better part of the preceding year studying for. Not only was the material relatively new but the writing style expected of me, from maintaining imaginary spaces between the lines and page edges on white sheets of paper to having perfect Spanish grammar, was far from anything I was used to. Unsurprisingly I barely scraped through. But scrape through I did and thus I was on my way to Pamplona.

Living in the clouds most of the time means making a mess of things regularly. In this way I had an admissions letter but had never bother to actually register so I arrived not knowing where I was meant to go on my first day. My natural instinct was to go talk to the professor that had spoken at our orientation. What hadn't registered at orientation was that he was the vice-dean or something bigwig along those lines. Fortunately, his secretary and he seemed totally relaxed about a confused student showing up at his doorstep not quite knowing why she didn't have a schedule. After going around a few offices I did register and get that schedule and found myself sitting in my first calculus class. After two weeks of macro, micro, accounting and other numerically inclined classes I was pretty sure I had made a mistake. I called me brother. He convinced me to give it a bit more time. A semester went by and I was still sure economics was not for me. Really a semester had been too long and if anyone had known how I had chosen the subject they would have agreed at the two week mark that I was going down the wrong path. By the second semester I had received permission from the faculty to choose an array of classes, from law to sociology passing through literature and history, to see what it was I actually liked. Chemistry didn't have a chance. I had to study one year of physics for that. That was simply not going to happen. History and law came out the winners. Again I called me brother who made it clear to me that if I chose law I had to move back to Central America. As far as I was concerned that decided it. History became my subject. I wanted to teach so it made sense, that is what I told all those puzzled at my study patterns.