I'm back

Go here.

For real, this time

I keep crossing things out and starting over and flaking out over what I want to say. But it's really not complicated, and by now you either like my writing or you've stopped reading so who cares if I don't go out with a huge bang of hilariousness.

I'm back in New York, and not running away to the Basque (or any other) Country until at least next year. If I have updates (fingers crossed that someone somewhere will want to publish something from me) I'll post them here. Thanks for reading!

Human grocery store

To most of the world Guernica is a Picasso painting or a place that was bombed during the Spanish civil war -- or else something they've never heard of. (The painting was only sort of a result of the bombing: The Spanish Republican government had commissioned it and Picasso had started making sketches before the bombing actually happened. And, the commission was originally offered to a Basque artist, Aurelio Arteta, but he turned it down to be with his family in exile in Mexico.) But to the Basques, Guernica (Gernika, in Basque) is home to their laws, The Fueros, which are about as important to them as their language is. And that's pretty damn important.

Historically the Basques made laws and decisions and agreements under an oak tree in Guernica. I don't know how often things happened literally under the tree -- I imagine more got done in the round fancy meeting room next to the tree -- but a tree is a much better symbol than a conference room. It wasn't that the Basques' Fueros were so different from the laws of whoever most wanted to take over the Basque country at any particular time, but they were their laws and not someone else's. So anyway, the Germans and Italians were helping the Fascists/rebels/Franco's side during the civil war and they bombed the hell out of Guernica. But they didn't hit the tree, and it went on to die a natural death in 2004. (It hasn't always been the same tree -- they don't live forever -- but it's always been a descendant of the original tree.)

There wasn't a lot to do in Guernica today because the museums were closed, but it was market day. The bombing happened on market day, anyway (easier to kill more people if they're all shopping in the same place), so that felt kind of historical. And it also meant lots of free samples of artisanal cheese.

To be honest, I don't love Guernica the painting as much as I'm probably supposed to. But still, if I ever come to rule the world, I'm getting it the hell out of Madrid and moving it to Guernika. (Unless the Basques would rather have it somewhere else.)

There will be corn

The Basque country is not amenable to large-scale farming; it's too hilly. So, the Basques fished. Once you have a decent boat (the Basques were good at building boats), the limiting reagent in fishing is good food preservation -- you can only fish as long/as far as your food supply doesn't rot. The Vikings preserved fish by drying it -- it works, but Viking-style dried fish is pretty terrible. The Basques figured out that if you salt it first, you can save your fish and eat it, too. Bacalao (salt cod) is on basically every menu here. I don't love fish, but the Basques have learned to do good things with it.

On their long cod-fueled fishing trips, the Basques may or may not have made it to the New World before Christopher Columbus did. ("Oh, everyone knows we were there first," a Basque told me. "We just don't make a big deal about it. Columbus can have the holiday.") They had the boats to get there, and they fished in that general direction, and if they had discovered a whole new world they probably wouldn't have told anyone because apparently fishermen don't talk about stuff like that. Anyway, pre-1492 or not, the Basques did make it to America, and they brought back food. Like hot peppers -- except that when you grow hot peppers in this part of the world they don't turn out hot. Still, the little tiny bit of spice that they do have is spicier than anything you're likely to find in Spain. And while canned corn can be found in ensaladas mixtas (ew) all over Spain, only the Basques do anything good with corn. They make these things called talos that are basically fried corn cakes filled with things like cheese or chorizo. They're good. The first time I tried one I made the mistake of asking whether talos are Basque or Mexican, and I got something like a Basque look of death in response. Oops.

And, in case you're somehow still not sold on my claims of Basque greatness, the Basques were largely responsible for bringing chocolate to Europe.

PS. Can we replace Columbus Day with Basque Day, pleeeeaaaasssse?? We could wear scarves and berets and drink in the streets and it would be so much fun and I bet it would make the Native Americans a little happier. Plus, watching TV coverage of the Bilbao fiestas reminded me that sometimes during Basque parades people carry sticks with sponge-y things attached and use them to hit little kids. God, I love it here.

When the hell did I start liking the middle of nowhere?

Part of me feels super lame for not going back to Bilbao for the fiesta. The day after I left for France Bilbao started eight days of fiesta, and I'm missing all of them. I meant to get back this week, but I just didn't and then all I wanted to do this weekend was be antisocial in the middle of nowhere and look at the mountains for a few days. So that's what I'm doing.

I'm staying in this Basque farm-type house in a place called Axpe, which Google maps thinks is called San Juan. In Axpe there is my little hotel (they call it a casa rural -- when you want to be antisocial and look at the mountains, a casa rural is pretty much perfect) and its attached restaurant, a church, a pelota* court, and maybe about six houses. The nearest bar is two pueblos away and I closed it down at about 3pm today. And then I walked around and looked at the mountains. And made friends with some horses and a puppy. In addition to the pine and other kinds of trees you'd expect to find in the mountains, there are a few palm trees here. And there are some little gecko-y lizards running around. And even the cows here are pretty; they look clean and soft like stuffed animals. And even with all these farm animals, it doesn't smell like poop at all here. This may be as close as I get to a mom who thinks her kid's shit doesn't stink.



*Pelota is a traditional Basque sport. The players hit a ball into a wall with their bare hands; the ball is hard like a baseball. Other traditional Basque sports involve chopping up tree trunks (tronco is another good example of a word that sounds like Spanglish but is a real Spanish word) and picking up various super-heavy objects and sometimes throwing them. Brutos.

Flying in on a DC-10 tonight

Every time I've ever talked to anyone with a Spanish passport about Jose Aznar (the prime minister of Spain before Zapatero), they go on about how dumb he is. Not quite as dumb as Bush, they say, but pretty damn dumb. They were kind of pals, he and George W; Aznar sent troops to Iraq in 2002. Then in 2004 Islmists bombed a bunch of trains in Madrid, Aznar blamed ETA, and Zapatero, a socialist, was voted the new prime minister a few days later. (For the record, Aznar's party, the Partido Popular (PP), was also Franco's party.)

Back in the 1980's, the then-in-power socialists had the bright idea to send convicted ETA members to prisons in places like the Canary Islands or Andalucia rather than here in the Basque country. (I've heard people blame that policy on Aznar, but it predates him.) The idea was to keep the ETA members isolated from each other so that they couldn't plot anything, but it also had the effect of making it difficult or impossible for their families to visit. Some Basques have been imprisoned in the Canary Islands, over 2000km away, for over twenty years now. Other Spanish criminals go to prisons close to home. As far as I can tell, most Basques are a lot more angry about that specific issue than they are about independence/autonomy/lack thereof in general. The poster in the photo says 'Basque prisoners and refugees HOME' (eta means and in Basque) and the arrows point to a map of the Basque country (the whole thing, including Navarra and the French Basque country) which, incidentally, is shaped kind of like a heart. And that poster is everywhere -- almost as prevalent as the Basque flag in some places.

There's talk right now of ETA's permanently disbanding. I don't have a good enough sense of things to know whether or not that means much -- it seems to me like ETA is always threatening to disband or call a cease-fire, but it never lasts. I've heard a few people here say they don't believe ETA will go away completely until all the Basque prisoners are back in the Basque country. Which probably means the government will dig in its heels in order to not look like they're negotiating with terrorists. The current prime minster's been burned once already, when he started peace talks with ETA and then they set off a bomb that killed two people at the Madrid airport. There are elections coming up in November, but they will almost certainly put the Partido Popular back in power, and the PP isn't likely to do the Basques any favors. And so it all continues.

On a somewhat lighter note, ETA was originally going to be named ATA. (ETA is an acronym for Basques and Freedom in Basque, and ATA was an acronym for, um, something else. I forget what.) But then someone realized that in one of the Basque dialects, ata means duck. And you can't have a freedom fighting/terrorist organization called duck, now, can you?

Sheila has a cat

They say that Vitoria is one of the nicest 'Spanish' cities to live in. In the United States they say things like that about places like Omaha and cities in Wisconsin that I've never heard of, so I was sort of bracing myself. But it's not boring or sterile here, it just has lots of parks and bike lanes. There are some parts where the houses look an awful lot like castles, but the old part of town still smells like hash and has Basque graffiti everywhere. Today as I loitered around trying to steal wireless, a man in a tank top had a heated discussion with a woman in a long leopard-print robe. And there were some little kids running through the streets speaking Basque. And in the art museum is this painting of a cat on a couch that for some reason I'm still thinking about 12 hours later -- it made me want to paint my walls red and smoke cigarettes and have affairs. (To be fair, though, I guess I mostly always want to smoke cigarettes and have affairs.) I don't know that I can tell good art from bad, but some things definitely speak to me. Anyway, don't come to Vitoria because it's the capital of Pais Vasco -- the capital building is super boring, and very fenced-in -- but do come for the parks and the plazas and the character and the cat. The art museum is even free.

Aside from bocadillos, though, I haven't had great food luck here. I respect that southern Europeans mostly take the month of August off (even if the markets don't). I covet their Augusts. I've got nothing to complain about this particular August, but it does make me sad that the restaurants I want to go to are ALWAYS FUCKING CLOSED. The Basque country is basically culinary heaven, but heaven has mostly gone on vacation. So tonight I took my whiny self out for Chinese food -- that'll teach those world-renowned Basque chefs to take time off. It was greasy, and almost spicy, and cheap. The end.