Dedicated to Gabe not Phong

I guess you've probably all stopped reading by now, since I stopped writing. But wait! Come back! I'm quitting my job and going back to the Basque country. And then, I'm going to try to make some kind of income from my writing. So you must keep reading.

In the meantime, here are some only-barely-organized photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/61797406@N04/sets/.

Had to run away high

Is there such a thing as a food hangover? I woke up very early and still very full from last night, feeling not hung over but otherwise horrible. Walked to the bus station in the rain (whine), and twelve hours and some screaming kids later, was back in New York. One of the nice things about ground travel is how un-jarring it (usually) is. Wherever you're going, you ease into it.

Taking the subway 'home' from the airport, I sat across from a homeless-looking guy passed out directly under an ad for some kind of anti-bed bug sheets.

Yay, real world.

Venga, hasta luego

So. This is it. By the time I get around to posting this, I'll probably be back in New York. I've done a pretty good job of not thinking about going back, so I'm not moping around all pouty or anything. (It's not like New York is a bad place to be, and I do miss my friends. But the thought of rejoining the real world is not appealing.) In order to not think about going back, though, I think I've managed to spend most of today not thinking about anything: I have nothing to say. Talk about going out without a bang...

...

Ok, here goes. I'm having my last dinner at the kind of restaurant that food people get excited about. This place has a different tasting menu every day and it's all allegedly made only from things bought this morning at the market across the river. Because it's Bilbao, it's a fairly good deal for a fancy dinner; it would be a really good deal if the US dollar were worth anything. (Although no one here has a job, so I know I shouldn't whine too much.) The food is good and fresh and interesting and all that; halfway through the tasting menu I've really liked all but one plate, which was too fishy. (But I'm super picky about fishiness.) I'll probably finish the bottle of vinho verde (I already forget how they say it in Spanish -- vino verdejo, I think) that I ordered because bottles are the only option here and because seafood plus red wine makes my mouth taste like a battery -- partly because I'm paying for it, but mostly because months of drinking east European beer 500ml at a time has noticeably upped my alcohol tolerance. That will right itself once I get back to some kind of a normal life. Anyway, what I really like about this restaurant, beyond anything in particular that I've eaten, is that it's sort of a nice little summary (microcosm is I guess what I mean to say here, but it sounds pretentious) of everything I like about Bilbao. The Basque country in general is always a fiesta and the people are hot and sidra and berets and blah blah blah. (Spanish people sound cute and hilarious when they say blah blah blah.) Bilbao in particular is arty and it has great food and some nice architecture and big hills slash little mountains in the distance. But it's also industrial and, as much as I've been mocking my roommate for freaking out about the neighborhood where my Spanish class is, there is actual grit here. So anyway, the restaurant is right on the river and lights shine on the water and it's very pretty. But it's also in a pretty grungy neighborhood that smells of urine and hash and is covered in Basque nationalist graffiti and clothes hanging out to dry. On the walkway right next to the river are some bags of trash that unleashed dogs sometimes stop to pee on. And the building itself has old exposed stone walls and some beams and pillars running through it, which they neither accentuate nor try to cover up. It's basically a lot of good, but with enough crap around to keep things interesting and make you appreciate the good even more. And, on that note, I'm going to take my head full of vinho verde and wander home and bask in a few more Basque hours.

Thanks for reading. :)

The streets are clean and nobody died

...the title was a headline on the news today about Pamplona post-San Fermin (aka the running of the bulls).

Anyway. My landlord/roommate is that kind of woman who might happily take over my life if I let her. Nothing specific about me, she's just one of those helpful/nosy/pushy women who talks a lot and likes to make plans and organize things. I happened to mention that I might prefer a private tutor to my group Spanish classes; then I went out to make a phone call and by the time I got back she had found someone online, called her, reviewed her credentials, and negotiated a price. And now I have a nice well-trained inexpensive Spanish tutor for two days. So today I had four hours of class, two hours of tutoring, and two hours of intercambio. And I think something finally clicked. For the first time in a long time, I felt like with some more time and some money and the complete absense of shame, maybe I could do this. (This = learn Spanish for real.)

In today's installment of verbally blowing the Basque country, there's this place where I go for coffee before class every morning. It's called Don Jamon and it's nothing special. It's just on the way to school and has good coffee, in a place where almost everywhere has good coffee. But it also has this old man who's there every morning, wearing a sweater and a beret, reading the paper and nursing a glass of red wine.

In case you think I just go around blindly adoring every aspect of everything here though, I do have some gripes, which I'll share now. (They're not unique to the Basque country, though.) For one thing, Spanish people cannot make French fries. They come unannounced with a lot of dishes, and they're always terrible. So oily that they're soggy. (As I write these gripes about Spanish people, an old man is buying me a beer and telling me I speak good Spanish (I don't), which kind of makes me want to just stop with my gripes. But, in the spirit of being fair and balanced, or something, I press on.) In class yesterday we were talking about food and had to describe our favorite dish. (I hate that question because I don't really have a favorite dish and I can never decide what to say in any language and I get all indecisive and weird.) I chose tacos. Tacos have tortillas, which are not like Spanish tortilla (which is made of eggs and potatoes and onions and gallons of olive oil) but are made of corn, I said. "No," said my teacher. "Tortilla always means something made with eggs." Me: "Ok, in Spain, but in Mexico tortilla means something made of corn." Him: "No, you probably mean torta, not tortilla." Me (silently): Joder.

(Now the old guy is saying that sidra is the fruit of the gods, or something to that effect.)

On a more general and unfortunate note, I've heard a lot of people here complaining about Latin American immigrants. (On various trips to Spain, in various parts of the country.) My heart doesn't bleed quite so blindly that I call racism on anyone who doesn't love all immigration. But I'm pretty sure that gangs of Latinos don't go around robbing blind all the good citizens of Bilbao. (Not betting Gabe's life here, but I'm pretty sure that both times I've personally been robbed in Spain, it was by Spanish guys.) And it's hard to put a nonracist spin on "No me gustan los latinos."

You belong to me, I believe

Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before I start with what I was going to write, I have to tell you about right now. Right now I'm sitting in a plaza. There is a little brass band with a following of maybe 30 people, mostly older and all wearing Basque scarves, making their way around the plaza. They stop at each bar and the band plays a song, the old people dance, and then they hang out for a while and have a drink before moving the 20 meters or so to the next bar. I guess you know what I'm thinking now.

Anyway, before that little slice of Basque delight trumpeted through my day, I was going to talk about my Spanish class. Well, kind of. The other students, myself included, are mostly a bunch of priveleged-enough westerners. A teacher from Italy came to Bilbao to go to a concert this weekend and decided to stay for a few weeks and study Spanish. A Brazilian graphic designer-type who interned at Disney Animation Studios took off most of this week to run with the bulls in Pamplona. A lot of them are college students with free time. And then there are the Western Saharans.

Western Sahara is a disputed territory currently under Moroccan control. To overgeneralize (it's what I do), it's the same basic story that it always is. The Western Saharans feel culturally and idiomatically different from the rest of Morocco and want autonomy; the king of Morocco says "No way, that land is mine." Plus, Western Sahara may have oil off its coast. Protests are violently repressed which leads to more politicization and then more protests and repression. Repeat. The Western Saharans in my Spanish class are a group of human rights activists. They've all been jailed, some for years. During a break from class the air was suddenly filled with what sounded a lot like gunshots, followed by some sirens. (No cause for alarm, it's just always some kind of fiesta in the Basque country.) I noticed that none of them flinched and, after the first round of shots subsided, one of them asked, with no humor, irony, surprise, or real concern, "Guerra o fiesta?" Anyway, they're staying here with a Spanish human rights lawyer and their school is being paid for by some Human Rights Watch-type organization. They're not sure if they have quite enough money for all their meals here, which they cook at home, but they invited me over for lunch. The horrible neighborhood that my landlord/roommate says is full of drugs and prostitutes has a halal market where we stopped so they could get ingredients for lunch, and where I got free samples of the desserts that I asked about. I tried really hard to pay for them but it didn't work. They wouldn't let me do anything, not help pay or clean up; they even insisted on paying for my metro ticket. It's stuff like that that makes me want to run away and join the Peace Corps.

Oscillate wildly

Museums are easy. You pay someone who doesn't give a fuck, communicating via hand signal if necessary, and then everyone leaves you alone as long as you don't try to do something stupid like touch the art. Galleries are harder. Half the time they just don't exist; you go to the address and find a door chained shut or a condemned building or something. If you do find a gallery, the door is probably locked so you have to get buzzed in and then maybe you flail about a little because the door is super heavy and you can't tell whether you should be pushing or pulling. Once inside, your clothes aren't really right, no matter what you're wearing. Then if the cute gallery worker says "Let me know if you need any help" and you somehow completely misunderstand that simple Spanish phrase and think he's telling you there's more downstairs and then go charging into the broom closet, you'll really feel inadequate. But, you will get to see lots of art and it will be free and if you're me and in Bilbao, you'll even like most of it.

Speaking of epic language fails, I had my first Spanish class today. My landlord/roommate says the school is in a horrible neighborhood, full of drugs and whores. It's too close to a main street to actually be dangerous, especially in broad daylight. (Says the girl who once got violently robbed in broad daylight while surrounded by four friends. Whatever.) I did pass some people from Bilbao's underbelly on my way to school, though; one of them told me that he loves New York and that I should be careful, and another tried to give me some yogurt that he happened to have with him because he thought I might be hungry. My nonthreatening appearance generally serves me well, but do I really come off as such a lost cause that I need the town drunks to feed me? It was kind of endearing. I guess. Class itself was mostly uneventful. It will teach me things and it's not so far over my head that I want to cry, but it instantly made me realize that I'll need a lot more than a week if I really want to improve my Spanish. We'll see...

All the wine is all for me

I was supposed to be surfing today. Happy (belated) 4th of July -- it's also a holiday in the Basque Country (all together now: it's always a fiesta in the Basque country), which meant that my Spanish class was replaced with surfing lessons. Of course. Back when I didn't realize how miniscule my weekend pueblo, and the pubelos within hiking distance, was, I thought I would buy a bathing suit there. When that failed, I was sure I could find something in Bilbao on Sunday afternoon, even though I know that most everything in Spain is closed on Sunday. I did find one open clothing-ish store, but it didn't sell bathing suits. And one cannot surf without a bathing suit. I'm trying to convince myself that I definitely would have gotten sunburned, but learning to surf sounds like so much fun now that I'm not doing it. Whine.

So, I drowned my sorrows in sidra. Sidra is another one of the thousand reasons the Basque country is the best place in the world. (You can get sidra all over Spain, but it's Basque.) Sidra is (hard) cider, but not like the sugary stuff you get in the US. It's more like beer that just happens to be made from apples. Sidra is best consumed at a sidra house, where you pour your own straight from the barrel and it comes with a thick bloody steak and, if you're lucky, a Basque boy. But the cider houses are only open in late winter/early spring. Anyway, if you order sidra at a regular restaurant, they bring you the whole bottle. The idea isn't really for a single person to drink a whole bottle for lunch, but they let you drink as much as you want; most people show some restraint. I am not one of those people. I love sidra, and I'm not good at turning down free alcohol, and even though you can get it in the US it's not the same there at all. I tried explaining the first and last of those reasons to the old guy sitting next to me who gave me a hard time for finishing the bottle, but he wasn't really hearing it.

Potentially related to everyone's being broke here, a girl walked into the tapas (pintxos, in Basque) bar where I'm eating jamon and hand-writing this, asked if you get a free pintxo when you order a drink (sometimes you do), and then left when the answer was no. And in other news from the tapas bar, an old guy just walked in and ordered jamon, a glass of red wine, and a glass of rosé. After being served the jamon and the red, he asked again for the rosé. "You want that and the red?" the bartender asked. "Yes, of course," said the old guy. I bet he would have understood my drinking all the sidra.

Elevator operator

The Spanish economy blows. It's not as bad as Greece's or Portugal's, but it blows. The government introduced a bunch of austerity measures and people got mad. In elections last month they voted the Socialist party out of power. It may have been the right move economically, but I doubt the people who are mad about shrinking entitlement programs will be any happier under the more right-wing Partido Popular. Anyway, Spain has some kind of law against organized protests in the 24 hours before an election and people got mad about that as well and decided to protest their inability to protest by camping out in public spaces all over the country. Here in Bilbao there are still about 20 tents' worth of people living camped out by the river. One of them is a grumpy beer-drinking Moroccan who just wants a job and a wife, but there are no jobs and things keep not working out with his Spanish girlfriends. He works when he can as some kind of elevator mechanic and has a woman who lets him use her shower. He claims that life in Morocco is really good right now, but his preference for living in a tent by the river in a place with mucho racismo where he can't find a job or a wife isn't very convincing.

At the other end of the bad Spanish economy is my new roommate/landlord, a seller (for some stupid stubborn reason I don't want to use the word salesperson or saleswoman) of Italian tile and other fancy bathroom products. Her apartment is huge and nice and my bathroom has two showers, three shower heads, and the trendiest, designer-y-est toilet and bidet I've ever seen outside of a trendy designer-y restaurant. She's traveled all over the world and has nice art on her walls. But she's not selling enough these days so she rents out her daughter's old bedroom to make ends meet. She's friendly and took me out for tapas and I can mostly understand her if I pay attention, but speaking a language you don't quite speak for a few hours is as exhausting as any physical activity. Joder, I'm tired.

You only used to get juiced in it

I probably could not get used to this. I would probably get bored and end up taking it out on my hair and my liver and my sex life. But for a weekend, my little casa rural in the little pueblo on a bluff overlooking the sea is pretty much perfect. It's peaceful and beautiful and it's two hilly kilometers from any restaurant, so if I want to eat I have to exercise a little. Sitting outside, when the wind blows the right way you can hear cowbells and mooing. But it doesn't smell like cows.

Basque pueblos are hilly and green and the little houses are usually white with red rooves and there are little gardens and sometimes sheep and cows. (The Basques are the only people between France and Portugal who can cook a steak.) The north coast of Spain is hilly and cliffy and rocky -- except for the beach at San Sebastián it's mostly little fishing villages. In the little fishing village two hilly kilometers away from my little hotel, it's a fiesta this weekend -- the town's patron saint's day -- so people are drinking in the streets and there's Basque music playing everywhere. See, it really is always a fiesta in the Basque Country. And on the hilly two kilometer walk to dinner, I passed an old man in a beret talking to/yelling at his cats in Basque.

...maybe I could get used to this.

Es complicado

I love Russia. It's complicated and hilarious and tragic and liking it takes some effort and some patience; I like and respect places like that. I'm at least half serious when I say I may try to move to St Petersburg one day. But oh man does Spain feel clean and calm and easy and, well, civilized after a few weeks in Russia.

I am drinking so much tap water. I had tortilla for breakfast and it was olive oil-y and wonderful. From Bilbao I took a bus to a little pueblo for the weekend. (Maybe it's redundant to say little pueblo, but this one is really little.) The bus station bathrooms didn't smell great (what bus station bathrooms ever do?) but they were free and had soap and toilet paper. People lined up in an orderly fashion to get on the bus, which was an actual bus and not a hot sweaty van; it was clean and shiny and air conditioned and bright green. (Not that I need these creature comforts, of course -- I bitched about the hot sweaty vans but they didn't make me flee or anything -- but comforts are comfortable. Still, I didn't expect to be appreciating them quite so much.) When I got to my little hotel, they had not lost my reservation and I didn't have to register my passport with the police.

For the record, I would be raving about the Basque Country (although maybe not the Bilbao bus station bathrooms specifically) no matter where I was coming from. It's one of my favorite places. The people are mostly nice and mostly hot and they're always celebrating something and they have an impenetrable language with lots of z's and x's and k's. If you know me at all (and you're reading this, so you probably do), you've heard me go on about the Basques, probably many times. But they really are hot and nice and celebratory, and it's beautiful here and the food is reaaaalllly good. Of the places I've been, the Basque country is the only once I've made efforts to go back to multiple times. Blah blah gush gush.

Getting back to Russia, I miss drinking beer in the streets already. The Basques drink in the streets more than most people do, but not every single day. Ordering wine with a pre-fixe dinner and getting the whole bottle is a pretty good consolation prize, though.

Rumbo perdido

Surely the best way to get from St Petersburg to the Basque Country was not to train to Moscow and then fly to Barcelona via Warsaw, wait in Barcelona for seven hours, and then fly to Bilbao. But I planned things in stages and each leg of this particular meander seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Flying to other countries from Russia is a huge pain in the ass if you don't leave from Moscow, and if I hadn't gone back to Moscow I would have missed out on making friends with Igor and Yegor while drinking beers outside the subway station, and Shane would probably have missed the chance to finally impress some Russians with his knowledge of the Russian word for cunt. And the Barcelona layover was so ridiculously long that I had time to go into the city and get a bocadillo de jamon. "Jamón cerrano with pan con tomate?," the cute grandmotherly woman at the cafe asked. I love Spain. And then she brought me a newspaper, which felt like a huge compliment although it really only means that I appear to speak enough Spanish that I can maybe read a little. No one in Russia ever offered me a newspaper. And then, on the way to Bilbao, there was a beautiful sunset out the window for the whole flight. For what was supposed to be a big hassle at best and a huge disaster at worst, today turned out to be sort of a lovely day.