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.