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.