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.

Where you from? You sexy thing

Whew. Back in the land of Basque flags and unreadable translations.

No one really knows where the Basques came from. Their language isn't related to anything else, so no help there. And whatever else historians or archaeologists or anthropologists study to try and figure things out has also been dead ends. On my first trip to the Basque country, a friend and I entertained ourselves by deciding that the Basques must have been Celts. It's the obvious guess: The geography is about right, and traditional Basque music sounds Celtic, and some traditional Basque dances look a lot like Riverdance. (It may be that I just think all traditional dance looks like Riverdance.) And you know that Irish-looking font that you mostly only see on Irish bars? There's a similar lettering that they use everywhere here. QED. (Also, my Spanish teacher here told me that when she went to Ireland it felt like home.)

I felt a little vindicated when I read that people have actually researched the Celtic hypothesis. Much as I would like for my Irish roots to make me some kind of long-lost Basque, though, there's apparently no evidence that the Basques came from Celts. One thing they have learned from studying Basque origins is that Basques have more people with O-negative blood than just about anyone else in the world. Just for the record, I too have O-negative blood.

This is Spain

I went to Pamplona with the idea of using it as a jumping point to see more of Navarra, the autonomous region of which Pamplona is the capital, which is kind of Basque and kind of not. Then I remembered that in addition to having been to Pamplona twice, I spent days walking through Navarra on the Camino de Santiago. I really do suck at planning. I had never been to southern Navarra, though, so that's where I came.

The first thing to know is that the term Basque Country means different things in different contexts. If you're talking about the entire Basque Country, which lives in Spain and in France and is also known as Euskal Herria (Basque for land of the Basque speakers, or something like that), you're talking about seven provinces (each with its own dialect of Basque) -- three in France and four in Spain. If you're talking about the Spanish autonomous region also called the Basque Country (Pais Vasco), you're talking about three of the four Spanish provinces (Vizcaya, Álava, and Guipúzcoa); the fourth Spanish Basque province is Navarra, which is also its own autonomous region. (Or if you're in France, you might mean the three French Basque provinces -- I didn't ask anyone there what exactly they mean by Pays Basque.)

However you define it, the Basque country is mostly full of steep green hills and small farms -- it's not flat enough for big farms. But driving south from Pamplona it flattens out fast and suddenly there are big flat fields everywhere; it turns into central Spain, basically. Because you can do more with the land down here, people like the Romans wanted it more than they wanted the rest of the Basque country, and the Basques lost influence. Which means it's not really Basque here at all.

Basque and Spanish are both official langauges in Navarra, but down here nothing is translated into Basque because no one speaks it. The bars don't have sidra, and no one rows on the river. (I still don't understand how Basque rowing is different from any other kind of rowing, but regardless there's no south Navarran rowing.) I've seen exactly two Basque flags all day (in Pamplona you see at least two flags per block, if not per building), and they were old and tattered and neglected. I even went to the city (of Tudela) museum, knowing I'd probably be bored, just to see if it had anything Basque. It didn't. It had information about the Bronze age, and some other ages, and the Romans, and the Muslims, and the Jews and the Inquisition, but no mention anywhere of anything Basque. And I looked.

It's not like the people here suck, and there is still jamon. But tomorrow I'm on the first train back to Pais Vasco.

My way: Get the fuck out of it

I was excited to get a front-row seat on the bus from St. Jean to Pamplona. But then the driver made me fasten my seat belt and I realized as he honked before going around tight curves that if an oncoming car ignored his honking, I would be the one the car drove into. And there were a lot of tight curves. (I survived.) There was also a lot of construction, which made the bus driver super mad. I've seen some grumpy bus drivers beofre, but this man was truly exceptional. He was already mad that we had to stop for the road crew (who, like most every road crew, didn't look to be doing anything besides holding up traffic), but then when they let a bunch of cars go through but made the bus keep waiting, he really lost it. "Fuck! It takes fifty years to make a road. Fifty fucking years!" He hit the gas like maybe he was going to plow right through the workers, stopped just short of them, and started yelling at the guy with the hand-held stop sign. "What is this? What are you doing?... Fuck! You have to work? I have to work. I have to get this bus to Pamplona. I'm already late. Fuck!" Then he pulled out his cell phone and started bitching to someone on the other end. "Vive les vacations!" yelled some French person from the back of the bus. It was all pretty hilarious, to me anyway, but I was afraid the bus driver would start yelling at me if I laughed at him. I had to bite my tongue really hard to keep from cracking up. Once we were finally allowed to go, he bitched to himself the whole way through the super narrow construction site (¡Hostia! he kept saying -- another good Spanish expletive), except where we passed trucks (there were some big trucks carrying lots and lots of hay) and he paused to bitch to the hay truck drivers about the construction situation. I understand road rage pretty well, but still I bet he has high blood pressure.

That particular bit of construction not withstanding, Spain has really nice roads. Maybe the nicest roads I've ever seen anywhere. And Pamplona has a ridiculously nice shiny new bus station. (When I was last here five years ago, it was basically a dirty garage.) At least they've got something to show for the construction boom, I guess.

La Voie Lactée

Q: Does the rest of France have stereotypes about the Basques?
A: Not really... They like it when we dance and do traditional things for the tourists, but if we ever try to talk about independence or autonomy they get upset and call us extremists.

So, I haven't learned how to say vascos son brutos in French.

Anyway. Today I took a little train through the mountains to St. Jean Pied du Port (when a French-speaker says St. Jean Pied du Port it sounds like St. Petersburg), which is where people often start the Camino de Santiago. Starting from St. Jean, the first day's walk to Roncesvalles is mostly straight up, and super hard. Or so they say. When I did the Camino, my friend and I read about the St. Jean - Roncesvalles walk and said 'that sounds hard -- fuck it, let's just start in Roncesvalles.' (You can read a tiny bit of what I wrote during the Camino on my old blog here.) I regret nothing, but the pass is very historic and I assume it's beautiful (everything else around here is) and I would like to hike it sometime. I was even thinking about hiking it tomorrow, since I'm going in that direction anyway and my running shoes could probably double as hiking boots. But it's about a thousand fucking degrees in this part of the world right now, so that little piece of Basque history will have to wait.

Seeing all the pilgrims made me nostalgic for the camino, even if I am too soft to join them for a day, so I'm drowning my sorrows in cheese and cider. (It's too damn hot to do anything, anyway.) I don't know that French Basque cheese is better than Spanish Basque cheese, but it's definitely more abundant. Here they serve cheese with cherry jam, although "now that we have reliable refrigeration, only tourists eat the jam." I like membrillo better, anyway. The cider here I definitely don't like as much as its Spanish counterpart. It's more bland, and no one aerates it by raising the bottle way above his head to pour a little shot into a glass several feet below, which makes it -- the cider and the whole experience -- even more bland. Still, better than cider from pretty much anywhere else in the world, as far as I know.

PS. I don't care if I'm repetitive: When I got here this afternoon, there was a little parade going on. It really is always a party in the Basque country. This one was more subdued than a Spanish Basque parade -- not much drinking in the streets, for example -- but still there were old men in berets everywhere. God, I love the Basque country.

Militant Equality

If I lived in Bayonne, I would probably hate Biarritz, too. It's full of rich people (even worse, rich tourists) and it's expensive and mostly lacks character. But it's also fairy-tale beautiful (think castles on hills) and there are beaches in little coves separated by cliffy rocks with holes in them (think Salvador Dalí), and even though I felt like I was supposed to, I couldn't quite dislike it. It's hard to argue with the beaches -- although the sand is rockier than you want it to be, which makes getting to the water a little bit of a death march.

Anyway, a few days is of course not enough time to figure out much about the French Basque country -- I don't even speak French. But I'm trying. People don't speak much Basque here -- less than on the Spanish side, it seems like. The French government never banned the Basque language, the way the Spanish government did under Franco, but it's also never supported it, the way the Spanish Basque country's regional government does now. So there aren't and never really have been (not in recent memory, anyway) many Basque schools in the French Basque country. And, for reasons I don't really understand, Basque-speaking French Basques don't necessarily teach their kids Basque. So, not that many people speak Basque. A few different Spanish Basques have told me that the Basque schools in the French Basque country are mostly supported by the Spanish Basque country -- because the Spanish Basque country controls its finances and the French Basque country doesn't -- but I haven't heard anything similar on this side of the border.

Because of internal migration, the Spanish Basque country has a lot of people who aren't Basque. I wondered if the same is true on the French side, but apparently the official answer is that no one knows: Everyone in France is French, period, and they don't keep statistics on race or ethnicity. It seems hard to believe that whether or not many people move from non-Basque France to Basque France is really not known, but I thought it was an interesting answer to the question regardless.

Vive les Basques!

...but fuck their French keyboards. They are unusable, and the reason I haven't posted anything for a few days. Sorry.

I've become a regular at Bar Jamon! Now not only do I get to bask (get it, bask?) in the old man with his beret and glass of wine, I get my cafe con leche without even having to ask for it. I don't think I've ever been a regular anywhere before. The bad news is that this morning I was running late and so didn't have time for what would have probably been my last Bar Jamon breakfast, because today I finished my Spanish class and left for the French Basque country. Oh well.

The bus from Bilbao to Bayonne should only take about two hours I think, but once over the French border it turns into a local bus and stays on city streets and makes lots of stops and it ended up taking almost four hours. Usually that sort of behavior annoys the crap out of me, but the drive was really pretty and you see a lot more when you're not on a highway. So far, the French Basque country, compared with the Spanish side, is cleaner, and more flowery, and more calm and less noisy, and the younger people look, well, less Spanish: fewer tattoos and piercings and mullets and dredlocks. And fewer Basque flags (although I haven't seen all that many French flags, either).

When United Statesians use the word lovely they're usually being sarcastic, but I really mean it when I say Bayonne is lovely. It has a beautiful cathedral and some cute little streets with shops and outdoor cafes and a river (two, really) and bridges. Looking over one of the bridges, the river is lined with little whitewashed buildings with red and green shutters and it all looks as quintessentially idealized-European (in a good way) as anywhere I've been. And just on the other side of that particular bridge, the neighborhood gets slightly grittier and has some interesting graffiti. If you're into that sort of thing. And I heard some people speaking Basque. And they have good ham here. And good cheese. So far, not bad.

Rant-grade Spanish

I'm pretty sure there was a time when I thought that if I could just speak Spanish well enough to buy a bus ticket without pain, that would be enough. The tickets always got bought, but bus stations are loud and chaotic and you're often talking to someone behind a window so it's really hard to hear and the person behind the counter is usually at least a little gumpy which never helps anything, and I used to fuck it up most of the time. I don't fuck it up very much anymore, which is nice. But the smoothness of bus station transactions is a pretty ridiculous way to measure one's language skills; foreigners gesture and grunt and use their fingers to buy bus tickets in languages they don't speak all the time. And since I'll never be a native speaker, I'll probably never really be satisfied with my Spanish skills. Even so, I've found a new bar for what seems like it might be enough: I want to be able to rant. A good rant is funny and entertaining and so very satisfying (if you're the one doing the ranting, anyway). I heard two good ones today, which is what made me realize that my own Spanish isn't rant-grade yet.

I wanted to buy La Vanguardia, the Barcelona newspaper -- Barcelona beat Madrid in soccer last night and I figured the Barcelona paper would have more coverage than the Bilbao paper -- but the newsstands were all sold out of it. I didn't make the connection, but then the woman at the third newsstand I tried started going on about how no one reads the news except for sports and La Vanguardia only sells after Barça games and something important could happen and no one would know unless it happened right after a football game. It was a good rant. (Maybe because I'm a foreigner or maybe because I'm a girl, it didn't seem directed at me, even though I was mostly interested in the sports section.) And then my Spanish teacher got started on the pope's visit. "Do you know how much this is costing? The government says it's a state visit not a church visit and that's why the state is paying for it, but they don't pay when other heads of state come, and he's coming to preach not to do state business. And it's not like people from out of town are bringing in money -- the government is paying to put them up in empty schools and feed them. They even get special pilgrim cards that let them ride the metro for free. But regular Madrileños still have to pay for the metro. And they just raised the fare!" Something to aspire to.

And speaking of the friggin' papa, after all that boring repetitive news coverage of pilgrims camped out in schools, now that he's finally here people really seem a lot more interested in the Barça-Madrid game.

Daddy Issues

The pope (el papa) is only coming to Madrid, and he's only coming for something like 72 hours. But you wouldn't know it from the fuss everyone is making. Pilgrims from Chile are camped out in school gyms; the police kicked the Indignados of the Puerta del Sol weeks ago; there's pope coverage on the news every day -- and he's not even here yet. (Actually, by the time you read this he probably will be, but the hype has been going on for weeks.) There's a big banner on the Bilbao cathedral welcoming the (friggin') papa, even though he's not coming anywhere near the Basque country. It blows my mind a little that in this place where people apparently didn't much care that Spain won the World Cup, they're excited (some of them, anyway) that the friggin' papa is coming to Madrid. But, I don't much understand religion at all. I tend to associate being religious with being uptight about, well, basically everything (partly because I'm kind of an elitist agnostic asshole, and partly because where I come from a lot of religious people are uptight about a lot of things), and since people here aren't uptight at all by my neurotic East Coast standards, I forget that they are mostly Catholic and that, to varying degrees, religion matters to them. (That sentence was way too long. Sorry.)

Some people are complaining. Not about the church's anti-condom stance, which kills people by promoting the spread of AIDS, or its abhorrent handling of its montón de pedophile priests. I take that back -- probably someone somewhere on the Iberian peninsula is complaining about those things. But the complaints that are getting news coverage are about money. The Spanish economy is shit; the whole European economy could collapse any minute now; no one has a job; and the Catholic church is rich -- but still it's the Spanish government that's paying most of the 50ish million euros that this visit is going to cost. (There will be a helicopter overhead monitoring the entire visit, and apparently that alone costs thousands of euros per hour. Incidentally, helicóptero is one of my favorite examples of an actual Spanish word that sounds like Spanglish.) The people complaining on the news always make a point to say that they are Catholic and they love the papa, they just don't think the government should be paying for him.

There's an easy solution: Make him camp out with the Chilean pilgrims. It would cost less, which would make the Spaniards happy. It would definitely make the Chilean pilgrims happy. And if the friggin' papa himself doesn't like it, he doesn't have to come. That would at least probably make the Indigenos a little happier -- they'd still be unemployed and smelly, but at least they'd probably get the Puerta del Sol back.

I taught Koreans how to roll their r's; I can teach you

So there's this mime. She (he? --I think it's a woman but I'm not really sure) works on Gran Via, which is the main street that runs through the newer section of Bilbao. Except that she doesn't work, because she's always sitting or squatting right in front of some building with her back to everyone walking past, either smoking or putting make-up on top of the make-up she's already wearing. I can't decide if I think she's some kind of weird performance artist (but a different kind of weird than the kind of performance artist who becomes a mime) and that's her act, or if she's just the laziest mime ever.

Anyway. Usually when I'm traveling/writing I spend a lot of time walking around and thinking about things. The thoughts eventually converge (usually) to something vaguely coherent and then I write them down. Here, though, I spend most of my walking-around time forcing myself to think in Spanish, and those thoughts almost never converge to anything coherent. Sometimes I mutter the thoughts out loud under my breath, and sometimes, if I really don't feel like thinking Spanish thoughts, I practice rolling my r's. Both of which probably make me look a lot more ridiculous than a smoking mime. (I keep wanting to write monk instead of mime.) But I'm a lot more self-conscious about my gringo accent than I am about looking sillier than a mime on a smoke break.

A long time ago I met a Spanish guy who had to go to speech class as a kid because he couldn't roll his r's. He told me to practice saying vroom vroom ("Loud, like a motorcycle!") and that helped a little. Then later I went on a couple of awkwardish dates with an Ecuadorian who had lived in Seoul for a few years teaching Spanish. He told me to use the back of my throat, not to make noise but to make my tongue move more, and that helped a little, too. But I'm still not very good, so I practice.

I realize that my accent is the least of my problems with the Spanish language. People can understand the words I say; my communication disasters happen when I say the wrong words, or when I get flustered and then forget all the words, or when I get distracted by how nice some Basque boy's teeth are and forget to listen carefully for a bit and then don't know whether I'm agreeing to bear his children or turn out the lights when I'm done in the bathroom. None of which has a thing to do with my accent. But still, Spanish accents sound nice and gringo accents sound ugly (there's this woman in class who speaks Spanish with a super thick French accent and that sounds a little goofy, but it doesn't sound ugly) and sub-par r-rolling is part of the gringo accent. Vroom vroom.

That big rockin' chair won't go nowhere

I just bonded with a gay Ukrainian bartender about how great we think the Basque country is, and not just because we both like Basque boys. In addition to being brutos and gastronomes and super proud of their culture, Basques are also known for being a little bit closed and incredibly loyal. (Loyal (leal) is one of the new Spanish words I've learned this trip.) I try not to pay too much attention to stereotypes, but I also believe they usually exist because a lot of people meet them. People are always saying that if you make a Basque friend, you've got a friend for life. Around here, it's often said in comparison with people from southern Spain, who are friendly and outgoing but, according to some, all fake. Someone told me that one of the ways Basques are different from Spanish people is that they maintain their own friendships even after they get married. It seems obvious to me that being a good friend is a necessary condition for being a decent person; I don't mean to give the Basques a ton of credit for doing what you're just supposed to do. But I do appreciate it. And I'd take closed but genuine over friendly and fake any day.

Goooolllll!!!!

(The Basque word for gol is also gol.)

The Bilbao soccer team, Athletic Bilbao, only has Basque players. The coach can be anything (currently Italian) and the best Basque player, Xabi Alonso, plays for Real Madrid. The team is the Leones (lions), and I don't think anyone ever uses the Basque word for lion, whatever it is. (Maybe Basque doesn't even have a word for lion? That would make a certain amount of sense, since there are not and surely never have been any actual lions in the Basque country. I don't even think there are any zoos here.)

I'm not quite sure how I feel about any of those things.

I do get a kick out of the fact that the team's colors, red and white stripes, are painted everywhere on walls and garage doors and those grating things that you pull down and padlock to the sidewalk to lock up a storefront. And I also like that they call the stadium La Catedral. And I'm a little baffled by the fact that Fernando Llorente (whose full name happens to be Fernando Llorente Torres), one of the leones, is apparently considered the hottest Spanish football player. I mean, if he invited me to run away to Bilbao with him I suppose I probably would go (I bet he has a grandfather who wears a beret), but he's no Fernando Torres.

All the calories, none of the fun

You can buy alcohol-free beer in lots of places in the world. Here is the only place I know where people actually drink it. They call it zero-zero, or zero-comma-zero (damn Europeans switching the periods and commas in numbers), as in zero percent alcohol, and it comes in several different brands and is advertised all over the place. I get that drunk driving is a problem here, but you're not really allowed to drink and drive anywhere -- only here do the conscientious drivers drink alcohol-free beer instead of water or soda or something. Anyway, one of my excuses for drinking too much here is that beer is usually cheaper than water. I don't want to pay two stupid euros for a little bottle of sparkling water just so that I can sit at a bar and read the paper or write or eat jamon. So I drink beer. But I'm going running later today so I thought I better not drink beer for lunch. And suddenly zero-zero made a little bit of sense. It wasn't even that bad. I felt like such a local.

Speaking of drinking, there is a Basque drink that I somehow missed out on during my previous trips to the Basque country. It's a liquor called pacharan, or patxaran if you're speaking Basque, and it's made from berries called endrinas which I think are the same as what they use to make sloe gin but maybe they are slightly different. Pacharan is reddish and sweet and not bad, although sometimes it's a little more anise-y than I'd like. It's no sidra, but in the world of liquors that are sometimes homemade by someone's uncle or grandfather (think rakija), I'd say it's among the best.

I still hate mayonnaise

There is a small corner of the culinary world in which the Basques could stand to improve a little -- in particular they could stand to learn something from the Catalans. I'm talking about bocadillos. A bocadillo is the non-Portuguese Iberian* version of a hoagie. Unlike its distant North American cousin, the bocadillo does not have a ton of different ingredients, nor does it ever come with unannounced mayonnaise. A bocadillo de jamón means jamón and bread. Maybe olive oil, but nada más. Except in Catalunya, where the bread is usually pan con tomate. Cut a baguette in half, the long way, and cut a tomato in half, any way you want, and rub the cut tomato all over the cut bread. Pour some olive oil on the tomato-y bread (I would say drizzle, but that would be a euphamism for what they do with olive oil in this part of the world) and you've got pan con tomate. (A Catalan once proudly told me all about how, at a conference in Malaysia, he would sneak in his own ingredients to make pan con tomate at the conference dinners.) Use the pan con tomate to make a bocadillo de jamón, and it's basically the best thing in the world. It's a Catalan thing, though; I almost never see pan con tomate outside of Catalunya. Basques, you're missing out.

(For the record, all the italics here are starting to bug me. They feel a little pretentious. But I don't like the way the above looked without them either. Whatever.)

*Out of adoration for the Basques, I try to watch my use of the word Spain, but it gets cumbersome.

You're not wrong, you're just repetitive

Nouns in English mostly don't have cases: a book is a book is a book whether it's the subject of a sentence, or the direct or indirect object, or the object of any preposition, or whatever other grammatical role it might play that I can't even name because English is so goddamn simple you don't really need to know any grammar to speak it. The exception in English is pronouns: I/me, he/him, etc. I.e., the very few English nouns that do have cases have two cases.

Basque nouns have twelve cases. That means that every noun has twelve different forms, and you need to know all of them to speak properly. I think Basque is fairly regular so it's more like you just need to learn twelve rules, but twelve is a lot and you also have to know all the grammar to know when to use which form. (Plus there are seven different dialects of Basque, along with a generalized common form.) Joder.

And yet they have no swear words.

I'm still having a really hard time with this. Joder is basically the perfect swear word, and I support its use in pretty much any context. But how can the same people who don't want to listen to Spanish music be OK with taking their swear words from Spanish (or French)? I'm not going to claim that I'm not judging, but mostly I'm just baffled. Basque is an old language. Why haven't swear words developed naturally as the language has evolved? Why did I not study linguistics?

I'll keep asking anyone who will talk to me and let you know if it starts to make any more sense.

X$*!%x?*x*!

Ok. I'm slowly building up a small list of gripes about the Basque country. I feel so balanced.

The Bilbao metro trains run on the left side of the tracks and that bugs me.

The Basques are certainly not the only people who listen to too much bad American music, but it is everywhere here and that makes me sad. If people don't want to listen to music in Spanish I suppose that's their call, but why do bars not play Basque music? I know it exists, and no one can give me a good reason why I never hear it. (At the very least, they could play American music that sucks less.)

But those are the little gripes. It gets much worse. I love the Basques, so part of me doesn't want to touch their language with a ten-foot pole. It's how they define themselves, and they've fought for it, and they kept it alive during decades of fascist dictatorship, and it sounds nice and is full of x's. But. It doesn't really have swear words. Apparently a Basque equivalent of hijo de puta (son of a bitch, or son of a whore if you're being literal) is as bad as it gets. The fuck? Of all the things a language could get horribly wrong, I think this may be the most unforgivable. If you listen to spoken Basque, on this side of the Pyrenees anyway, you'll hear Spanish words. Everyone here, or at least almost everyone, speaks Spanish, so when some word or phrase doesn't exist in Basque they just say it in Spanish. (My unscientific estimate is that that happens between 0.25 and 1 time per sentence, which surprised me.) I appreciate that the Basques aren't language nazis (the Basques are the best people in the world -- of course they're not language nazis), and it makes me very curious about how things work in the French Basque country. But come on Basques, this is important. You need better swear words. Fucking invent some. Dammit.

Guillermo Shakespeare

I have a library card. It's great; it's like I live here or something. And I managed the whole transaction and found and checked out a book without a single language disaster. Woohoo! Hooray for very small victories. The library here is the quietest mostly-Spanish-speaking place I think I've ever been.

It's sort of silly to talk about a Basque Shakespeare -- hardly anyone even speaks Basque so hardly anyone writes in it, and until fairly recently no one wrote in it -- but apparently if you were to use such a term, you'd be talking about Bernardo Atxaga. I'm now the proud borrower of a book of his short stories, self-translated into Spanish. It would be a lot easier, and a lot faster, and I would understand better if I would just admit that I'm still a little over my head and read things translated into English. It's not like I'm reading the original Basque, anyway. But where would be the fun/growth/torture in that?

Also, I have a sort of blanket apology/explanation/excuse/whatever. I'm spending a month in the Basque Country partly because I love it here, but mostly because my subpar Spanish level been bugging me too much for too long and I'm finally going to do something about it, god dammit. So I'm trying really hard to do the whole immersion thing and, when I'm not talking or reading in Spanish I try to make myself think Spanish thoughts in my head. But my Spanish thoughts are generally at the intellectual level of maybe a 12-year-old. So when I sit down to write, I don't have much interesting to say. I wish I knew how to fix that.

I still love it here

The old Basque man in his Basque hat is still drinking wine for breakfast at Bar Jamon every morning. Not that his Basqueness was ever in doubt (and I would like him and his hat and his wine even if he weren't Basque), but I also noticed that he has longish earlobes. This one book I read about Basques says that they have long earlobes, so now I'm going around checking out everyone's ears. They're not goofily big or anything, but once you start looking you notice that some earlobes here are biggish, and the bigger ones often go with a long straight nose which is apparently another Basque trait. It's sort of a fun game to play. Well, fun for me, anyway.

Basques are very Catholic, although as far as I can tell they're not very uptight about it, and they are apparently more socially conservative than Spanish people. If you ask me, they hide it pretty well. Anyway, someone was telling me that couples here pair up early and mostly stay together, and that Basque boys are shy, and that if a woman here goes to a bar by herself people will probably think she's a whore (as in an actual prostitute). I.e., maybe the Basque country isn't the most perfect place in the whole world. It was a nice silly idealization while it lasted.

"So if I moved here, with my 33 years," I asked, "would I stay single forever?"

"Well, things are changing. You could probably find someone, but he'd probably be a lot younger."

Ridiculous idealization restored.

La más estúpida

Joder. (In case you didn't know, joder means fuck in Spanish. It's not as strong/bad as fuck is in English, though, at least not in Spain. Maybe it's different in other Spanish-speaking places. It's a good word. You can pronounce the h sound way in the back of your throat and drag it out like they do here, or you can be extra gringo and say it like hoe-DARE and either way it's very satisfying and sometimes makes Spanish people laugh when I say it.)

Anyway, like I was saying, joder. I'm back at the same Spanish school where I studied for a week last month, and at first I was all excited that they put me in a more advanced class than I was in before. But then the class started. And everyone else speaks sooo much better than I do. (In case you're thinking that this is just a case of my always being too hard on myself and my communication skills, I did think the easier class was too easy.) Whine. We happen to all be female which I guess is supposed to make me feel more confident or less like a disaster or something, but it doesn't. I hate being the stupidest one. (Not speaking a language doesn't make you stupid, but it sure makes you feel stupid.) I do like to torture myself though, and you learn more when things are hard, so I hope the Instituto Hemingway doesn't realize the horrible mistake it's made and demote me tomorrow.

Back, and out

Everyone who ever travels likes to bitch about air travel, but it's almost never of much interest to anyone else. So I'll just say that it looked like I was about to get bumped from my flight last night but then I didn't and now I'm very happy to be back in Bilbao and not stuck in Newark. And I still suck at sleeping on planes and I'm very tired and I'm going to bed now. Buenas noches.