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.