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.