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.