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.