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.