So I realized I may have come down a little hard on the Germans last time. I don’t have anything against them, when they are not yelling at me in another language. I just think that of all the things I have learned since coming to Europe, perhaps the most important is this: be wary of any person who hails from a country who singlehandedly has given David Hasselhoff a career.
I’m just saying.
This weekend my roommate and I went to San Sebastian, Spain, to meet up with a friend, Mike, studying in Salamanca for the semester. Supercute tiny little town in the Basques...
Kind of felt like being in Winter Park with the beach so close by. On our way there Jessi and I had to change trains in Irun, a city that we later learned straddles the border of Spain and France. But we arrived at 6am Saturday morning to Irun, and everything in the train station was in a completely different language... Not French. Not Spanish. DEFINITELY not English. I guessed Basque, though I couldn’t believe it is actually well-known enough to be written down anywhere. Luckily the people spoke Spanish too, and somehow my 4 years has just been dormant or something, because every time I opened my mouth, Spanish words came out. Sometimes more smoothly (and often with a better accent) than the French words I speak here in Paris. Amazing. I had no idea I remembered ANYTHING. I am nowhere near as proficient as I used to be, but I could totally get around on my own in a Spanish-speaking country and be completely fine. I was shocked. Luckily we had Mike with us too, who speaks it like a native, so we didn’t have to rely on my meager skills once we met up with him.
The town was cute, we spent the 2 days there wandering the beach and the old part of town (literally called "Parte Vieja"– the old part). We made our way up one of the surrounding Pyrenees (which means I have now climbed a Pyrenees (if there is only one is it a Pyrenee?) as well as an Alp...) to see the castle and view from on top, but when we got up to the top it turned out to be a FAKE castle with this Natural-Bridge-style theme park attached to it. Some good views of the city and ocean below, but also a rickety wooden roller coaster, an E.coli infested looking boat ride thing, and a bumper car rink literally at the edge of the cliff that dropped straight down into the sea. One strong bump and you are sunk, I guess.
Then down from that mountain, across town, and up the mountain on the other side. (San Sebastian is in kind of a cove with curved peninsulas that sort of mask it from the ocean on each end of town.) The second mountain we hiked up has a huge sandstone Jesus on top of it, surrounded by cannons and fortress-like protection... I don’t really understand what the original purpose of it was, but while we were standing at the foot of Jesus, a door started rattling from the inside and suddenly this thick huge wooden door creaked open and a nun who was at least as old as the door itself came out with a Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-esque key ring to relock the door. What I want to know is how she got up there... I led hikes all summer (which is not to say that I am particularly athletic...) And it was a hard hike straight uphill to get to the statue, and I was in hiking boots, not orthopedic shoes. So I don’t know about that.
Other news of the weekend: I have always suspected the Basque people were crazy. Back in the day we studied them in my Spanish classes, and they are pretty much insane. They are like what would happen if, like, the indian reservation in Montana where we lived when I was little decided they wanted to be their own country and left Montana and started bombing Los Angeles to prove their point. Crazy. We spent the weekend trying to avoid them and their ridiculousness, because Mike says they are crazy as well (though he seems not as convinced as me of the level of their insanity). Luckily, though, they never bomb things IN the Basques, just in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, etc. The weekend had passed uneventfully and I was relieved we were not going to meet any Basques, when Sunday morning as we sat on the terrazza at a pastelerie (cakerie for you gringos...), we heard yelling and sirens, and pretty soon a protest march rounded the corner. The banners they carried were all in Basque, as were their signs, so we had no idea what was going on, but they were quite adamant about whatever it was. The Basque language, sidenote, is not a dialect of Spanish, it’s a completely different language, more distant than Spanish and Portuguese, but it kind of resembles ancient Aztec writing, which is filled with words like txacyquoatl and which I only know because of art history classes. Ok, back to the story. There are police meandering around the edge of the protesting Basques, who were marching to an amphitheatre in the center of the Plaza we were sitting in, so we had a great view of them. They carried picket signs with people’s pictures on them and kept yelling in Basque about something; completely different from protests in France or the States, and a little worrying since, as previously mentioned, they are crazy.
Ok, enough about Spain, I miss you!
~B

AMAZING pictures from the weekend to come!