Semana Blanca

A European appreciation of vacation combined with the leftovers of a once strictly Catholic society means that we civil servants get time off whenever a religious holiday rolls around. This week is Semana Blanca- Carnaval and the beginning of Lent- and so my high schools are closed all week! It would have been the perfect week to take off travelling, but unfortuantely the private sector isn't so generous with its vacation time, and at the language school where I work evenings it's business as usual.

Enter day trips. Northern Spain has a compact concentration of places I have yet to see, and the public transportation that will get you there and back in the same day. So I've been taking advantage of my week off and the unseasonably sunny weather we've been having to get out of Bilbao. (In Bilbao, when you see the sun, you'd better run outside and take advantage of it, because you never know when you'll see it again. )

Monday's destination was Santander with Kristine and an American friend of hers visiting from Ohio. Santander: coastal port city; encircled by beaches; summer tourist magnet but wonderfully quiet off-season. We took advantage of their free-use bike network and went from beach to beach and park to park on wheels, dodging old couples strolling on the seaside promenades. The Basque cities I've visited have these dense medieval centres of winding, narrow stone alleys. Santander's history doesn't go back quite as far. The streets are broad, airy, elegant.

Wednesday was a visit to Durango, 30 kms inland from Bilbao. My friend Julen's from there, and he showed me around the city, which has one of those dense medieval centres I just mentioned. Historically speaking, Durango was isolated for a long time, nestled between two chains of mountains, a river, and protected against invaders by a stone fort and two massive stone churches. When we left the city to go for a hike in Parque Natural Urkiola, history was put into perpsective. From the top of the peak we climbed, with mountains on every side, you could see how any army wanting to take Durango would have had quite the climb ahead of them.

Onstage at the Arriaga!

I've made my European debut as a non-speaking theatre extra, and at Bilbao's oldest, most prestigious theatre, to boot.

Cosmético del enemigo was playing last night at the Teatro Arriaga. It's a four-hander that takes place in an airport lounge. And how better to create the airport atmosphere than to have people sitting on stage throughout the performance?

An actor friend is friends with one of the actors in the show; they were looking for extras, and my friend asked me if I'd like to join him and his troupe on stage. I accepted of course. It was basically a chance the see a play for free, and up close and personal with the actors.

Here's the view from the stage:

The show was great. Good thing, because falling asleep on stage would have been pretty embarrasing.

Here are my partners in crime; the other actors on stage with me. ( It was Carnaval, hence why one guy is dressed up in a kilt and wig.)

Industrial history of Bilbao

With a few well-written exceptions, I don't tend to get much out of history books. Something gets lost for me-either in the transformation of real-life actions and events to the written word, or from the page to my imagination. I'd read bits of pieces of Bilbao's industrial history, but a boat trip down the Nervion on Friday has helped bring it all together into a soup of images and anecdotes that resonates much more than a list of dates and facts can.

It was a chilly grey morning, but at least it wasn't raining. The river was calm when I ( and a group of high school history students and teachers from Arrigorriaga) climbed onto a fishing boat the port of Santurtzi, where the river meets the ocean. The following hour, as we travelled downriver tot eh centre of Bilbao, was like a visit to a living museum. Historical houses that used to be the homes of rich factory owners. Functioning factories and abandoned ones. Shipbuilding facilities dwarfing the industrial warehouses-cum-artists' studios on the shore behind them. Rotting remnants of fishing docks that can't be removed for fear of stirring up the century-old toxic layer of debris on the riverbed. Old men fishing and joggers pushing strollers along the riverside promenade. The old warehouses and houses they're planning to tear down to build a Manhattan-esque island of luxury condos in the middle of the river. Scrap metal and cranes and abandoned train cars.

The students didn't really seem to care too much about what we were seeing, so I was the eager student the teachers were more than happy to share their knowledge with.

Liendo, Cantabria

Iratxe and Txema should be sponsored by the municipality of Liendo. They absolutely love living there and will tell you exactly why: the peace and quiet, the space, the green, it's proximity to a variety of beaches and mountains, hiking and biking trails...and it's only ten minutes from beach-town Laredo, and 30 from Bilbao! Their friends and family thrive on the convenience of city-living and therefore think they're crazy to live "in the middle of nowhere". City living in the Basque country means the butcher's, the baker's and the candlestick maker's all within walking distance from your house, and daily afterwork get-togethers at bar on the corner for catching up over a wine and a pintxo. Unless you're a farmer, why would you want to live in the country?

But from a North American perspective, they live no farther from the major amenities than most drive-to-get-a-loaf-of-bread suburban communities. Except, well, you can buy fresh bread everyday at the general store in the centre of the village (this is Spain, after all). I'm all about city living myself, but at the end of an idyllic weekend at their place, I was ready to move into the spare bedroom and stay put.

My visit coincided with a mid-winter warm snap, and we sure took advantage of it. We biked around the winding roads of the valley, up the mountain, down to a secluded rock beach. We saw houses built in the medieval stone houses, expansive hilltop views of the Atlantic, and at different moments had to stop to let a donkey, and a herd of sheep cross our paths. They showed me various beaches, parks and lookoffs around Laredo. Sunday it was even warm enough to eat lunch outside on their patio.

CanCon, pt. 1

I was taking questions about Canada from a bunch of grade sevens the other day. They wanted to know everything about Canadian food and animals. We had a computer in the room, so every time they would ask about an animal, I would quickly Google image search it and put a picture up on the screen so that they could see it.

Did you know that if you Google image search "skunk", you get 2 pages full of pictures of marijuana buds? And that amongst the search results for "raccoon" you get this picture of a dog screwing one?

Neither did I. Or the grade sevens. But they do now.

Santa Águeda

February 5 is the feast-day of Santa Águeda, a martyred Italian saint from the third century, and apparently patron saint of married and breast-feeding women (because as part of her torture Águeda had her breasts cut off.) Groups of children (in the morning), and adults (in the evening), go around in traditional Basque dress singing songs specific to the occasion. The choirs stand in the round and pound sticks on the ground to keep time as they sing. You can listen to audio and read the words to the songs in Basque and Spanish here. As accompanies the majority of traditional festivities in the Bilbao, there is some drinking and general carousing in the Casco Viejo of Bilbao tonight after the groups have finished singing.

Santa Águeda is nothing major; apart from school kids that visit the neighbourhood old folks' homes, only choirs or groups of friends that like to sing take part. But having my otherwise routine evening interrupted by singing on the street below my building was a pleasant surprise.
One of the most interesting parts of living in the Basque Country is observing how people relate to their roots and how seemingly every couple of weeks I get to be part of a different tradition.