I've been thinking a lot lately about travel as more than simple vacationing; that is, travel as a metaphor for life, a resource for life, training ground for life, as personal development. In my post a couple of weeks ago on Couchsurfing, I talked about how enthusiasm for travel is contagious; seeking out adventurous people wakes you up out of your routine and makes you want to be like them.

In a similar vein, this blog post/video on a talk travel writer Rolf Potts did at the DO Lectures in Wales recently talks about lessons learned from travel that can be applied to your everyday life. Inspiring stuff about living life on your own terms.

Kalimotxo

I really resisted it for a long time. The very idea of kalimotxo -- the mix of red wine and Coca Cola I had always associated with groups of drunk-in-public teenagers -- just didn't appeal to me. I didn't want to like it. So I refused to try it.

And now I eat my words. One night, at a club, someone passed me their glass (sharing drinks with your friends at bars seems weird to North Americans, but I've found it quite common elsewhere), and as soon as I tasted it I knew that it had to be kalimotxo. It was a refreshing change from beer. And I didn't immediately revert to being 18 and swigging from a purple-tinged 2L Coke bottle on the metro or in the corner of a park with my friends.

Yesterday I ordered one in a bar for the first time. Though now popular all over the country, kalimotxo was invented in the Basque Country, after all, so I just tell myself I'm doing my part to sustain local culture, one katxi at a time.

Why don't hipsters like Bilbao?

I've known several foreigners in the time I've been living here that just don't like Bilbao. Most are the usual culture-shocked, inexperienced travellers that don't like it simply because it's not home. A couple came to Bilbao after having visited other parts of Spain and were disappointed to find that the north of Spain completely lacks, for lack of a better term, bulls, flamenco and olé.

But there have have been others, who were not simply victims of homesickness or not reading their guidebooks properly, but who nonetheless couldn't really get into Bilbao. And if you ask me, it's because they were hipsters.

Don't ask me to define what a hipster is. Every written definition of a modern-day hipster I've read has some parts I agree with and others I don't. Official definitions aside, if you know what a hipster is, you know one when you see one. And though lots of urban young adults, myself included, may enjoy one or two examples of supposedly hipster behaviour (micro-brews and bikes, anyone?), there's a critical mass of lifestyle, appearance and attitudinal factors that, if you possess enough of them, push you into hipster territory.

In my opinion, irony is what makes or breaks a hipster. Ironically ugly haircuts/facial hair/glasses/clothes. Ironically crashing old-man dive bars and the like, half-laughing at the regulars. Ironically drinking disgusting PBR. Irony implying here a distance or lack of a sincere engagement with your surroundings; even if the concert's great I'm not going to dance. Social events and artistic happenings that are uber-hip, but no one seems really into it.

Irony makes or breaks a hipster, and irony, or lack thereof, is why hipsters don't like Bilbao. Bilbao is a sincere city, in its people, music scene and social life. Ironically ugly clothes here are just considered, well, just plain ugly. (American Apparel wouldn't stand a chance in Bilbao.) Though the late nineties rocker aesthetic is alive and well here, when you see some dude rocking headbanger hair and a plaid shirt it's because he's really into the music and lifestyle associated with that style. The metrosexual look, a mainstay of the look of the moderno (as they're called here) doesn't go over very well here either. A few select bars and events aside, the nightlife is decidedly sincere -- drinking to a traditional rock soundtrack, or dancing to a pop/house soundtrack about sums it up. Bilbainos are rockeros, and I think the metaphor of a balls-out 80's rock band, feeling every guitar riff and ever word of their lyrics, à la Springsteen or something, is an apt one to describe the city. Shoe-gazing, twiddly Casios and pretending you don't care just don't cut it here. Though there are some hipsters floating around Bilbao, the city's just not big enough to create a hipster subculture.

Call it a traditional city, but I personally find this refreshing. As I've said, I definitely partake in some hipster-like activities, but the level of irony encountered on a daily basis in the Mile-End neighbourhood of Montreal was getting a bit much for me, so I'm happy to revel in the sincerity of Bilbao for a while. And for those that aren't, there's always Berlin or London...

Name Games

I knew it would happen sooner or later.

In class with a bunch of 13 year olds, choosing names for the characters for a skit -- One kid's utterly determined to name the character Patxu Pamela. The Patxu part sounded vaguely Basque, and I wanted to get on with the lesson, so that's what we named him.

I might as well have named the character Hugh Jass or Amanda Huggenkiss or Mike Hunt. Patxu Pamela, said out loud is pa' chuparmela, aka. to suck my dick.

And I didn't figure it out for a week! Hilarious.

Bilbao Sundays

"I Love Bilbao Sundays" reads a friend's Facebook status. Sundays do have a special flavour in Bilbao, simple and back-to-basics, stemming from the fact that there's nothing to do.

Well, besides drinking. If you get up at a decent time, the Sunday morning activity par excellence is to meet up with some friends to potear. Poteando on Sunday morning doesn't differ all that much from they way you'd potear any given evening. It's getting together with friends for a couple of drinks and pintxos but in a way that's so unique to Bilbao. Order your drinks at the bar inside a tiny, narrow pub, then bring them out into the street, which becomes a defacto extension of the bar. Adults stand around and chat, kids play together in the square or at the other end of the street, pintxos are nibbled, and once glasses are empty the ritual repeats itself at another bar down the street. On Sunday morning from about 11 to 3, people get together in different areas of Bilbao such as Plaza Nueva (above)for a drink leading up to Sunday's centrepiece: a giant lunch entre familia.

But if Saturday night was a late one (as they often are) and you don't get yourself out and about in time to potear, you've missed your window as many bars and restaurants close up after lunch. All stores, including supermarkets, are closed, so there is no shopping or errands to be run. Sunday's offerings are narrowed down to football and the movies. If Sunday's football games don't suit you, then your remaining entertainment option is the movies, which are often sold out on Sunday nights for that very reason.

Walking, be it urban styles along the ría, or up into the hills surrounding the city in typical mendizale fashion, is also a Sunday activity that can help you deal with Saturday night's excesses. Unless it happens to be downpouring all day, as it was yesterday. The formula for Bilbao Sundays--family, friends and football--suffers when heavy rains make for soggy poteando and miserable mountain climbing. And then Bilbao Sundays can seem...long.

Happy Monday!

The CouchSurfing Project

I recently created a profile on CouchSurfing, the "world's largest hospitality exchange network." The goal of the site is to facilitate travel and cultural exchange. If you have a spare room or a couch, you can offer it up for a traveller who may be passing through, and similarly travellers can search out a place to stay for free in their next destination. There are more than a million members worldwide, and lots of people I know have used the network in their travels. I don't have a couch that anyone over 5'1" could think about sleeping on, but I've offered to meet up with anyone passing through town for a coffee or a drink. After a year and a half in Bilbao, I think I'll be able to to orient a new-comer off the tourist track. CouchSurfing Bilbao has quite an active forum on the site, and and I've been to one of their local meetups.

As I get more involved in the CouchSurfing project I'm realizing that the travel bug metaphor is an accurate one. Not only in the sense that you often come back from a trip "infected" with the desire to pack your bags and leave on a new journey. But the more you surround yourself with people for whom travel and intercultural exchange is a passion, a habit, and a priority in life, the travel bug can be caught and transmitted between people. Just try having a beer with someone who's recently come back from 3 months backpacking through China, or wandering around Ghana taking photos, or doing an internship in Uruguay, and not getting up from the table with a desire to get on the next bus to the airport.

This actually makes sense, given research that says you are who you hang around. Many emotions are supposedly contagious, and we justify our behaviour, good and bad, by whether others in our peer group are doing the same thing. So, if your friends are fat/happy/successful, you're more likely to be too. If you're friends are big spenders, good luck trying to keep a budget. So the contagiability of the travel bug isn't really that surprising. Being around people that realize that real travel doesn't include the word "all-inclusive", that thrive off of culture shock instead of fleeing it, that reorganize traditional ideas of home and work to go beyond 2 weeks of vacation per annum makes you want to be like them. You start to absorb their enthusiasm, and next thing you know you're constantly asking yourself, "Where should I go next?"

Comida: Part Two

"Y para el postre tenemos: flan, natillas, queso con membrillo, cuajada, tarta de chocolate, mandarinas o plátano."

I found it weird the first time I was eating dinner in a restaurant, and at the end of the list of dessert choices was a banana. Or mandarin oranges. Or a plate of strawberries. Brought out just like that: a piece of fruit on a plate.

It shouldn't be weird. Fruit is nature's dessert, after all. But it was. The inevitable comparison with home popped into my head, and I couldn't imagine a nice, sit-down restaurant serving you a piece of fruit on a plate. And even if they did, would anyone order it? But sometimes you're in the mood for a lighter dessert, or a healthier dessert.

Fruit is not only nature's dessert, it's nature's convenience food. Some American friends and I were joking about how our students here wouldn't even recognize the recess snacks our childhood selves used to take to school. A banana, an orange or an apple? Or Fruit Roll-ups, Fun Fruits, and Fruit Gushers? My students and colleagues at the high school almost exclusively snack on fruit, or maybe a homemade sandwich on crusty bread or a digestive or arrowroot biscuit. It's just so simple.

The striking thing when you go into a supermarket or fruit and vegetable market is the state of the fruit and vegetables. They're deformed, assymetrical, spotty. Perfectly edible and in great shape, but visually they don't compare with the picture-perfect, genetically modified, waxed and colour-injected produce in North American supermarkets. It's a nice reminder of what fruit and veg are supposed to look like.

Comida: Part One

It's often the seemingly small details that catch your attention while living in a foreign place. I find myself taking note of differences between life in Bilbao and life in Canada that I never could have foreseen before coming here. Aspects of life that I took for granted while living in North America but that simply don't work the same way here.

One big difference is the differences in attitudes toward food. Last year, I tried to teach a lesson in one of my English classes about Slow Food, a back to basics movement started in reaction to the proliferation of fast food that encourages people to reconnect with food through eating local and organic, eating homemade, eating for flavour as opposed to convenience and rediscovering the pleasure of cooking and eating with family and friends.

"I don't understand this movement," one of my students told me. "Homemade food, slow meals, eating together with family? That's just how we eat here."

And she's right. Cooking, cooking, eating, family and friends are all things taken very seriously in the Basque Country, so the Slow Food movement seems a little redundant. And though fast food and convenience food are more and more popular, their popularity is nowhere near what it is in North America. Fast food outlets are generally restricted to suburban malls on the city outskirts, and when they opened a McDonald's on Bilbao's main drag years ago, it eventually went bankrupt.

North America people are falling into two camps. The "live to eat" camp: Foodies, locavores, organic-or-bust shoppers and those who live, eat and shop by Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food manifesto: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And then the "eat to live"-ers: Those who blissfully ignore the hoop-la around fast food and Wonder Bread and spray cheese and food colouring and mechanically separated pork byproducts and hydrogenated this-and-that.

But in the Basque Country you don't have such polarization simply because attitudes and practices surrounding food have not become so unhealthy as to necessitate a revolution, a reaction or a manifesto.

For example, both Slow Food and In Defense of Food recommend seeing cooking and eating as an event to be shared with family and friends. Eating in your car or from Drive-thru's is a major no-no. But here? Moot point. I've seen maybe one Drive-Thru since I've been here, and requesting evenn a coffee "to go" is seen as kind of strange. The thinking is, if you want a coffee, go into a Cafe-Bar, take 5 minutes to drink it there. You're really not saving that much time taking your coffee to go.

And I think they're right.

People don't eat and drink walking down the street, in stores, in the metro, on the bus, like they do at home. They'll just wait till they get home, or pop into a cafe for a snack, or at the very least sit down in a park to enjoy their drink. I've started doing it too; it's less messy, you enjoy what you're eating more, and in the end, you don't really waste that much time.

Similarly, fast food hasn't taken off here ( in my opinion) because of the fact that on every street corner here you have a cafe/bar. Inside they serve everything from hot drinks and pastries to alcohol, sandwiches, tortilla and pintxos. If you're craving a snack, why would you order a BigMac, when you can pop into a bar and get a mini Iberian ham sandwich on homemade crusty bread or a pintxo of fresh seafood or local cheese? Instantly? And for 2 euros? With nary a neon light in sight.

Lunchtime

My colleagues and I eat out once a week at a neighbourhood restaurant.

I've come to conclude that if you dine with someone who grew up in a small, coastal fishing village, invariably, the fish served at any restaurant outside of that village will be pathetic/bony/runt-y in comparison with the gigantic/meaty/delicious fish that are caught/served in that village. Especially compared with the gigantic fish dad/grandad used to catch.

Also, you will come to question your own alcohol tolerance, which cuts you off at ~5 beers per night, while people from the fishing village normally drink 30-40 beers a night.

El último lunes en Gernika

Last year's Último lunes de octubre in Gernika was a soaking wet affair. It poured rain, which made all the day's festivities a little less than pleasant, from wandering around the open-air farmer's market that covers basically the whole town, to drinking txakoli and cider in the street or trying pintxos of local cheeses, to listening to the lilting song/prose of bertsolaris, all of which are normally quite pleasant activities.

But this year--Redemption! A sunny, unseasonably hot day made lounging in the town square with a bottle of cider and a talo (a thick corn tortilla cooked on a grill wrapped around a hot sausage) the most enjoyable activity you could imagine.

And then we saw this wonderful poster in the window of the Gernika tourism office: "We don't want tourists, we want friends!" Well, plying the 90 000 people that came to visit Gernika that day with fresh food and festivities seems like a good way to start.

Fall in Euskadi

Plentzia
Kristine and I!
The view from the cliffs
Castillo de Butron




Fall in the Basque Country is amazing. Some days are warm, some are crisp. The trees and flowers and still in bloom; the leaves don't change colour until late October or November. And so far, it hasn't rained THAT much.

We've been taking advantage of the fall weather and of Bilbao's being surrounded by coast and mountains over the last few weeks. Some are regular Sunday strolls, like a walk up Artxanda (and a funicular ride down). We've taken in the coast via Muskiz Beach and the trail from Sopelana to Plentzia along the cliffs. We walked more than 700m straight up for the views from the top of Pagasarri, and followed the seemingly never-ending trail from Plentzia along the river to the Nintendo-castle Butron.

Basque hikers are hardcore. Young or old, they all get up early and do their hiking to be back home for a 2 or 3pm lunch. Then, on some of the more accessible trails you see people out for an after-lunch stroll in the late afternoon. We usually manage to time things so that we are just heading out when the hardcore hikers are heading home, active during everyone else's siesta time.

The best feature of hiking around here is that trails often lead from village to village. Which means that when you get to your destination there's always a pub or cafe where you can refuel before the trip back.

12 de octubre

Día de la Hispanidad, Día de la Raza, Fiesta Nacional de España--whatever name you give to the 12th of October, it remains a national holiday, complete with military parade in Madrid, celebrating the arrival of Christopher Colombus on American soil and beginning of Spanish colonization. Schools, businesses and public offices were closed for the day.

But if you don't exactly identify as Spanish, or don't think the beginning of colonization is something to be celebrated, the holiday isn't that meaningful, though a day off is always appreciated. But if you're a Basque who doesn't identify as Spanish, and on top of that feel some antagonism toward the Spanish state, it would be impossible to let the symbolism of October 12 and its flaunting of Spanish dominance pass by quietly.

Some students at my school organized a protest encouraging students to...come to school on October 12. The doors were locked, the teachers were at home, but some students showed up in a kind of symbolic eff-you to the Dia de la hispanidad. I have to hand it to these students; everyone accuses teens of expressing their adolescent rebelliousness by half-heartedly taking on the hippest political/social cause of the day. But these students who came to school on a day off are obviously 100% dedicated to what they believe in.

Muskiz

The 6000 or so residents of Muskiz must have crapped their pants 30 years ago when Petronor finished building their giant oil refinery outside town. The quaint downtown, the soft-sand beach ringed by green hills and cliffs and the river that snakes between them are dwarfed by the tanks, smokestacks and machinery of the several-kilometres sqare refinery and chemical plant .

Minutes from the Vizcaya/Cantabria border, Muskiz's industrial installations blink and hum, grabbing your attention as you pass on the highway. I'd heard about their great beach, though, so Kristine and I took advantgae of a warm, late-September afternoon to check it out. The 4km walk between the train station and the beach followed a dirt path along the quiet Rio Barbadun. It was early-fall lush: cows and sheeping grazing in small-scale farms, reeds and trees growing out of the riverbank into a canopy over the trail, splashes of purple and pink flowered vines.

And the whole walk we were never more than a couple hundred metres away from the towering, noisy monstrosity of a petrol refinery. From the town right to the coast. We were blown away by the sheer hugeness of it. (Check out the relative size of the villages of Muskiz, Pobena, and San Julian compared to the refinery, with its dozens of round white oil tanks, on the map.)

But somehow, magically, when you got to the beach, from the vantage point of a towel in the sand, a chance combination of a couple of jutting, stony hills and a patch of trees blocked Petronor from view. You could look out at the ocean, pretend the salty wind fully masked the chemically odour, and concentrate on more important things: e.g. seeing which of the September surfers braving the waves that day could ride the waves the longest.

Al Txoko

First, the definition of a txoko.

From the Basque word for nook, or small space, a txoko is a closed gastronomical society typical across the Basque country. A group of friends will chip in money to buy a commercial space, outfit it with a full kitchen and eating space, (and nowadays a soundsystem and TV and all the comforts of home). The members then use the space to get together and cook and eat together, or with their guests. Traditionally, txokos were about serious culinary creation and experimentation ( and maybe a singsong after dinner), and were for men only. Nowadays, though the focus is still food, in all but the most traditional txokos anything goes, and women are allowed.

And a good thing, because half of the people at Xabi's txoko in Bermeo on Saturday were women. And we didn't really cook: we picked up some roasted chickens and some wine, and threw together a salad, and made some homemade french fries. And we didn't sing any traditional Basque songs, though we did watch the regattas. The txoko had an amazing view of the port of Bermeo and the open ocean, and we could see the news helicopters circling overhead covering the rowing races, we couldn't see the actual boats themselves for the high waves and rain. So we turned on the TV to watch the rowers up close. Urdaibai, the local team, didn't win. But later, as we were having coffee and ice cream in the centre of town later, the team came jogging along the port, and they were given a full cheering, flag-waving, song singing welcome anyway.

San Juan

In Quebec, June 24, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, is a party. Parades, big budget concerts, block parties awash in the blue and white of the fleur-de-lys. Canada Day celebrations pale in comparison.

Here, San Juan has no nationalist associations--it's a celebration of the longest night of the year. The traditional way to celebrate it, like so many traditions passed down over generations, is really fun, but really dangerous. Every neighbourhood sets up a huge bonfire, which is the centrepiece of the evening's celebrations; beer stands and music are secondary, though necessary. You write your regrets for the past year and wishes for the year to come on a piece of paper, and toss it into the fire. Burning of school books and notes is optional. Then comes the dangerous part: jumping over the fire. You have to do it in order for your wishes to come true.

but as one of my students put it, you start out the evening preparing the fire and drinking beer. Then, the height of the flames is inversley proportionate to your level of drunkness. By the time you feel courageous enough to jump over the bonfire, the flames have burnt down into coals. some municipalities have banned the bonfires, but some still have officially sanctioned events, and others still just continue the tradition anyway.

Ibilaldia 2009

There's a certain predictability to many of the fiestas and festivals in the Basque Country. Whether they're celebrating a patron saint or a holiday, there are usually stands selling drinks, sandwiches and talo, maybe some traditional baked goods or food products or farm-fresh produce, and a stage with entertainment, all open-air.

The Ibilaldia, held last weekend in Galdakao, was all of the above, but with certain variations on the above themes. First, it's a yearly festival held to promote the Basque language, organized by a local ikastola, or Basque-language private school, who get to collect all the proceeds. Everything was in Basque, from signage to announcements, and most of the people at the event were speaking Basque too--not so common for an event so close to Bilbao. The entertainment--music, poetry, etc.-- was Basque-centred as well.

And the coolest part of the event is that it was spread out over 6 sites in and around the town and surrounding countryside. So that meant short hikes through the woods between beer tents, and different atmospheres happening simultaneously on different stages. It added a kind of outdoorsy note to what would have otherwise been your typical festival of light-hearted summertime debauchery.

Here's the promotional video for the festival. Conspicuously absent from this video are the hordes of drunken teenagers we saw in groups along the trail; I've been told getting together with your under-age friends to get drunk on kalimotxos at the Ibilaldia is kind of a rite of passage.

The national anthem scandal @ the Copa del Rey

A Basque team and a Catalan team confronting each other to win the "King's Cup"; the irony of the two Spanish peoples with the strongest nationalist/separatist sentiment playing to win a symbol of the Spanish monarchy, in the presence of the King and Queen no less, was not lost upon most. But football trumps politics, though a plan was launched among Basque and Catalan spectators to express their dislike of the Spanish state by whislting when the national anthem was played before the match.

But one of the stations broadcasting the match was the Spanish state-run TV station, rTVe. Mysteriously, before the game, viewers didn't see the national anthem being sung; they cut to a reporter live in Bilbao talking about the ambience in the stadium. And then, the video footage of the players standing at attention for the anthem was played at half time, without the sound. Here's a video that shows what viewers saw on different TV channels. ETB1 ( a Basque channel), TV3 ( a Catalan channel), and TVE.

The public cried Scandal! Conspiracy! TeleEspaña claimed it was human error, that they weren't trying to hide anything, and but their director of Sports programming still ended up resigning.

Basauri, circa late 70's

Basauri, the town south of Bilbao where I work, had more marches, protests and conflict than most barrios in Basque Country during the tumultuous transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 70's.

Police presence was constant, political activism the usual motivation for their harrassment, as the Basques were mobilizing and demanding political autonomy over Euskadi. One of my colleagues told me it was nothing strange to have the police raid the high school where she studied.

One day, they arrested a kid from her school, and held him in the police station overnight, for political reasons. The following day the whole school, students, teachers, and staff, marched to the police station, demanding to know what was going on. The police came out, told them to go away, or they'd open fire on the group.

My co-worker got trampled in the crush of students running away as the police threatened to shoot. "In the end I got hurt just as bad as if the police had come out and beat us up," she told me.

Intercultural fascination #560

Deodorant.

Sometime back in the 90's, when the anti-CFC backlash was happening in North America, they stopped selling spray deodorant. Chloroflorocarbons in the atmosphere for the sake of dry armpits? Switch 'em all to solids and roll-ons, the producers said. Except somewhere along the line roll-on deodorant disappeared too, and now for all intents and purposes, in a Canadian drugstore, it's solids or au naturel.

But not here. I'm happy to report that spray deodorant is alive and well.

I was reluctant to embrace it at first, but now I will never turn back. Not only is it less annoying for your skin and clothes, it's FUN to put on! Pppsssssshhhhhhtt! Pppsssssshhhhhhttt!

This is what intercultural exchange is really about.

Feria de abril at Cafe Iruña

I can finally have something to say when people ask me about all the flamenco I must be seeing here in Spain.

We all grow up with national stereotypes, and some people never outgrow them. Some friends are surprised when I tell them the Spain isn't all wall-to-wall sangria and tapas and "Olé" and running of the bulls and rain falling on the plains. Each region has its own culture and traditions. Think about it: Do kids in Toronto sing Barret's Privateers and Rita MacNeil in school? Do they eat pâté chinois in Whitehorse?

Flamenco just isn't part of the cultural fabric of the Basque Country. But Cafe Iruña in Bilbao, through it's architecture, menu and cultural events, is more evocative of Southern Spain than of the North. And for the last 25 years they have a series of events coinciding with the Feria de Abril, the week-long spring festival that happens every year in Seville.

Saturday night was a flamenco show. Three dancers, a singer and a guitarist performed a spell-binding show, bookended by willing (and less-willing) amateurs dragged onto the stage from the audience to dance by an enthusiastic member of the public in a bullfighter's suit. When the musicians left the stage, DJ'ed flamenco music gave the by then well-lubricated audience something to try out their own flamenco skills to. Thing were going strong when we left at 2.

Now all that's left is for me to see some bullfighting...