Pagasarri

Pagasarri is one of the many small mountains circling Bilbao. The 570m climb from sea-level Bilbao to Pagasarri's peak has always been a popular hike, and no day more so than December 21st. For the last 18 years on Santo Tomas day a group march leaves downtown Bilbao and walks up the mountain to the wine, soup, sandwiches, tortilla ( and scenic views) that await at the summit. ( Oh, and don't forget your free gift- a rugby jersey!)

I couldn't believe our luck. After a month and a half of rain almost every single day, the 21st was warm and sunny. I dragged my roomates out of bed, and though we missed the 9am start time for the official march, we figured that leaving at 10:30am we'd still make it up and down the mountain before dark.

The advantage of leaving later was that there were very few people going up at the same time as us. The disadvantage is that they were all coming down, and so we had to fight our way upstream through the crowds. (Ten thousand people were expected to reach the summit that day.) Old folks, spandex-clad joggers, and tons and tons of families braved the mud to walk half a kilometre uphill. I ran into a couple of co-workers on the trail - Bilbao's a small city after all, and even after a couple of months you start having smalltown moments.

Parking a la bilbaína

I live on the 10th floor of my apartment building, and I'm glad.

My building is surrounding by many others in a dense neighbourhood of mixed-use buildings--apartments upstairs and small businesses on the street level. If you have a car you park it in one of the deep, labyrinthine parking garages below most apartment buildings.

But not everyone's lucky enough to have underground parking. And parking street level is every man for himself. People park every which way, all over the place, double or triple parking, blocking others in, blocking the street. And if you come out and someone's car is blocking yours in, you lay on your horn with the hopes that the offending driver will come and remove their car. No matter what time of day. You keep honking...and honking... and honking..until...they... come...out...

Um, it's still not falling mainly on the plain

The headline of today's 20 Minutos (my freebie Metro newspaper of choice):

In November it rained 25 days out of 30, and the sun shone for a mere 42 hours

The corresponding front-page article goes on to give the stats that quantify the shittier-than-usual weather Bilbao's been having- litres of rain fallen, average drop in temperatures - and origin of the weather system that is causing it all.

I'm not a whiny wimp unable to put up with a little falling water! My feeling of having had it up to here with the constant rain is justified! I'm not the only Bilbaino that wants to throw herself off the Puente Euskalduna every morning when she wakes up to yet another day of bone-chilling heavy grey humidity!

The last line of the article? And December, as far as we can tell, will be more of the same.

Humid afternoons

It's cold, grey and drizzly, and I'm bundled up in a wool sweater and slippers. It's my nth cup of tea today as I sit at my computer, taking care of schoolwork, class prepping, and all the administrative tasks needed to keep my life running forward. I'm listening to CBC Radio streaming over the net, trying to keep up with the antics on Parliament Hill.

When you're abroad, you see that some habits are easily abandoned but others die hard. Tea, radio and wool socks on a grey afternoon, it seems, will only be put to the test if my next destination turns out to be Tahiti...

Chocolate caliente

Spanish hot chocolate. is. amazing.

Forget powder and hot water or mini-marshmallows. Chocolate here is a deliciously thick sludge that would choke the Nestle Quik bunny in seconds flat. It's made from solid chocolate grated and melted with hot milk or cream until it's just barely liquid enough to drink. Forget Starbuck-scale servings--a small mug is all you need. And remember to ask for a spoon, or you'll end up with a chocolately chin trying to get the last drops out of the bottom of your mug.

Biarritz, France

"There's no such thing as bad weather, only badly dressed," goes a Scottish proverb. Whether or not the Basques have an equivalent proverb, they sure take the sentiment expressed by this one to heart.

The French Basque coast is a popular tourist destination for the French and Spanish alike. In the summer. Why did we decide to go in mid-November, in the heart of one of the rainiest autumns this region has had for years? For the trip of getting away for a weekend, visiting another country, hearing another language, trying something new; basically, for the hell of it.

The French border is a little over an hour away by car on the highway. (Actually, make that lack of a border; in today's Europe, the only way you know you've crossed from one country to another is that the road signs change language.) And though Euskal Herria (Basque Country) straddles that border, the French Basque country has a flavour quite distinct from the Spanish Basque Country.

Biarritz is a tourist town, no doubt about it. And not a seaside fishing village-a NICE tourist town, with high-class hotels ( though thankfully some low-end ones too!), a selection of fine dining, and lots of quaint, yet expensive shops. The winding streets of its centre are clean and orderly. The beach is omnipresent, right in the centre of town, and there are several promendades that let you walk out on the rocks that jut out from the coast. Though it was by no means a ghost town during our visit, you could just imagine Biarritz must transform into another place altogether come summer.

The air in Biarritz was one of a pretention of classiness. Though I won't go as far as using words like haughty or snobby, there was definitely a contrast with the vibe in Bilbao, which is quite down-to-earth.

But one thing that we observed from Basques on both sides of the border was a willingness to continue with their lives despite the grey skies and windy rain that hung over the weekend. As we made our way home on Sunday the Basque coast from Biarritz through San Sebastian all the way to Bilbao was full of people making the most out of their Sunday afternoon. "What's some torrential rain to keep us from our family Sunday afternoon walk along the shore? All we need is head-to-toe raingear and a couple of humungous umbrellas."

Must be something in their genes.

¿Entrevista?

I was explaining an activity to a group of Grade Sevens the other day.

¨Prepare some questions, because you're going to interview your partner, " was greeted by raucous laughter.

"Wow," I thought to myself, "it's an interesting activity, but not THAT much fin."

Their teacher took me aside later and told me that the Spanish equivalent of Playboy is called Interview.

Vitoria-Gasteiz

If I had to evoke the landscapes of the Basque Country with one phrase, it would be red clay rooftops and lush green hills. While southern Spain chokes on dusty heat and dry plains, the north is a vibrant green.

Except in the fall, when those green hills turn yellow, brown and red. The colours aren't quite as vibrant as their Canadian counterparts, and the leaves turn about a month later than they do in at home. But fall colours are fall colours-you can't deny their prettiness

So that's why we took the back road to Vitoria-Gasteiz, a city of about 300,000 people, 45 minutes from Bilbao. The back road is longer than the highway but the extra time is made up for in pictoresque views as the hilly road winds through villages and farmland.

The road between Vitoria and Bilbao takes you uphill from sea level to about 500m, which isn't that much, but it means that there's a palpable temperature difference. On the drive into town we wondered out loud why people were walking around in gloves and scarves-and when we got out of the car we found out why. Brrrrrr. The only solution was to seek refuge in the finest of Vitoria's Chinese buffets.

When you visit most cities here, you go straight for the Casco Viejo. The architecture's medieval, the streets winding, and bars and cafes plentiful and atmospheric. Vitoria's old town surprised me in that it had a slightly different flavour than Bilbao's-much more wood in the architecture, and African and Mid-Eastern restaurants and groceries everywhere you turned. We wandered around for a long while before ending up in a bright, airy cafe that overlooked the Casco's expansive main plaza for a coffee to end off the afternoon.

The joy of Sunday afternoon day trips out of Bilbao is that they are as simple as that. There are so many sites nearby-you pop out, see what you want to see, have a bite to eat or a coffee, and you're back home by nightfall.

Canada's cultural embassadors

Simple Plan, a.k.a. the best fake-heavy, super cheezy pop-rock band to ever come out of Laval, are playing in Bilbao next week. There are posters all over the place.

I overheard two people having this huge argument in the metro over whether the name of the band was pronounced /sim-play plan/ or /sim-pool plan/. It was rally hard not to turn and tell them that the REAL pronunciation is actually /krap/.

Roasting on an open fire

I don't know what the link is between chestnuts and trains. I'd never even eaten a roasted chestnut before, but when I saw this train-shaped shack on the street the other day, I just knew that it must be someone selling hot, roasted chestnuts. Instinctively, my spidey sense just knew that's what was inside. Why a train? Don't ask me.

So I bought a dozen, in a little paper cone. I choked down the first in its shell before realizing that you remove the outside before eating. Mmmmm.

But then I had that damn song stuck in my head for the rest of the evening.

Hallowe'en in Las Arenas

Excursión urbana: Artxanda

Under the weather

The fall cold is universal.

Days get shorter. The sky gets greyer. The streets get rainier. The temperature drops gradually until you have to stop fooling yourself-there will be no sunny Sundays like the one we had last week until spring.

And then you get sick. Like your friends, colleagues and everyone else on the metro.

As I blow my nose and stare out my 10th-floor window at the heavy grey clouds that have been emptying themselves over Bilbao for days now, I just keep repeating one thing over and over:

"At least it's not snowing..."

¡Truco o trato!

Everyone here knows what Halloween is. But not everyone shares the same attitude toward it.

Commerce has really lead the introduction of Halloween into Spain. The only places you see orange and black Halloween decorations are stores, and the most decorated stores are the big-boxes, the multinationals, and the shopping centre chain stores. These types of stores sell American products, pop culture, and consumption habits, and so they choose to promote Halloween, which is like all three of these things rolled into one. But though you'll find a couple of racks of kids' Halloween costumes and pumpkin banners and black cat stickers, it's still nothing that's celebrated as widely as it is in North America.

A lot of people resist it. "It's not our holiday, it's an American holiday," they say. "They can celebrate their holidays, and we'll celebrate ours."

But some bilbaínos see Halloween as an excuse to party; for those that do celebrate Halloween it's for adults only. I've seen posters for several club nights and costume parties in bars, and lots of people have house parties.

But because Halloween is relatively new here, and because people have learned its ins and outs from American pop culture, it's celebrated in a straighforward and earnest way. The costume repertoire consists of your typical scary being-witch, ghost, vampire, monster, grim reaper. There aren't too many ironic or tongue-in-cheek costumes. I got many puzzled reactions at last night's party for dressing up as the Urduliz Bridge Champion of 1990. (My costume consisted of a hat and a bridge trophy found in the depths of a storage closet in my apartment.)

Under my umbrella

It rains a lot in Bilbao in the fall and winter. So bilbainos don't mess around when it comes to keeping themselves dry. Everyone carries hardcore, quality, metre-long, SERIOUS umbrellas. What's great is that in the entryway to every public building, there's an umbrella bin. When you come in, you leave your umbrella in the entry, and you pick it up when you leave. Some places even have these high-tech Japanese umbrella dryers. So civilized.

Gernika

Lots of tourists who visit Gernika find it a somber or intense experience. The city's best known as being the site of a huge bombing in 1937, when Franco got his pal Hitler to drop a bomb on what was then the traditional Basque capitol, destroying almost everything accept a gorgeous old church and an oak tree.

But I chose to visit on the last Monday of October, which may be one of the most festive days on Gernika's annual calendar. Gernika's well-known for it's weekly Monday farmers' market, but El último lunes de octubre combines an extra-large market with music, drinks and festivities as part of the town's fiestas.

It was grey, cold and raining hard, but that didn't stop the party. The whole town centre was filled with stands and stalls selling local cheeses, vegetables and fruit, flowers, honey, and even tractors and clothing. Sagardoa, or alcoholic apple cider, is a local speciality, and most stands would sell you a bottle and pour the whole thing into plastic cups for you to drink while wandering around the market ( or to chug with your teenage friends while huddling under an awning.)

I tried txakoli, a Basque sparkling white wine, and lots of local cheeses. I really wanted a talo, which was a sausage wrapped in this hand-pounded dough tortilla thing cooked over an open fire. But after waiting 30 minutes in line at the food table, listening to old people yelling at the young server boy in Basque about how bad a server he was, and him yelling back at them how if you wanted a hand-made talo you'd have to be patient, and them yelling back at him that young people these days have no respect for their elders, I decided to opt for more cheese and cider.

Trassssssssshy!

Any city has different types of nightlife. Everyone knows that going out on Crescent St. in Montreal is different than getting a drink on the Plateau. When you arrive somewhere new, discovering what happens where after dark is an important part of getting to know the city.

And I think after last night we can conclude that Calle Iturribide can be classified as trashy. (Not that trashy is necessarily a bad thing, either. Just wait.)

We're not talking red-light district herion addict trashy. (You can find that in the San Francisco neighbourhood of Bilbao.) Iturribide is a narrow, cobblestoned street that winds uphill for what seems like miles from Plaza Unamuno in the Casco Viejo. It's bar after bar the whole length of the street, with alcoves, alleyways and dimly-lit staircases snaking off to either side. As is typical in parts of the Casco Viejo, it's Medieval meets Industrial.

The atmosphere could be described as 'the night before the apocalypse.' Hordes and hordes of young people in groups overflowing out of bars, drinking and carousing in the streets. Some take their pints out from the bar and form impromptu terrasses on the street, while other just hanker down with their two-liter bottles of homemade kalimotxo ( red wine and Coke!) No one on the whole street is over 30. Even though every single bar on the street has a bathroom, every 5 metres there's some guy peeing against a wall. There are broken bottles and garbage everywhere. Total chaos.

If there's one thing to be said about Iturribide, it's that it's utterly un-pretentious. Those too preppy, classy, or old for the street' form of grimy hedonism party elsewhere. And though I'm glad to have experienced what Iturribide was all about...in the future I think I will too.

Summer Time, and the living is easy...

I woke up this morning freaked out because all the clocks in the house said one time, and my cell phone and computer said another. The European equivalent to Daylight Savings Time ( or Summer Time, as it's called here) had ended, and everything connected to the web automatically updated itself. ( Of course, it took my roommates and I several sleepy Sunday-morning minutes to come to this conclusion.) Wooh for gaining an extra hour!

Las Arenas and Portugalete

Sunday afternoon it was just me and the old people. Oh, and a couple of families. I personally think the water front of Las Arenas is pretty enough for people of all ages to stroll along. For at least 4 kilometres you're treated to historic architecture and river views, beaches, boats, fishermen and parks. The Puente Colgante is a UNESCO heritage site, or, regardless, just plain cool.

But it seems like young people, if they don't happen to be tourists looking to take a little sun and walk off the remnants of the previous night's fiesta, don't like to go for Sunday afternoon walks. Oh well, I'll be in good practice for when I get old.

Me and Justin Timberlake

My high school student find it absolutely HILARIOUS that my last name is MacDonald. They have no idea that it's actually a pretty common name; they've only ever heard of the restaurant.

Today was the first time I met one of the classes of 17 and 18-year-olds. Their teacher told them I was coming, and somehow they knew that my last name was MacDonald. They thought it was so funny. Before I came to the class, they covered the blackboard with McDonald's golden arches and wrote "I'm lovin' it" all over the place. They died laughing when I turned around to erase the board and I thanked them for the nice drawings.