Zorionak

Christmas holidays are serious in the Basque Country-lots of time off, lots of eating and drinking. When not catching up on various projects, F and I have been making the rounds-visiting with his family and friends and eating extremely well. So well, in fact, that it may be time for Conversations With Your Pancreas:
Pancreas: You can't live on marzipan, you know.

Self: Fine then, we'll throw in some chocolate for balance (there is a Christmas-specific chocolate here that is wrapped in gold foil with the tag line "hecho de tus sueños" <made of your dreams> and it is kind of like a thick Nestle's Crunch bar, if Nestle's Crunches were crafted in cauldrons made of hammered narwhal tusks and mixed with diamond-coated whisks by immortal gold-crown wearing noble centaurs...which is to say the pancreas has no chance here)

Pancreas: Fine, then-won't cut out the sugar? Then chronic facial dermatitis it is, then. 

While hanging out with a friend of F's who lives in Catalunya, near Barcelona, we learned that the Catalans have a really interesting version of Santa Claus-to file under 'they do things different over there.' They make a little creature out of a log-they put a couple legs on it, with eyes and nose and a mouth-and they put a blanket on it at night and leave food for it starting around the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and continuing through the holiday season. The expectation is that it will (sorry to be crude) poop presents. Not iPads, mind you, but like, nuts and candies and such. They even have a song in which they hit the log with sticks and entreat it to poop candy, else they will hit it more. I can't imagine why this hasn't caught on elsewhere...
So anyway yeah, it's sheep milk season here (see baby sheep), which means...mamia. This is a Basque dessert made of fermented sheep's milk-it is delicious and will send you straight to naptime. Like we needed more desserts over here.
We recently went to the local science museum, which inexplicably has probably 20 or so very detailed scale models of Basque buildings in its front yard. Kind of surreal, but neat. Otherwise I have been somewhat remiss in my photographing duties so here are some dormant sycamores outside a sagardotegia (cider house) that I see on my regular walk, and a couple pics from a hike we went on a while back-would you trust the water from this fountain?
Wishing you and yours a most excellent New Year, and hope you have no nightmares now about pooping logs...

Santo Tomas

  The start of Saint Thomas' festival was announced yesterday by a bunch of students at our institute in traditional baserritar (19th-century Basque farmer oufits) yelling the irrintzi and playing the trikitixa (accordion) while they paraded out of the building with a big Olentzero (Basque Santa Claus) doll at 11 in the morning. Officially a way to commemorate the day that farmers came to town to pay the rent, it is now a kind of Basque Pride day, with lots of traditional arts, including eating and drinking and partying down in the rain.The Old Part of Donosti was totally packed, with people forming long lines to buy talo and txistorra-corn bread and sausage-along with cheeses, honey, Basque Cake, hard cider, and all manner of Christmas pastries. There were people selling crafts, including hand-made pelota balls. Pelota is what they call Jai Alai here-Jai Alai actually means 'happy party' in Euskara-and instead of using baskets for hurling the ball here, they usually hit it with their hands. It's crazy, but very popular, and people bet a lot of money on pelota games. There were a couple guys playing the txalaparta, which was a couple people hitting wooden blocks with sticks, and which was originally used to communicate messages between the mountains.

At some point I've got to be Donosti's Bill Cunningham and get a picture of this Anthony Bourdain look-alike from Avenida Madrid (Bourdain has gone on the record as saying that yeah, Barcelona's ok, but Donosti is where he wants to be in the end) as well as this lady I routinely see on the train who has the most impressive hair sculpture. evah. But we will save the non-baserritar style for non-festival days.

Zombies Ate My Cupcakes

This is an actual cookbook that is currently available for purchase. The review says that it has recipes for Marzipan Beetles and Gingerbread Tombstones. Sounds like Christmas cookies to me! It also says "If Ozzie Osborne made cupcakes, this would be the result."  I've been waiting so long for this! I knew Lily Vanilli would come out with another one eventually...

Chateau D'Abbadia

We had most of last week off and so we took an excursion. Just hopped on the train and after a little more than half an hour, and lots of near-comical Basque town signs later, we were in the French Republic. Hendaia is still the Basque Country, but people speak a different dialect of Euskara, and fewer people know it there than where we live. We were just across the river from Hondarribia, which is in the Spanish state-where you would never know you were right on the border because there isn't much signage in French-but in Hendaia, there's a lot of stuff written in Spanish-you can get paid a lot more to work in France, and the real estate is equal or less than what you pay here, so there are a lot of Spanish citizens who decide to learn French and improve their fortune. You also see the same calls for Basque independence from the Spanish state as you see on the other side of the border. Interestingly, all the train tracks built in the Spanish state during the time of Franco are a different width than those built in other parts of Europe-to prevent invading armies from getting supplies through. If you're taking an older track you have to stop at the border so they can fit an adapter to your train so you can cross. We walked along the coast of Hendaia, where there are many campsites and places to stay for summer vacation, and on to the Chateau Abbadie.

The castle was built relatively recently-in the late 1800s-by Antoine D'Abbadie. He was an interesting guy -born to aristocratic parents, his father was from Zuberoa (which is a Basque province known in French as Soule) and his mother was Irish. During his life he was an astronomer, anthropologist, and linguist. He spent a number of years in Ethiopia as well as the Middle East and Brazil. He had his own observatory, which was functional well into the 1970s, where he and his colleagues took manual observations with a telescope that is still at the castle, and made calculations to map the stars. The castle is now administered by the French Academy of Sciences, which recently restored the interior over a period of ten years. You're not allowed to photograph the inside, but there is a virtual tour online that I recommend. The place is just absolutely bananas-there are a lot of very detailed paintings of Ethiopian life, with springbok heads and ornate hand-painted wallpaper in Ethiopian patterns. The furniture is all heavy tropical wood with intricate carvings, and everything is symbolic-either from Catholicism, Ethiopia, the Arab world, or Ireland. All the rooms had fireplaces and gorgeous furniture that was all done up with marquetry or whatever. It's hard to imagine why the rich folks now living would ever put up with cruddy Prada stuff in light of what it used to mean to be wealthy. I mean, the craftsmanship was just ridiculous. Abbadie was buds with Napoleon, who stayed in the Emperor's bedroom, and the family had their own personal chapel, where Antoine and his wife were buried. The castle overlooks the sea and the exterior is ornamented with all kinds of stone animals- snakes, snails, elephants, crocodiles, cats, and conch shells. Anybody who visits will be going to see this place because I want to go back...
Pictures I wish I had taken this week: Bolivian woman in downtown Donostia wearing a traditional bowler hat and an iridescent (I am talking about Little Mermaid Blue) dress of her own design. Very inauspicious among all the elegant European ladies. A flock of 40 snow-white egrets-at first I saw them through the trees with a herd of sheep, and for a second, it looked like the sheep were flying. An ad in a bank window with a picture of a Sean Connery look-alike with a jovial expression at the helm of a ship with the caption "Retire like a German..bank with Caja Laboral." Do Germans all get boats when they retire? I want to know.

Auténtico Crack

So the other day my favorite cooking show host David De Jorge hosted a segment that included the North American staple peanut butter, which features prominently in his weekly segment "Guarrindongadas," which is slang for food nastiness (example: chocolate donut sandwich with ham, chorizo, and mayo). I thought this recipe was kind of clever, so I translated it here. Is it "auténtico crack" (yes, that's exactly what it sounds like)? You decide.

Peanut Liquor


8 ounces water
3 1/4 cups milk
7 Tbsp. peanut butter
1/4 cup sugar
1 pinch of cocoa powder
1 pinch of salt
1/4 cup of good rum
Bring the water and milk to a boil, then add the rest of the ingredients, save the rum, leaving it on the burner for a couple of minutes.
Put the mixture into a blender and add the rum, mix.
Keep refrigerated.

Amalur

The Basque Country is strong in environmental conservation and clean energy production-possibly because it has more industry than other parts of the Iberian Peninsula and has suffered stuff like this (borrowed and undoctored) photo shows-paper factories give off effluent that looks a lot like wine when it runs off in the river. I haven't seen this for myself but I understand it used to be a lot more common when the paper factories were running full-tilt.

Hiking is a common pasttime here,
and there are some pretty excellent natural reserves. Last weekend we headed out to Pagoeta, which had one of the most fastidiously-labelled botanical gardens I've ever seen. They had a large assortment of holly, which is a threatened species (good I was warned-I've been propagating plants to beat the band on our balcony) and lots of hardwood trees. There was a dog motel and a hydro-powered iron forge along the way.

Afterwards we headed to Zarautz, which is famous for its surfing. The island in the beach picture is supposed to look like a mouse, but I'm not so sure. The town butts right up against the sea, so when you look down the alleys, it's like National Geographic covering the movie Inception.
 

Keeping the Faith-or Not

Last week I attended a commemorative mass with F's extended family. All of them are Euskaldun Zahar, or people who speak Basque as their primary language, and the mass was in Euskara also. Spanish has gotten a wee bit easier for me through sustained effort, but I haven't done much with Euskara, so going to mass in that language makes me feel like I'm rocking out Mr. Bean style:

In any case, the history of Catholicism in the Basque Country is pretty interesting, if also complicated. Like a lot of places that have been majority Catholic during its recent history and where the church has exerted serious political influence, you often have a separation between people's perceptions of the rank-and-file priests and nuns who directly serve their communities and the higher-ups who consorted with kings, and who helped to make several decades of fascism possible. Here in Lasarte, the town was originally based around the convent, which started in the 1100s. The convent used to have sprawling gardens in the back to support its residents, which have now been turned into lawns that are open to the public. The only folks I have seen around in traditional nuns' habits are either quite old or non-European. This evolution from town center to half-empty historical site is a pretty good representation of what is happening to Catholicism in this region, and to organized religion in Western Europe generally. On the one hand you have the small-town Basque priests who preserved and protected the Basque language even when it was banned during Franco's time (which constituted a large part of the formative years of F's parents' generation). You have the Mondragon Corporation, which is a very successful group of business cooperatives that is co-owned by its workers, revered for its fair practices, based in part on Catholic social justice principles, and was started by a Basque priest. On the other hand, the clergy were traditionally among the ruling elite, and there is a strong strain of anti-elitism within the Basque culture. During the 1930s, the Basque Country was part of the Second Spanish Republic, which gave it relatively more autonomy, was anti-monarchy, and anti-clerical. Franco was able to overthrow the Republic after a very violent civil war, which included the famous bombing of Guernica in the western Basque Country. He allied himself with the more traditional Catholic bishops as a defender of the church's values (really, their standing and power within the Spanish state) and tried to squash the use of other languages besides Castillian Spanish. You can see why people have mixed feelings about the church. Holidays still have a religious basis, but the average age of the parishioners at any given mass has got to be like 60 and not a lot of people are in attendance. Nearly all marriages in this province are held by a civil authority alone. There are a couple small storefront Evangelical churches that are mostly attended by Latin American immigrants, and you occasionally get a knock on your door from Jehovah's witnesses, but a substantial portion of people from our generation and younger do not subscribe to any particular religious tradition. Children are sent to religious education classes en masse but they usually stop attending church in their teens. It is a pretty sudden change in the orientation of this society and it is hard to say what it means for the traditions and the culture of the region. It does make you wonder, though, how much of a religious faith depends on its relation to the secular culture. What makes it relevant, or not? Do changes in community structures, like the adoption of the internet and increasing prosperity, drive these kinds of changes? It seems inexorable and vaguely sad, but perhaps it will make for an eventually more progressive branch of the church, or something else completely. In any case, that is quite enough armchair anthropology, and there are churros to be had..until next week (or the next funny poster I see in the street...)

Seen

Seen in bookshop window: "The Basque Man Who Didn't Eat Too Much," set in 2049 in a dystopian world in which everyone eats processed soy food from China and only the Basques are keeping the culinary traditions alive, including the protagonist, who has a great family recipe for cheesecake. Couldn't make it up if I tried. Got to see if the library has this one...

On Elections

So just a quick procrastinatory post-these posters are all over town, advocating vote abstention as a way of showing one's disapproval of the system. Killer graphic, no?
F tells me that at one point, the Anarchists won enough votes to actually get a representative elected, which is sort of pretty hilarious if you ask me.
A friend from the Dominican Republic has posted this video in support of a presidential candidate there (don't watch the whole thing or your head will explode):

I think that U.S. presidential elections could be substantially improved by the addition of merengue. Both kinds. Best wishes to the candidates and the uhm, puppetmasters.

Terms of Endearment

I took French in school and was overamused by the term of endearment "mon petit chou-chou" (my little cabbage). The bi-weekly paper in Lasarte has a section of birthday and anniversary greetings, which can be pretty entertaining. My favorites are "pitufina" (Spanish for Smurfette) "txokomarrubizko muxu" (chocolate strawberry kiss), "paaa" (the sound of a kiss, which you only say for children) and "txipiroiak" (squids). This morning someone brave was climbing alone on Santa Barbara. I also saw a txantxangorri -the European robin. I should also note that Lasarte is on one version of the Camino de Santiago, which is a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James that runs through hundreds of kilometers among several different paths that you can take through a big chunk of Europe, ending in Galicia. It's like a Catholic Appalachian trail-you can get a Compostela, or certificate of completion of the pilgrimage, under certain circumstances. Near the sign for Camino de Santiago are a bunch of temporary billboards for the upcoming elections. Can you imagine how much money the U.S. would save if it would restrict campaigns to the 2 weeks before the election? Every couple hours cars with bullhorns drive by, playing pre-recorded messages about their political party. It's almost like the internet never happened...until you get political party ads on your Facebook page. And lastly there is pie. Maple hazelnut-because there was still some maple syrup left from my last trip here in 2008 and because there are no pecans, but a mountain of hazelnuts. Thinking of Thanksgiving-

A Todos los Santos

This week we had All Saints' Day off (and Halloween too because heck, it falls on a Monday, and who is really going to get anything done?). It is a quiet day when families go to the cemetery to clean the headstones and place flowers and other gifts. When you pay for a burial, you are only assured to have that spot for ten years or so-after that, the bones or the ashes of your loved ones are moved to a cubby or you have to find somewhere else for them-the reason being, as far as I can understand, that people don't want to expand the cemeteries and lose arable land. Coming from what the writer Toby Young referred to as "a bloated sow of a nation," it seems excessively pragmatic to me to move people's remains, but well, it's probably smart.
There was a 10K road race called Lasarte-Oria Bai! (Lasarte-Oria Yes!) during which I got tired just watching the serious athleticism on display, including an 85-year-old man who could've creamed me. They had shorter races for children, who also could have kicked my butt. I guess the idea is to start people out in some serious physical pursuit early so they are able to navigate this area's crazy mountains. I also saw what may be my favorite public display of opinion (among many), this one being about a high speed train that has been proposed to run through this area. The sheer excellence of the existing public transit system is hard to beat-I have yet to learn to drive here and have had no problems getting around-so it's hard to understand why they want to add another train. Apparently, a high-speed train would be capable of chewing up entire municipalities in its greedy maw-and among other problems-would create "garbage jobs" and would add "prisas," which means "hurries." The Spanish state is set to hold elections in a couple weeks and candidates are only allowed to campaign for 2 weeks, so this is just the beginning, I suspect. It has been pouring all weekend-I did go out for a walk and it was mass Wormicide out there. Not sure of the species around here but they are ginormous (when I was an undergrad I poisoned a bunch of worms with lead for a project-long story-but ever since I have had a relationship ranging from ambivalent to bleccccchhhh with earthworms). If you baited a hook with the small ones you could catch a whale and the big ones-well, you could ride them to Arrakis and extract like, the Spice Melange from those things. I won't even go into what happens when cars hit them. Bleeearrrrgh. Anyway. I have an appointment in Hondarribia this week, which is a lovely coastal town that still has its original defensive walls in place, so if I have any presence of mind, next week will bring some decent pics.

Lasarte-Michelin

The city where we live is a factory town, by which I mean Michelin. F's father worked in the Michelin factory for the better part of his adult life and although business has declined in recent years, the factory is vast and still forms a city at the center of the city, with its very own street names. At this point the factory
mostly makes tires for race cars and such. It would be devastating for this area if the factory ever shuts down, which is a reasonable fear as it would be lucrative for them to tear it down and build expensive apartments for people who work in Donostia. Being within the Michelin orbit is probably unrelated to Donosti's distinction of highest per-capita Michelin stars in the world. There is a very strong culinary tradition here, and even the regular folks tend to eat very well. In 10 minutes you can walk from the Michelin factory to Martin Berasetegui's restaurant, which has three Michelin stars. Berasetegui is respected, if maybe not exactly loved-word is that he's rather stingy for a guy who charges 175 euros for a tasting. For aspiring chefs and cooking show obsessives, Berasetegui makes a weekly appearance on Robin Food. Even if you don't speak Spanish you will find this show entertaining, and if you do, you will probably be a wee bit surprised at how crudely people can speak on daytime t.v. Another favorite is Arguiñano, who takes product placement to new heights but is still a very skilled teacher. Food fixations aside, we had Tuesday off and went to F's uncle's place in Berrobi, which is a tiny town not far from here. He lives in an old-school baserri, or farmhouse, where the animals stable on the first floor. The main entrance to the house goes into this room, which has a funhouse floor with a discernibly sloped (and highly sled-able) floor. It's a gorgeous, very comfortable place to be, and a pre-lunch stroll (when you hang with Basque folks you need to take pains to work up an appetite: much fried stuff in large quantities and several courses are involved) provided the usual stunning views and altitude changes. This week we have a bunch more time off for All Saints' Day, and even though they don't do Halloween here, they have their own ways of celebrating. Other forays included a ramble in Donostia, where one of the natural food stores near the train station actually has a vending machine for carne mentiras (roughly 'meat lie') for all your fake meat needs and middle-of-the-night tofu emergencies. And if you liked the Emo Cows, you will definitely like the Pottoka, or Basque pony. They're tiny-they are only about waist-high, chunky, and very friendly. Must. Remember. Carrots. Sadly I didn't have my camera with me when I was at the school of music and dance this week-the busking nearby is super-duper and this week there was a hard-core looking punk guy with a gold faux-hawk and a leather jacket with the anarchy sign on the back...playing a recorder and sweetly singing a traditional Basque folk song. Wooo. And every day I am overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of everyone I've met, who tries valiantly to help me understand what the wu tang is going on, repeating words and communicating patiently-I have yet to have a rude experience, not even in the bureau-crazy extranjeria, or foreigner's office, which sounds to me like a place where you go to buy the wool of an exotic animal from outer space, and even the 18-year-olds at the institute where I study always help me. And my last observation for the week, I promise, is that no matter how many people are around, some heretofore unarticulated law of nature dictates that some poor fool will ask ME for directions-this happens 3-4 times per week. Half the time they ask in Euskara, too. Ha ha! F conjectures that it has something to do with the contrast between my usual walking pace, which tops out at 'mosey,' with that of local people, whose pace is more like Actual Form of Transit, so lost people can catch me more easily, like a tree. Coming up: more cooking anecdotes? Or farm animals. Hm..