Wanna Hear a Dirty Joke?

Mua ha ha ha...

Paleo Pottoka=Your Next Punk Band?

 Chilly time of year, not that awesome for traveling. So pigs and churches it is. These are my special pottokak neighbors. I occasionally see the gent who owns them in the morning, just standing in the middle of the field with his tiny horses and looking really happy. Forget positive thinking, peeps. It's all about the tiny horses. Like cats, but you can ride them.
The church in the third picture is at the top of a fort that crowns a perilous rock face. The fort played a part in one of the Carlist Wars. The wars were a bunch of conflicts between monarchy and republicanism, official Catholicism and secularism. Surprisingly, the Basque Country sided with the monarchy during the first Carlist war, in part because they thought that the royals would uphold their traditional foral laws, which granted them significant autonomy. There were also warring factions within the royal family.
Also: pigs. It will be St. Thomas Day in Donosti a few days before Christmas, which equals ham. For the moment, these folks at the bottom were oinking it up, acting like they didn't just eat every last acorn on the forest floor.

The Principality of the Thing

Spent some time in Asturias last weekend. It is situated in the very dramatic Picos de Europa and has a long industrial history with many signs of the medieval past. There was recently a big strike in which the miner's union marched to Madrid to protest coal subsidy cuts. The EU is a Kyoto Protocol signatory with specific greenhouse gas emission targets, so it is not possible for them to continue burning coal and still meet emissions goals, and yet a major cut to that industry has been catastrophic to this region's economy. Tricky, tricky. Thanks to some generous friends, we spent a night in the Narnia-esque Snow Palace.

The museum of steel and ironworks. Reminded me for all the world, of well, this. Sounds boring but actually...kind of cool. At least if you went to grad school for metals.  

Like a lot of the Spanish state, Asturias has an indigenous language that is not Spanish. The Asturian language is Latinate, like Spanish, but it has a heavy Portuguese influence. Very few people speak it, and it does not enjoy the same legal status as Catalan, Galicia, or Basque. Of course, that doesn't stop some Asturian speakers from expressing a desire to secede from a Spain in crisis.

A coat of arms in the city of La Felguera.

Another example of the Asturian language.

A view from inside the museum of iron and steelwork, which was originally a cooling tower for a factory.

An arch in an Oviedo park. Oviedo is the capital of Asturias.

View of the Picos de Europa in La Felguera. Real estate is incredibly inexpensive for reasons that may be obvious.

One of the best bird names ever in Spanish: pavo real (royal turkey). See?

Cathedral of San Salvador, Oviedo.

Burrito

Basque cuisine is marvelous, but it is around this time of year when I would gladly exchange some misdemeanor on my part for a little Mexican food (mole! mole!), or a Thai restaurant in the vicinity, or some pho, or Buddhist Vietnamese, or or...Also, baby donkeys. Well, baby cats>baby birds>baby goats>baby horses>baby donkeys. But still. Here are some of the fall colors we are getting now-a bit muted relative to some places, but not bad.

The Chill

The chill is creeping into the mountains, trying to remind us that we live in the northern hemisphere and winter is approaching. Hmph.

A conversation I had with my driving examiner recently:

Him: "Oh, you're from the U.S. They're having elections soon, no?"
Me: "Yep."
Him: "Who's the guy opposing Obama?"
Me: "Romney."
Him: "Who?"
Me: "Romney."
 Driving Instructor: "Who?"
Me: Romney."
Driving Examiner: "Who?"
Me: "Romney."
Them: "Oh! Rrrrrromnaaay!"
Me: Yep.
The world is how you pronounce it.

Aquae Tarbellicae

 We had to use up a couple voucher tickets for the French train system, and since it was the ideal distance and I had once read that a special nut-merengue dessert originated there, we ended up in the city of Dax. Sadly we did not realize our pastry objective (though the pain au chocolat was really quite something), but we did take in an organ concert at the cathedral and we wandered around the city's natural hot sulfur spa. Dax is in the Aquitaine region and its founding myth involves a Roman soldier who had no more use for his dog, who had rheumatism, and so he threw the dog in the river (!) and went about his soldiering. Upon his next pass through Dax, the dog came running to greet him and had been cured of his rheumatism by the soothing waters of the natural spa. The lesson being that dogs are not that bright, and also that you should complain if you are made late by public transit because it will mean that you get to do more traveling. We also stopped by a deeply odd little art museum that was dedicated to a little-known impressionist painter named Georgette Dupouy. It was one of the few things open on Sunday afternoon and was run by a solitary older man with the very southern European tendency to stand very very close while talking who seemed to be nursing a long and slightly obsessive grudge about Georgette's lack of recognition by the larger art world. There's a gallery of her paintings on the museum's website, if, as the text says, "you are in a state of grace" to see them.

On another note, Basque parliamentary elections are taking place, which has brought an onslaught of advertising, perhaps the most entertaining of which is the Patxitrain. Giant billboards show the current lehendekari (president of the Basque Autonomous Community), Patxi Lopez. The election results are expected to be fairly punishing toward the conservative ruling Spanish party as well as a statement of independence, so we shall see.

Kilometroak

Last weekend we went to Andoain for Kilometroak, which is an annual fundraiser for Basque-speaking schools. It was totally packed, which is good news for the school in question. There is inevitably a lot of baldly independentist sentiment expressed at these things. There was also a rare performance by Erramun Martikorena along with Mikel Markez. If the Basques had a nation, Martikorena would be a national treasure. He is from Zuberoa (which is known in French as Soule) which is famed for its excellent singers and for people who speak the rarest (and many people say the prettiest) dialect of Euskara. If folk music is your thing, check it out. Also see: Mikel Laboa.

Sagardoa

There was an apple cider fest in Astigarraga last weekend. There were hard cider tastings and a demonstration of how people originally pressed apples. Behold:

55 varieties of apple, and I didn't recognize a one.

Pouring apples into a hand-cranked press.

 

 

 

One cider house had oxen pulling a barrel as an advertisement. I have actually seen people use oxen for plowing and regular farm duties, though, so it isn't just for show.

Picking apples from the ground with spears.

Crushing it old school.

Assembling the press.

 

 

 

 

Crushing apples with big metal weights. The crushers have a special rhythm for this task.

Txalaparta players announce that the cider is ready to surrounding villages.

Greba Orokorra

Yesterday marked the second general strike in the Basque Country this year. It was called by a consortium of local unions. Although the news said that "no more than 70%" of employees chose to strike, it sure felt like everyone was out in the street. This demonstration in Donosti coincided with the annual international film festival, which was probably kind of a shock to the visitors. There were calls to reign in some of the budget cuts, (closed) banks were treated to accusations of "thieves! thieves!" There were rousing speeches by different union representatives in Basque and Spanish. There were blunt calls for independence, and singing. The protesters remained pretty focused, although some people protested in their underpants, and there were a few keffiyeh kids-by which I mean folks who display all their political sentiments at once, like a fashion of sorts. Since everything was closed, there were ample opportunities to socialize in the park and wander the 10 kilometers or so back over the hills to our apartment.

El meu aerolliscador està ple d'anguiles

We went to Catalonia last weekend to attend a wedding between a Basque man and a woman from Extremadura. The title phrase means "My hovercraft is full of eels" in Catalan, which I found on a website of useful Catalan phrases. "Useful" is clearly in the eye of the beholder, but we certainly heard lots of people speaking Catalan, and nearly all posted text was exclusively in that language. Our trip was sandwiched right in between last week's September 11th National Day and a massive public transit worker strike. There were between half a million and 1.5 million people, depending on who you ask, marching in Barcelona in support of an independent Catalan state. The picture at right is from Reuters. Catalan is sort of a mix between Spanish, Italian, and French. I would feel for a moment like I could understand what I heard and then realize oh no, never mind. Something like 10 million people speak the language and it has a very strong presence in its territory. The Catalan independence movement has long been spurred on by linguistic concerns, but has become more popular since Spain's economic crisis has caused massive employment and draconian social service cuts in Catalonia, which paradoxically has less autonomous control over its public administration and tax structure than the smaller Basque Country, which is closely eyeing the goings on, along with other places like Ireland and Scotland that have independence movements of their own. In terms of our actual trip, we stayed in a gorgeous converted farmhouse and enjoyed a pretty boisterous get together. In between, we very briefly walked around Banyoles, Girona, Borrasa, and Barcelona, and hope to spend more time in the area on another day. You can see that it's pretty pleasant from the pics below. 

Sycamore alley in Banyoles

Plaza in Barcelona

Apartments along a canal in Girona

Flags supporting an independent Catalan republic in Girona

Stateside

Beavers! Foiled again. At home in the Adirondacks.

Brooklyn Bridge

Green Mountains, Vermont

A garden at Hildene.

The very lovely Hildene, summer estate of Robert Lincoln, in Vermont.

Liberty is so far away.

A 'mander with a harbinger of fall in the Adirondacks.

Those iconoclastic Vermonters at the Northshire Bookstore

Vermont hardwoods