Elurra

There's winter over there-but not so much down here, where stuff that people try hard to grow as houseplants can be found willy-nilly on the roadside.

                                 Major ambition this week: breathing through BOTH nostrils.

Eat Your Creeps

From the menu at the bar just downstairs from where we live. Just being a scold pointing out that I could take a slow train to the French Republic from here in under 45 minutes. Just saying.

Tradition

Another Saints' Day, another day off...January 20th is the day of San Sebastián, patron of that city and repeller of the bubonic plague. In Donostia they start celebrating the night before-people dress up as soldiers or chefs and play music and beat drums. This goes on through the night and the next day, with marchers representing schools and the many gastronomic societies in the city. Why celebrate a saint that was martyred during Roman times with 19th-century trappings? Nobody seems to know exactly why, but it has something to do with Napoleon and locals picking on his soldiers when they occupied the Iberian peninsula. Also, since much of Donostia burned in the early 1800s, a lot of stuff is left from that time-lots of wrought iron, marble, elaborate wooden facades etc.-folks familiar with New Orleans would recognize the style. And any night out with your gastronomic society? Probably a good night. I've met people who belong to these societies-folks get together and plan big meals and chill out every once in a while. Sounds like my kind of club. If I ever start one, it will have an almond theme. We made the mistake of baking for the neighbor who has given us piles of almonds from her family's farm in Spain and so we have been flooded-with more almonds, some of which were garrapiñada, or carmelized. Any Californian readers who have been to Gilroy lately may want to check out this recipe-these things are more addicting than, well, marzipan. Really. 

Marketing

At the grocery store: Snob brand jelly. It (or more properly, 'esnob,' since Spanish speakers need to warm up to the 's' as in 'espaguetis') means the same thing in Spanish as it does in English. I guess it's the Grey Poupon school of marketing.

Urte Berri

We started the New Year by climbing a mountain-a common tradition, with lots of people gathering at the top with their families. It was not the first time (I should know better by now) in which a proposed outing was portrayed as a casual little jaunt, but turned out to be a near-vertical mud scramble in which I felt woefully unprepared for having left my intravenous Gatorade and pocket defibrillator at home. The Spanish-speaking kid in mud-encrusted pants who was bodily dragged the last hundred meters or so by his father said it best when he said "Very bad! I'm going to die! Please stop!" I was right there with him, but unfortunately I'm too big to pull that one off. After getting my equilibrium back, it was actually a lovely excursion, with members of our group pouring out some champagne at the top. There were a number of cromlech, or prehistoric burial sites, near the summit. For those of you who are thinking of visiting sometime, this is also the part of Europe where they have cave paintings. Many thanks to Igor, Arkaitz, Nerea, Olatz (yes, those are actually people's names-it takes a bit of practice), and of course F for a lovely time. Mid-week we headed to Bilbao, which is to the west, to see the Fine Arts Museum. Being in the shadow of the Guggenheim Bilbao didn't seem to diminish its appeal (Wednesday was free admissions day), and it couldn't hurt that they have a large collection that includes works by El Greco and Mary Cassatt. We also saw the Puente Vizcaya, which is an old bridge that  carries passengers from one side of the Nervion River to the other in a tram, and is one of the few remaining examples of its kind. Bilbao, unlike Donostia, is very utilitarian and home to captains of industry and finance. I have become spoiled by the beauty of Donostia and find Bilbao to be, well, a lot like a wealthy Pittsburgh. Not far from the bridge is a statue to a former port engineer in which the engineer is calmly seated, in a 19th-century suit, while he watches Jupiter and another god duke it out for dominance over the waves of the sea.