Bazko

(All pics at the end-sorry for the uncooperative-ness) If you are curious about the general strike, you can find some pics here. Everything, but everything was closed. Which was followed, after one more day of work, by the long Easter holiday-most people have at least one and a half weeks off for it, some people have two. We were visited by my folks, who gamely complied with our every over-scheduled whim, undoubtedly resulting in serious historic-cultural not to mention linguistic whiplash in addition to the truly utterly horrible jetlag that accompanies your average trans-Atlantic flight. We did, however, get to see a bunch of neat places. We strolled the coast in Donostia and ate some pintxos (artfully arranged bar snacks, largely fried). We walked around Hondarribia, which is a lovely coastal town where I like to engage in games of Fantasy Real Estate. We had a tour of an old cathedral that was undergoing renovation and archaeological study in Gasteiz, which is also home to the New Cathedral, which is home to a bunch of creepy and deeply strange stone ornamentation. We saw the shrine of St. Ignatius of Loyola in Azpeitia, which clearly confirmed my suspicions that Jesuits are way way too serious for me. There was a second trip (and there will be more) to the Abbadia castle, previously reviewed here, in Hendaia, a rain-soaked stroll around Irunea (you may know it as Pamplona), to Gernika to see its assembly house and its oak tree, and we poked around the Guggenheim Bilbao. Mostly, we walked. And also, we ate...