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.