Aste Nagusia

Great week was
Great.

Aupa Maialen

Lasarte-Oria native Maialen Chourraut won the Olympic bronze medal in slalom kayaking today. I'm thinking of building one of those faux concrete rivers with whitewater rapids on the balcony now. Sports are, like, insomnia-killingly boring to me but I LOVE the Olympics, can't explain it. Zorionak Maialen!

Baionako Festa

We hopped a train to the French Republic yesterday to go to the last day of Baiona festivals. Baiona is still in the Basque Country, but little Basque is spoken there. We mostly heard French, which is the only official language of France, whereas Basque is one of four official languages of the Spanish state. In common with other festivals, you can see there are a lot of brass bands and similar elements.

Castle screen

Entering the city

Different flavors of giants

Le roi, c'est moi!

Killer Tomatoes

Yes, I actually am a proud graduate of what was once known as the Department of Fruits and Vegetables. Fortunately we're up a couple stories or I'd be worried about passersby succumbing to its cries of "feed me, Seymour!" Now all we need is a cow for our balcony, and we'll never have to leave our apartment again! It's basically hydroponic at this point and I'm not sure if it will hold out until the fruits ripen, but we're hoping. We headed to the artisan fair in town today to get a glimpse of my favorite cooking show host, who was going to receive an award, but alas, he was there earlier and we missed him. However, there was canned octopus (Greg Brown has a lyric about "canned trout" and it was supposed to be funny, but he's obviously never been here). I also have, unbeknownst to me, my own line of canned duck confit. Stay cool, folks. We're hearing all this stuff about the USA seeing major effects in up to half its crops due to drought and we really hope it's not true.

Mendian

Ahh, Digitalis, source of an important treatment for congestive heart failure. We will need to eat it straight up on this hike.

Most luxurious deer stand evah.

And what do you put right in the middle of the mountain? 

                            A full-service restaurant. Because you are in Europe.

 The biogeography of tiny houses on mountain summits in the Basque Country. I know this thesis has been written. But it is still weird.

I confess that sugar-sweetened electrolyte-containing sports drinks were consumed during the making of this photo montage. And I am not sorry.

Festa Festa

A dance troupe started the St. John's Day festivities. "Sorgin Jaiak" are "witch games."

Party of unknown provenance with dancing and accordions-we stumbled on this one while hiking.

 It is San Pedro week in Lasarte, which started with St. John's Day. There are festivals all over the region throughout the summer to celebrate patron saints (and well, to celebrate, full stop). Here are some photos of the events.

Saint John's fire was held right in the central square. Students typically burn their notes from the prior school year.

MOAR BRASS! This is no reluctant teenaged marching band in polyester uniforms, y'all. People parade up the street, the sidewalk, whatever during festival weeks at all hours of the day. It's like living inside a Beirut video. Or maybe I have it backwards.

Explanation of the tradition of Gigantes and Cabezones:

  F: "So there are big giants that are in the streets and people who run around with big heads. The big heads have cow bladders." Me: "Cow bladders??" F: "Yes. They're for hitting people." Me: "Hitting people???" F: "Yes. Children, mostly."

Sorgin Dantza (witch dance)

There was this incredible group called the Falcons from Catalonia. They do these human tower exercises while moving from one place to another, sometimes in tower formation.

There are a bunch of big dudes at the bottom who hold all these people on their backs and a tiny kid climbs to the top. It takes them a long time to work up to this kind of complex formation, and it is incredibly tense while you watch them all shaking and teetering. No one fell, but I did have some sympathy vertigo.

For this one, each person was added from below, pushing the others up.

Vampire Caviar

There's a new Transylvania market down the street that specializes in Romanian products. F and I were curious so we stopped in. It is basically a spotless, gleaming walk-in closet that carries routine cooking and cleaning stuff as well as Romanian food products and newspapers. The proprietor was a flamboyantly-dressed yet stern and obviously Eastern European woman who was chatting with a large square-jawed gent in what I assumed to be Romanian. When she paused to interact with us she spoke excellent Spanish. I got a chocolate bar and F was more adventurous and got a carp egg salad with onions, which is apparently #1 in Romania. The chocolate bar had strong overnotes of imitation butter with a soupçon of malt or maybe carob. I had to fight an initial disgust (an unexpected reaction for an excessive consumer of sweets such as myself) but found its overwhelming artificiality to be sort of addicting, though I wanted to scrub my esophagus with Lysol and a bottle brush after eating it, and must write a note of apology to my teeth after I finish this post. 

We live in an industrial town just outside of a fairly expensive international tourist destination, so there are a lot of immigrants from all over who end up here-from Morocco, Pakistan, China, various Eastern Europeans, Senegal, Spain, and unknown parts of sub-Saharan Africa. There are gypsies and well, one North American. There are also lots of Peruvians and various other Latin Americans who you can hear singing corridos at the karaoke bar and who have a large enough presence to warrant several locutorios where it is possible to get guanabana and tamarind popsicles at 10 p.m. As in the U.S., there are mixed reactions by the locals to immigrants, depending on their niche-there are the Chinese stores where people write nasty graffiti outside while going inside in droves to buy cheap plastic stuff and which will quickly induce infertility through BPA fumes. There are very tall, thin Africans who walk around town loaded down with purses and toys who hawk their wares to people sitting at the outside tables of bars. You see many Latin Americans in service work, taking care of the elderly or tending bar, since they already speak Spanish. As is expectable during a time of economic hardship, there is some resentment, whether warranted or not. I have heard more than one local person say something derisive about "Macchu Picchus," usually in reference to Latin Americans, regardless of whether they are actually Peruvian or not, about how they all get paid under the table and don't contribute taxes or to the national healthcare system, or some such thing. They have even said this in front of me, because well, I guess I look more like the people who are from here and am not lumped into this category, which usually makes me feel worse. Knowing how difficult it is to get through the Spanish administration, I am frankly surprised that there is as much legit commerce as there is. People wanting to contribute face quite a few barriers, not to mention that many of them are fleeing much worse economic situations than what we have here.