Facebook Global, Shop Local

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. – Adam Smith.

Bilbao has made me into a clotheshorse. I walk around town window shopping and fantasizing about the shirts and shoes I’m going to buy once I find the best bargain. Unless you’re 20-something, around here you generally don’t go out for lunch, dinner, shopping, or even coffee dressed to mow the lawn. Not many T-shirts, tank tops, sweat pants, or cargo shorts on the street. None, in fact. People in the traditionally prosperous Basque Country put on the Ritz more than we do in the boondocks of northern California. This presents a challenge to those of us who packed five months’ worth of all-purpose attire into a single checked bag.

Side Note: There are even more pijos (loosely: “upper-class clotheshorses”) over in San Sebastian, as my independent-study student Lauren blogs in her recent post “Rebajas and Winter Fashion.”

At home in the US I’d be shopping the Internet, but here I’m browsing the actual 3-D city streets, pushing my way through pedestrian-clogged sidewalks, squeezing through the crowds of smoking drinkers spilling out of every café, and jostling for position in front of the best window displays.

And I have never seen so many shops selling shirts, shoes, and clothes in general. Not only that, but bookstores appear almost every block, and stuff is offered for sale that you just don’t see much in the States: pipes and cigars, jewelry, leather, swords, jumbles of miscellaneous electronics, umbrellas of every size and description, and a hundred kinds of cheeses, under hanging forests of hams.

And the fish. Really, really fresh fish on beds of ice, some of them unfamiliar and even hideous to me, like those little wide-mouthed jobs with bug eyes and rows of razors for teeth. Presumably they are for eating, and not just frightening disobedient children.

Etiquette Note: Amy learned that when you line up at the counter (for example, one of the hundreds of numerous different stalls within the incredible indoor market  La Ribera) you approach the crowd of customers asking ¿quien es la última? – in effect, who’s at the end of the line? – so everyone has a clear idea who’s la próxima.  Like the streets, it resembles a free-for-all, but it isn’t: cooperation reigns, not Adam Smith-style cowboy capitalism.

Recently I’ve started “slow-shopping” at the numerous little shops in Abando, our own neighborhood. When we first arrived it was easy to walk two blocks to the vast edifice of El Corte Inglés, a department store along the familiar lines of Macy’s, with a full supermarket on the sixth floor. It’s way more fun and rewarding, however, to get to know the local shopkeepers and hang out with them on a routine basis. Frutería, panadería, charcutería, and every other kind of specialist are equally close-at-hand and offer the chance to interact with real live humans, more human even than the assembly-line clerks at the big-box store. It takes more time, but you don’t have to walk through cosmetics and ride the escalator past home furnishings, cheesy artwork, and lady’s underwear to pick up a couple of melons.

The hanging hams of Damocles.

One Day’s Retail Odyssey:  Amy has been taking a Basque cooking class and wished to prepare salmon in parchment to celebrate Tom and Ellen’s return from Madrid. So I wandered around the corner to Pescaderías Vascas, the fish market pointed out to me by our landlady Izaskun when I first arrived almost two months ago. It’s a small storefront on a side street with a huge high ice-filled counter worked by three or four people who could well comprise a family, though I’ve never asked. I mentioned my landlady, congratulated the mother, I presume, on being so busy, negotiated an order for cuatro filetes in my schoolboy Spanish, and as soon as my turn arrived one of the “daughters,” or so I style her, brought out from the back a whole salmón the size of a greyhound. “Dad” took his semicircular cleaver, beheaded it, and indicated for my approval the size of the piece he’d cut for me. In a few slices he had converted it to four filets, checked that I wanted them sin espinas and sin piel, and in minutes I was back on the sidewalk, fresh catch in hand.

Then I headed for a corner charcutería I’d noticed the day before while shoe-shopping down by the river. There I pretended to confess to Claudio, the proprietor, that I’d sinned by buying lousy ham at the supermarket, swore a mock promise to always buy from him, agreed that neither of us would ever retire, joked about why I wasn’t working on a Friday (“¿estamos al Día de San Viernes?”) tasted a few custom-cut samples, and walked out with a quarter-kilo of buttery but pricey jamón ibérico.

Then to Correa e Hijos, the panadería we’ve been patronizing (motto: “Nuestra Pan del Cada Día”) where even at the busiest times the women at the counter light up when one of “their Americans” comes in or even walks by and waves through the window. I get to share smiles with them and with my buddy Asier, who works mostly in back and introduced himself by showing me the tattoo on his forearm: A-S-I-E-R. He commutes from Cantabria, has toured the States, and likes to ask us geocultural questions: “¿Nevada? No está lleno de mormones?”

Benevolent self-interest.

We laugh about the lousy weather, and I leave with a cheery English-language farewell (“So long! See you later!”) and two oven-warm baguettes, or barras normales as Asier taught me to call them. Over to the pastelería where Asun cuts me big slices of ruse, a feather-light but oh-so-rich chocolate mocha meringue. In less time than it takes me to type these words she wraps them in a little cardboard and waxed paper cage, ties it with a red ribbon, takes my money, bids me agur, and turns to la próxima.

I go through similar routines to pick up two more basic food groups, coffee and wine. Now laden like a pack mule, my last stop is Arnaga, the alta papelería in the storefront of our apartment building, which I’ve never yet visited. I need a few sheets of high-quality stationery, and when I walk in I am immediately recognized as the new guy on the street, the Californian renting Izaskun’s fifth-floor flat. I’m there for 15 minutes getting acquainted with Alaia and her aunt who runs the place. The tía makes me promise to stop in and say hello every time I pass by, and to “like” them on Facebook.

• Salmón: 15 euros
• Jamón: 20 euros
• Pan: 3 euros
• Pasteles: 5 euros
• Café: 7 euros
• Tinto Reserva: 8 euros
• Papel:  3 euros
  • Feeling a part of a non-Facebook community: inapreciable.

 

Bar Talk

No corner bar is complete without its forest of hanging hams.

Hay pecados, pero no pecadores.  – Spanish proverb

So, in my last post I hope I made it clear that, in Bilbao, you don’t drink at home. You go out. But I always regret it afterwards. Not drinking, but bellying up to the bar and introducing myself by ordering my poison in a few simple and easy words of Spanish:  una cerveza, or un café solo. Too late, I remember that the person behind the counter is going to see through my easy smile, flat belly, and fashionable attire to the uncultured and savage simpleton within.

In the Basque Country, like much of Old Europe, exchanging money for goods and services traditionally involves more ritualized conversation and verbal hijinks than just ¡hola or por favor. Ordering generic drinks in monosyllables, as if in a cowboy movie – “Hey, barkeep! Whiskey!” – comes off as rude and clueless in this relatively high-context culture. Anyway, when’s the last time you did that: swagger into a bar, catch the bartender’s eye, and come out with nothing more courteous or creative than “beer”?  As if you’ve been lost in the desert, and can only plead desperately for relief. “Water! For the love of God, señor, water!”

No, anyone that wasn’t born in a barn, as my mom used to say, engages said bartender with witty repartee on the order of, “hey, hello, snowing pretty hard outside, isn’t it? I’ll try a pint of that Lagunitas IPA, please” or “what’s up, how are you doing, which California zinfandels do you pour by the glass?” or “I’ll take a Grasshopper this morning, Brian, light on the crème de menthe, please.”

Don’t just say “fino” or they’ll think you’re trying to say “vino” and God knows what you’ll get, probably some of that sweet wine only Tim likes.

Yes, even a foreigner so verbally adroit as yours truly (even if I do say so myself) must sound to local ears like the advance guard of a Visigoth invasion, a semi-articulate brute disguised in a trendy patterned scarf, Gore-Tex parka and Italian loafers grunting “Me wants beer.” I’ve heard it called “Tarzan Spanish.” It gets the job done, usually, but does nothing to enhance the beauty of anyone’s day or endear me to the neighborhood, whose ancestors have been transacting orders for beer, wine, and cider in these same taverns for hundreds or thousands of years.

Besides, a slight vowel shift, a lack of proper emphasis, the wrong verb ending, and you can be getting in over your head pretty quickly. Case in point: I heard one of my students say to a camerero, or think he was saying, quiero dos cervezas – standard tourist talk for “I want two beers.”  OK, a little short on the social graces, but hardly fatal. The bartender only stared at him blankly. Turns out what he had actually said was closer to quieres deshierbéis, meaning something like “Do you want I should pull out your weeds?” In the Basque Country, you smile when you say that.

I seem to hear a chorus of practical, get-to-the-point Americans thinking out loud, “well, who cares, as long as you pay good money for it?” (And besides, “aren’t they still grateful we took care of the Nazis for them?” No, they aren’t, because we didn’t – the United States government supported Spain’s Fascist dictator, and US automakers sold vehicles to both sides during WWII, and … and … never mind.)

I’ll have what he’s having, please.

No, it’s not that bartenders dislike Americans, or particularly love them either, as a rule. It’s just that the service economy here is not based on fawning over customers for a tip, or treating a peevish lout like an English lord. My bartender, the servers, even the men and women who bus tables, are all paid pretty well and get free higher education and health care. So they’re not going to give me a fake smile, not to mention the time of day, if I behave like a surly and oblivious slut. Sure, my second language skills are poor, but I’m taking classes, and I do try, and when all else fails, I’ve had a lot of practice at making self-deprecating wisecracks. And I’m pretty sure I don’t emit that faint trace of exasperation, that thinly veiled irritation that things are done differently here, called by different names even, that I’ve noticed in a few outlanders like this bejeweled EE-UU dowager in a Paris cafe: “Hey, you, gimme coffee, or whatever the hell you call it here.” (I think she’s still sitting there.)

I did run across one jerkwad of a bartender a few years ago in San Sebastián’s Centro Romántico, a presumably well-paid young man who was quite unsympathetic to my clumsy attempt at ordering a glass of wine. I hadn’t been in town many days, and was becoming aware of these local terms of art used instead of the generic translation of “red wine,” and I tried them all out on him, hoping, I guess, that he’d prove to be a live interactive version of Rosetta Stone and help me out.

I warmed him up with some social niceties at first, even a salutation in Basque: Kaixo, por favor, ¿qué tal? ¡Muy buenas! Then, using the politest verb tense possible, the future subjunctive that communicates “if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I should like” sort of attitude, I stammered out: Quisiera un … ummm … Un tinto? Un crianza? Un chiquito?  He stared at me, grew this look of great cosmic disgust, spun on his heel, his bad-boy Basque dreadlocks flying behind his pointy little pierced ears, and poured me three, count ‘em, three different glasses of wine, banging them on the bar with a pouty insouciance. I was so embarrassed that I drank them all, paid the tab, and staggered home to spend the evening with my Spanish-English dictionary.

Epilogue: Partly because they had some really good squid pintxos, I got up the nerve to go back to that bar about once a month, each time gaining fluency and command of the local colloquialisms, and while Patxi or Aitor or whatever his name is never became my best friend, he did finally give me a grin and a grudging nod when I managed to come out with the correct formula to conjure up a single glass of good Rioja.

I Love a Parade … and a Pintxo

“All people are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to party.”

There’s a statue of US President John Adams in the Gran Vía, because in 17-something he wrote nice words about the ancient Basque habit of self-government. Last Tuesday we ran into Mr. Alien-and-Sedition-Act, and although a devout Congregationalist, there he was, celebrating in the streets of Bilbao like a common papist.

Our beloved roommate Ellen offers her look at Carnaval 2013 in Bilbao, here. I shot some video and put a few short clips on YouTube, here and here.

Note the almost universal skills of umbrella management, and how little the steady rain dampens the performers’ spirit, or for that matter, the crowd’s.

Bilbainos, like most Spaniards (but don’t call them Spanish!) and probably most Europeans in general, take to the streets as often as possible, no matter the weather or time of day. Unless you’re a mad scientist or other reclusive type, it’s not “normal” to habitually stay at home or receive friends there, as a rule. It’s much more normal to meet them for a drink or a stroll somewhere. In fact, in the Basque Country the expression for a city dweller is kaletarra (“street person”) or kalekumea naiz (“son of the street”). Apartments here are small by US and even French standards, and as our friend Bob Johnston the former Truckee town planning commissioner and Amy were saying to one another a while back, Americans have more capital invested in private homes than most Europeans do. Here many more people own apartments, but they tend not to live in them as much as use them. They come in for a landing  to sleep, shower, change, and then take off again to work or socialize.

Here the gross national capital is invested in a high level of public services, the daily street cleanings, sidewalk sweepings, and trash removal, not to mention parks, transportation, schools, health care, libraries, and museums. People live their lives together, as a society. They love a parade, a demonstration, or a walk in the park. They will go bar-hopping, window-shopping, or cafe gossiping at a moment’s notice, and usually on a daily schedule at routine times and places. How else could all these eating and drinking establishments, easily a half-dozen in most city blocks, stay in business? On the other hand, you are never more than a 30-second walk from somewhere you can get a coffee, a glass of beer, a plate of snacks, and a friendly chat with a bartender or fellow traveler.

The scale and artistry vary, but this is the standard countertop display.

You may be thinking that this street life could get expensive. No, when a glass of excellent rioja or a café con leche sets you back $2.00-2.50 and every bar counter is groaning under its load of pintxos at $1-2 each, in the immortal words of my good friend Koldo in San Sebastián, “why not?” It was the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville who observed in the 1830s that Americans prefer to get “decently drunk” by their own fireside, but among decent folks here in the Basque Country, anyway, obvious drunkenness is frowned upon. Nobody drinks beer by the pint, or puts away a bottle of wine unless it’s with a big meal, and there’s a whole vocabulary of words for a short one: a zurito is about 8 oz. of beer, a chiquito an inch or so of vino tinto. You munch your pintxos, drink up, and move on. People imbibe to feel alegre (“merry”) rather than to get wasted. My Bizkaian friend Esti cites her father’s motto poco y bueno (loosely, “a little bit, but make it good”) to which I’d personally add a menudo (“often”).

In Mourning for the Sardine

It’s not an effigy of Benedict on that float — it’s Bilbao Mayor Inaki Azkuna, who won the 2012 prize for best mayor in the whole world

It’s my second Carnaval, the astronomically determined holiday known as the Lunar New Year in Asia, and to us Americans as Mardi Gras. In the Catholic West, Fat Tuesday is your big blow-out before 40 days of ritual self-denial. Here in Bilbao we government functionarios at the University of the Basque Country and our students enjoy three extra days off, although Tom and Ellen had to attend  their language classes at the Instituto Hemingway. It could be worse — Benedict had to give up the papacy for Lent.

In Bilbao, Carnaval is bookended by two raucous parades that take place rain or no rain (notice I didn’t say “shine” — note the umbrellas in the photos), regardless of the weather with a general sense of merriment and ongoing celebration making a welcome punctuation to the cycle of years and lives, much like Christmas does for us, which is not quite such a big deal here as in the states, at least from a commercial perspective, even if it does last longer.

_________

I must pause for breath after that  last sentence!

Not many periods — Hemingway hadn’t invented the short sentence yet.

Rosana, my Spanish composition teacher, has repeatedly noted that in English, and in Spanish written by English speakers, the sentences are generally too short to interest her, and I have noticed the average length of a Spanish sentence is greater, for example in the sad little early 20^th-century short stories by Pío Baroja we’re reading in class, not to mention in the 16^th-century picaresque tale of Lazarillo de Tormes which I’m struggling through on my own, in which what used to be called “periods” – and which we today call “sentences” — march on and on, piling up clause after clause to create this undulating and elastic rhythm, but of course in the process losing the attention of anyone who needs to get to the point, which in my business-writing textbook we learn is an important cross-cultural difference in communication style: that Americans are always impatient to close a deal, which is seen as impolite and even barbaric in high-context cultures which place more emphasis on building relationships and the surrounding social amenities thereto.

__________

Checking out the slopes from Puente del Arenal

So it’s carnival weekend. Some shops are closed, some open. Some government offices ditto. Life goes on, even on Sunday when everything’s normally closed anyway, as the cafes engorge and disgorge a steady stream of customers, with smokers nowadays exiled to outside tables or the little sidewalk service windows that a lot of establishments have suddenly sprouted. It’s still raining most of the time, with occasional slivers of sun. Amy looks out our sixth-floor window, sees a scrap of blue and declares it to be fine weather, and then admits that her “standards have lowered.” The Bilbainos call it febrero loco. Last night, on the hillsides above town, snow. And down by the river, the “Burning of the Sardine,” the traditional carnival closing ceremony with celebrants dressed as penitents and lots of crocodile tears.

La Quema de la Sardina

Over in San Sebastian, Koldo and Mertxe blame us for bringing the rain, and have left to spend a couple of weeks at their second home in Dénia, on the arid Mediterranean coast near Alicante, to “dry their bones” after 32 consecutive days of wet weather. I went into El Corte Inglés, the big department store around the corner, to purchase a new umbrella after mine was shredded by a particularly violent gust of wind last week. You don’t leave home here without an umbrella. I fondled the sturdier, more expensive, “windproof” model that was on sale, and asked the clerk if it carried a guarantía. She broke into laughter. Nope. Not here. Not for an umbrella.

If it rains tomorrow, I am told, we will set a record for the most consecutive rainy days in 87 years. Either this is not normal, or else the Bilbainos like to complain as much as they do party.

Fun and Basque Games

It’s a bigger than usual contingent of students this semester here in Bilbao, and the numbers warrant various interesting outings such as a few weeks ago when a bunch of us Americans (and one Brit from our international contingent) took the Metro north along the Rio Nervión to the seaside town of Getxo, where we walked a mile to a fronton (literally, a handball or pelota court, but traditionally also a center of Basque culture).

Getxo

There, seated in the bleachers, we were treated to an exhibition of several of the herri kirolak — Basque games of strength. These dozen or so events originated in the rural lifestyle of ancient Euskal Herria where every man was either a fisherman or a farmer and one’s ability to perform heavy labor equated to survival and prosperity. It also helps to explain how, in the 800s, a horde of Basque farmers whipped a platoon of Charlemagne’s mounted knights as they crossed the Pyrennes at Roncevalles. The heavily armored soldiers were dismounted by a hail of logs and boulders from the surrounding mountainsides, and dispatched as they lay wriggling helplessly on their backs like ironclad turtles. The French were so embarrassed by this upset that the medieval epic Song of Roland rewrites the defeat to make the Basques into Moorish knights.

We saw four husky and good-natured young warriors demonstrate the following events:

Harri jasotzea, or stone lifting: these spherical weights range between 100-200 kg, or 220-440 lbs. and the contest is to lift it as many times as possible before busting a gut.

Trontza, or wood sawing: the familiar old crosscut saw applied to a big log on a pair of sawhorses: how many slices in a given time?

Txinga eramatea, or weight carrying: holding a 100 kg weight in each hand, contestants walk as far as possible before croaking.

Giza-abere probak, or dragging: this block of stone was said to be 1600 kg (nearly two tons) and is pulled from one end of the fronton to the other and then back again by a team of four, with two others on each side to steady the weight.

Lasto altxatzea, or bale lifting: with the help of a block and tackle, the contestant hauls a 45 kg (100 lb) sack about 25 feet in the air, then lets it fall and at the last moment grabs the rope so he is hauled 4-6 feet into the air and his weight can get the bale started on its next lift; again, as many times as possible in about 5 minutes.

Afterwards the students got a chance to put their backs into it, earning cheers and respect from the local sportsmen. This is Jameson on lasto altxatzea, one side in a sokatira, or tug of war, and Kelsey, in high-heeled suede leather boots, on her second lap of txinga eramatea.