Nadir, my dear.

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
look out your window and I´ll be gone
You´re the reason I´m travlin on
But don´t think twice, it´s alright.
-Bob Dylan

Hey everyone! Here follows the account of my last few days. Briefly put: I seem to have hit the low point of my trip and have had to rethink the route I had planned out...but I am optimistic that it will be for the best and that by tomorrow afternoon, the dog days will be over, as Florence plus the Machine would say.

ZARAGOZA

While writing my last update, I finished an entire bottle of manzanilla by myself. I went back the next day and corrected my copious spelling errors, but decided to leave in the flowery, partially innebriated language as a warning for kids to not drink and blog. Friends don´t let friends do it. Anyway, my first afternoon in Zaragoza was pretty cool. I ran into an Irish dude at the bus station who was staying at the same hostel as me, so we navigated our way across the city together, and it was cool to have someone to talk to in English for a while. After checking in, I wandered around Zaragoza´s old town, popping into a few cathedrals on the main plaza, including the Basilica Nuestra Señora del Pilar, which allegedly contains a pillar on top of which the Virgen Mary appeared to St. James when he was bringing christianity to the Iberian Peninsula. It has quite a long history, with churches having been built on its grounds since Roman times. During the Spanish Civil War, two bombs were thrown at the church and didn´t explode. Miracle? Or sketchy Czech engineering? Either way, the shells are still on display, which was pretty cool. Fucking fascists, man. I also visited the Catedral del Salvador (commonly known as La Seo). La Seo had a free audio tour, which was awesome, and like 5 masses a day are still conducted in it, and I got to see a smaller one being performed in a smaller chapel. I wandered around for a while longer after that, just taking everything in. I really like Zaragoza. It strikes me as the type of city I would actually really enjoy living in. Not too big, but there´s a lot going on, and a ton of history. Notably, Zaragoza was founded by the Romans in honor of the Emperor Austus, and was originally named CaesarAugusta (say it a few times fast and you´ll se how ¨Zaragoza¨ evolved from it). There are a ton of Roman ruins buried underneath Zaragoza, and the city has at least 4 museums dedicated to telling different aspects of the Roman history. I had resolved to tackle the Roman museums on my second day, so I went back to the hostel, updated my blog while drinking a bottle of manzanilla, and fell in with a few Americans and Canadians. We passed around a bottle of scotch, taking pulls and trading travel stories, then headed out to find the nearest Irish pub. I had a blast with the Canadian chicks. The three of them had just done two weeks of backpacking around Morocco, and made me really jealous with their experiences in the interior of the country. We all agreed that Tangier sucked, and I was happy to hear that the rest of the country was really cool for travellers. Mental note: backback around Morocco at some point. The next morning, I got up early and went to the Aljaferia Palace, a fortified castle built a thousand years ago during the Moor´s control of the region, then subsequent Spanish monarchs tacked on bits and redid parts of it. It´s in pretty good condition, and is actually the current seat of the local legislature. That means that there are some places that aren´t open to the public, but they don´t have signs...the security guards wait for you to wander into an unmarked ¨restricted¨room and then tell you sternly that you aren´t supposed to be there. Oh well. It had some great comparisons of the architectural styles over the years, but I might have enjoyed it a bit more if I hadn´t seen the magnificent Alhambra first. It´s like that movie Equilibrium. Really awesome movie, but it came out the same year as the Matrix so nobody really paid attention to it and it wasn´t as epic so it still doesn´t get a lot of love. Back to Zaragoza. After a morning of wanderingaround the Palace, I popped into a local market and bought some fresh fruit for brunch in the park. In the middle of eating my apple, my trip to Spain took a decided turn into less awesome territory when I realized something wasn´t quite right with the fruit, or maybe with the salad I ate the night before. Either way, I guess I should have just kept to a ham-only diet. I booked it back to my hostel and spent the next 4-5 hours alternating between vomitting and being curled up in the fetal position in my bunk. Luckily, I started to feel better in the early evening, and dragged myself out of bed to see the 4 Roman history museums, culminating in an audiovisual show on the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre, excavated only within the last 30 years. I made myself eat some bread that eveing, then chatted with a nice Spanish lady from La Rioja before calling it a night.

BILBAO

I can´t begin to express how psyched I was about Basque country. I´ve always been really fascinated by it since I started studying Spanish and learned that it existed. So when I arrived in Bilbao, I had some pretty high hopes for the next few days. I tried booking a hostel online the day before I arrived, but I could only find one bed in a ¨private room¨ in a hostel that was a bit more expensive than I wanted to pay. But I figured, hey Bilbao is a pretty cool city, so I´ll just bite the bullet on this one because it will be worth it. Totally wrong about that one. So I´m pretty sure the ¨hostel¨ was not actually street legal. I trotted up to the address and there was no sign, no notoce of where to go, and it looked like a lawyers office. I was just about to try to find a tourist office, when I happened on three English chicks with giant backpacks who were looking for the same place. One of their posse already had a key, assured us it was the right place, and let us in. There was no reception area, and whoever would have served in a reception capacity was not there. It was quite lucky that I had been let in by the British chick, because I ended up waiting around for almost TWO hours before I could check in, drop off my bags, and go check out the city. I had even called the informational number for the hotel and was told someone would be back to help me check in in 30 minutes. She showed up over an hour later, and wasn´t even apologetic about it. There was only one working toilet for over 20 people, and there was a sign posted on the bathroom that you were only allowed to be in it for ten minutes. I was really glad I didn´t get my stomach virus while at this place. And the room I reserved was just an outcropping of the common room where the door wasnt flush with the hinge so it was really loud. So all in all, I was underwhelmed. As some background, there are two things that are guaranteed to put me in a sour mood: 1) you make me rushed, and 2) you make me cold. Both factors were well in play by the time I left for the Guggenheim museum. The museum closed at 8pm, and I didn´t arrive until about 6:20, so I didn´t get a chance to see everything I wanted which bummed me out a bit. I also got mad at myself for wasting too much time in abstract art. I get it 1950, you´re trying to say that art doesn´t have to be about imitating the human form or landscapes to have value, so paint something that doesn´t look like a kindergartener overturned his crayon box onto a canvas. I don´t dislike abstract art, see my notes on the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca - that place was breathtaking. I probably could have given that part of the Guggenheim more of it a fair shake if I wasn´t rushing through it so I could consider what each piece had to say, but all I ended up soaking in was yellow square, blue stripes, fingerpainting, white canvas. The more modern exhibits were really cool though. I really enjoyed this one room that had like 40-50 old tvs, each of which was playing a different interview this artist conducted with a member of this Turkish slum town that has high rates of drug use, violence, and domestic abuse. All the tvs were different, and in front of each was a chair so you could sit and have this creepy comfortable yet voyeuristic look into so many people´s mesed up lives. After the Guggenheim, I wandered around Bilbao a bit to get a feel for the city. Again, I was only there for a day, so take this with a grain of salt, but I kinda think Bilbao looks like a futuristic urban Pleasantville designed by an NYU architecture student. There was a ton of modern as well as perfectly-maintained (or perfectly imitated) older architecture, all the streets were wide and clean, lots of little modern art pieces in smaller parks, you can literally look through an urban city and see the pristine rolling hills of northern Spain a kilometer away, and the metro has these futurisic partial nautilus shell entrances. I found it had a lot of pretty things, but lacked heart. It didn´t quite feel like a real city. I saw a lot of old people, but not so many younger people. I didn´t go to the outskirts of town where the University is located, so maybe I would have gotten a different impression of Bilbao had I been outside downtown. Part of this unfavorable review might also be attributed to how cold it was. I brought one long-sleeved moisture wicking shirt just in case it got cool one night while I was hiking in Galicia. WRONG. Northern Spain is going through a notoriously cold summer this year, which means I grossly mis-packed for this leg of the trip. Shivering on my way back to my fake hostel from the Guggenheim, I stopped in at a local pasteleria and bought some handmake cookies. When I got back to the hostel, I hung out with the three british chicks, two austrian dudes, and american couple, and a french guy. The American fellow and the French dude had brought along three giant bottles of liquor, which we sipped for a while before heading out to check out Bilbao´s nightlife. Again, Bilbao had a major fail. We were there on a Friday and not a whole lot was going on. We wandered around for about 4 hours, stopping in at a salsa dance club for older folks, a place packed with jersey-shore wannabes, and a really loud pirate-themed place. I had a good time hanging out with all the people I met and if nothing else, really enjoyed that part of my experience in Bilbao. I got up early the next day to catch a bus for San Sebastian, on Spain´s northern coast. It was still really cold in Bilbao, and by now it had started to rain. My bus was almost an hour late, and the bus station in Bilbao is not an indoor one. Insult, meet injury. You two will hit it off in Bilbao. I was so excited about getting to the coast, spending a few days relaxing on the beach in the sun, and putting some less than great times behind me. Alas...

SAN SEBASTIAN (DONOSTIA in Basque)

Everyone I know who has been to Spain has told me ¨OMG YOU HAVE TO GO TO SAN SEBASTIAN¨. On paper, it looked like they were right. Gorgeous beaches, pleasant weather, surfing, beautiful old buildings, great hiking. I booked two days in a hostel ahead of time. As I waited for my bus to San Sebastian, I checked the weather forecast and realized something was terribly wrong. The temperature was dropping in San Sebastian, and the rain was set to continue indefinitely. After arriving in San Sebastian, possessing no cold weather clothes of any kind except the now-smelly long sleeve running shirt I had worn for the last 2 days, I thought it might be time to rethink this whole ¨skirting the north coast of Spain and hiking for 5 full days on a pilgrimage trail¨ plan I had been so excited about up to that point. I decided to test myresolve by walking the two kilometers in the rain from the bus station to my hotel wearing my full pack to see what it was like. Surprisingly, it wasn´t that bad. San Sebastian is a beautiful city and very walkable, and the extra weight of my pask kept my heart pumping and my body temperature up. It wasn´t a bad walk, but I had a moment of clarity when I realized that I would definitely be spending three quarters of my life for the next three years in this type of cold, rainy weather. And I am on vacation, goddamnit. At that moment, I decided to cut out my beloved pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela. I figure it would be better to do the entire month-long trail anyway, since I´m such a completist-snob. Maybe next summer or after graduation. Who knows? All I know is that I had to soak up some sun after San Sebastian. I was still pretty determined not to let the weather completely ruin San Sebastian for me. So after checknig into my hostel and taking a really hot shower to psych myself up, I went out in 15 degree (Celsius) rainy weather in my tank top, skirt, and sandals to check out San Sebastian. After about 15 minutes, I popped into a boutique and bought a cool leather jacket for a reasonable price (just don´t remind me it´s in Euros, please). I popped into a bar in old town to try some pintxos, a basque word for sandwich-like tapas that have a good amount of culinary complexity, usually involve seafood, and are almost always delicious. After that, I wandered some more around old town before heading back to my hostel, chatting with this hippie from Virginia who is staying in my dorm room, and hitting the sack. This morning, finding the cold and rain to persist, I sucked it up, pulled on my new jacket, and walked up this light hiking trail up to a smallish mountain to the east of town. There´s a pretty big Jesus statue on top (obviously) and an old fortified castle turned into a museum relating the history of San Sebastian. It was a pretty refreshing walk (the rain let up a bit) and I took another trail down the mountain. I stopped into the Museo Naval and checked out their exhibit on Basque whaling and whalers. It was really interesting. The museum framed it in kind of a cool way, saying that it was no longer necessary to kill whales, that whaling destroys biodiversity, but it was important to tell the full story of that aspect of Basque culture and history. It ended with some pretty gruesome shots of modern whaling in Japan, with yet another explanation how whaling is an unnecessary and destructive practice. Clearly, the museum benefactors have seen Whale Wars. After that, I walked back down to the bus station a couple kilometers away to buy my bus ticket back to Bilbao for tomorrow morning, then strolled back into old town to find some internets. This update is probably longer than neessary because it´s warm in the internet cafe. And I´m hesitant to go back out there. I´ll probably round out the evening with some more wine and pintxos, and then more wine.

After this, instead of skirting the northern coast like I planned, I decided I will be trying to catch a train from Bilbao to Valladolid, in the warm central Castilla-Leon, then hang around there for a few days before visiting nearby Salamanca and Segovia. After that, I might shoot over to Valencia on the east coast for a few days before heading up to Barcelona. It will all be very weather dependent, since I don´t want to happen upon more Seattle weather anywhere else on this trip.

Hope everyone is doing well and I hope that my next update will be more cheerful and I will have much more to report!

Much love,
A-bear