This may be the last installment from Spain, as tomorrow we grab the kids and cruise through Segovia back to Madrid and get on a plane Friday morning. I have grown to love this internet cafe, which sits nestled along the Rio Bilbao with a wonderful view of heavy construction equipment, corrugated tin, a Bilbobus stop and optimistic anarchist graffiti that says ¨muerte al estado¨...but today I bid this air conditioned computer cave adieu.
Last night it rained here, but hard. It was my third night in a row making the 10:30PM PizzaVia run (their thin crust with spicy sausage is WORTH it.) I don´t have an umbrella, and only tourists wear rain coats, so I arrived back at the hotel Nervion with wet hair, a soggy cardboard box, but a crispy pizza that was SO worth the soaking. While I ate I watched a televised ¨pelota¨ (literally means ¨ball¨ in Castillian) match, which in this case was handball, Basque style. They play three types of pelota here: one with a wooden paddle (something between a ping pong paddle and a college fraternity initiation stick), another version with a huge, curved basket (see the photo about four entries down), and the hand version with fingers taped up so that the hand looks like it has a soccer goalkeeper´s glove on it. I don´t know the rules, but it reminds me of racquetball- all you need is a ball, a buddy and a really tall wall.
This morning I opted out of the fine arts museum (free on Wednesdays) to instead walk the two kilometers to the bullring and bull fighting museum, which was cool. Their fiestas her start the third week of August. Shoot. On the walk back, I found gazpacho after all...(so I take back my lutefisk in Mexico City analogy). It was everything I had hoped for; that cool, oniony and tomatoey goodness was refreshing in the afternoon heat. I asked my server what the difference is between Andalusian gazpacho, which is what they were serving at this particular restaurant, and the ¨other¨ kind (I think one is cream-based and one is not)...but she was like, ¨dude, I couldn´t tell you...I don´t like the stuff, myself...gazpacho is from the south, where they eat vegetables. Up here in the north, we´re about meat. Cod and cattle.¨ Vegetarians be warned.
I am going to miss Spain´s bars and cafes tremendously. Where in the U.S. can you walk into an establishment that shelves its liquor right next to the espresso machine, and has beer on tap for the afternoons and evenings, but the fresh OJ machine behind the bar runs full time in the mornings. The best ones are those that serve ¨chocolate con churros¨ before noon (chocolate here is more like hot pudding), then switch to tapas, tortilla and raciones for the remainder of the day with wine to wash it down. Here, some even serve kalimotxo; cheap, red table wine mixed with Coke. Mmmm.
OK. Time to say goodbye to Bilbao, pack the suitcase and conceal the contraband... (The cuban cigars are easy to hide. It´s the bottle of absinthe that´s the problem.)
