Monday, September 9, 2019

Going down the wrong Hemingway

It's been a long while since I wrote a proper trip recap blog. My Colombia and Brazil trips were probably deserving of writeups, and the Panama/Guatemala New Year's adventure certainly was, but I didn't have the energy at the time and now my primary source memory is depleted. I figure then that I should get out this June 2019 Eurotrip before I get similarly busy.  A good chunk of that trip, especially its coinciding with my job saga, is documented in this post. Here I'll try to go through the travel and linguistic components about the trip.

The main goals of the trip were to 1) catch up and travel with my Brazilian friends who recently moved to Basque country, 2) explore France after an 11 year absence, 3) see the USA Women dominate in the World Cup and 4) attend Windmill Windup, the most famous European ultimate tournament.

A fantastic credit card decision and its signup bonus allowed me to turn a $2800 trip into $300 + points. I'm not sure how that worked but I'm glad it did.

19:15 - Flight takes off from Boston Logan (LOG)
06:45 - Land at London Heathrow (LHR), 5 minutes ahead of schedule
07:00 - Apparently this plane can't find a jetbridge
07:15  - Finally leave the plane, turn into accelerated mode
07:45 - Immigration at Heathrow took me nearly an hour last time. For some reason, we fly through in 10 minutes this time
08:00 - I find the counter selling tickets for the National Express bus transfer to Gatwick. I thought that airport transfers might be free, especially in socialist Europe, but no, this costs £25! It's #727 and will come in ten minutes.
08:10 - The national express bus supposedly arrives.
08:15 - A bus named 727 arrives, tells us we can’t get on, the bus we want will be here shortly
08:35 - The bus arrives
9:30 make it to London Gatwick Airport (LGW)
9:35 - My goodness, this is really the working class version of Heathrow isn't it? Should I be pronouncing Gatwick with a Cockney accent?
9:58 - Made my way through security, and I spot what must be Gatwick's only saving grace - Wagamama. I think I have time for this.
10:22 - Ok I barely have time. Gotta run.
10:24 - Woo at the gate....and I can't find my ticket. It must have come while running. Why must they be so awkwardly sized?
10:25 - This gate has another security check - for extra frustration - but they do allow me to ask the desk to print out a new ticket. This has happened to me before, but instead of printing out new boarding passes for the remaining two legs of my trip, I get a normal paper printout of my itinerary. The airline staff underlines the current boarding time with her pen.
10:28 - Boarding begins with an Englishman announcing, "Group one, grupo uno only please" in the most gringo way imaginable.
10:31 - "Group two, grupo dos." Surely this is not helping anyone.
15:00 - Land in Madrid. Exit the gate completely disoriented, and somehow have to pass through an EU checkpoint to get to the interesting bits of the airport.
15:10 - Try to get into priority pass lounge, they won’t let me in without a boarding pass. Insist I get it from Iberia desk
15:20 - Get in line at Iberia desk. Take one of those slips of paper with my ticket number like it’s a fucking DMV
15:50 - Take another slip
16:37 - Finally get another sheet of paper at the boarding desk. Toss the waiting ticket and earlier sheet into recycling portion labeled papel 
16:55 - Give up and run to the gate
16:57 - "Lo siento, pero yo perdió mi boleto." I try to explain my plight to the man now at the gate, and he points me back to the Iberia office. "No!" I exclaim back in terror.
17:00 - The man, who does have access to a computer, finally prints me a new boarding pass
18:15 land in Bilbao on time and I’m genuinely surprised to avoid serious disaster

As it so happens, Antonio is also flying into Bilbao from London, with his flight landing about an hour after mine. I sip espresso by the terminal exit while I await his arrival. He arrives, we hug, and he gets into his rental car and we're off.

The road wraps through evergreen valleys all looking gorgeous in the high evening sun. A sign soon welcomes us to Araba/Álava, where Vitoria-Asteiz is capital. The slashes and dashes are indicative of the interesting status of this region - the Basque Autonomous Community. Basque is famous amongst linguistic nerds as the biggest language mystery of Europe, one of only a handful of languages in Europe that don't belong to the Indo-European language family (others being Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian). No one knows where the Basque people or language come from, nor do they know any other language related to Basque. I believe the elevated mystique of Basque really speaks more to the lack of linguistic diversity in Europe. Asia and Africa consist of numerous ancient language families interspersed with undocumented isolates. But for Europe, it is cool to see/hear very white people, virtually indistinguishable from Castillian Spaniards, speaking this incomprehensible language full of x's and z's.

Raquel awaits us at their lovely apartment overlooking a small plaza. I drop my stuff off and we quickly go for a walk and explore this ancient, very Europeanesque provincial capital, filled with cobblestoned streets, tiny alleys and bars overflowing into the street. The unusual plot points of my job interview that night are explicated in that other post, and while I felt the ticking clock of my Urbint future hanging in the balance, I did try to manage my beating heart and immerse into this romantic European setting. We find our way to a bar with wine and pintxos, which are essentially Basque tapas. Various grabbable plates, often little sandwiches or croquettes or toothpick equipped items, are just laid out on the bar for the taking. It'd be a heavy week of meat, cheese and bread. I rushed back for my interview and then slept like a jetlagged log.

The next day we planned to drive to Bilbao, but began the day with cafe con leche and huevos fritos at a nearby cafe. Upon finishing, I suggested going for a leisurely walk around the city, as the previous night had been rushed. The walk through the cobblestoned-lined hilly streets eventually led us to the Cathedral of Santa Marta, which casually dates back to the 14th century. The Gothic arches tower over the city, and upon discovering that a tour had only just begun, we decided why not and joined in. The tour was entirely in Spanish and was my first real language test of the trip. I strained my ears to pick up architectural words but found myself completely lost while Antonio nodded, laughed and exclaimed "oooh." It turns out that while I was scattering my brain for Gothic terminology, the guide was focused on the engineering marvels behind the recuperation and preservation of this cathedral, which had been falling apart.

In the main church space, the guide pointed out the "Arcos de Miedo", or Arcs of Fear. She pointed out stone blocks comprising the massive Gothic arches, how they used to run parallel, and how now many had visibly slipped up to 15 degrees. I started to feel the fear of the Arcos de Miedo collapsing. Taut metal wires swept up through the ceiling vaults, trying to shift blocks back like braces on a giant set of teeth. The tour took us up wooden staircases (I couldn't help but think about the Notre Dame fire) to a tower that might have been the highest point in the city.

The tour ends on the ground floor with a slide show on a once painted mural. The mural had in fact been painted numerous times over the centuries, presumably by the town's best artists, but restorers in the 1970s had mistaken the layers of priceless paintings as inauthentic and removed them. Whoops. So now we have a slide show to recreate what those paintings showed. Technology.

We're finishing up the tour when we realized that we're way behind schedule, and barely made it to the rental car place before our time slot was up. We then repeated that scenic drive back to Bilbao.

The Guggenheim museum is the headliner in Bilbao and one that holds great lore in my family. My dad is obsessed with the architect Frank Gehry and my brother built a model for his 9th grade Western Civilization project. We had visited in 2000, making this 19 year gap possibly the longest gap between city visits in my recorded memory. 

As an adult who has worked in building engineering, the Gehry's masterpiece has much more meaning for me. His crumpled style devoid of straight edges could be dismissed as wasteful - an architect friend has accused him of not playing the same game as architects designing useful spaces - but I enjoyed the sheer number of interesting angles. Each turn of the corner excites. The design plays with interior and exterior space, seamlessly melding the two. Exhibit wise, a bunch of enormous metal parabolas set up by Richard Serra reminded me how much I enjoyed learning the formula for an eclipse in geometry class.

Our exit from the museum took us to its beautiful patio, adorned with a giant spider, and up a large bridge with a gorgeous view of the Guggenheim set behind the river. The rest of the day included a tour up a century old funicular, randomly walking into an outdoor symphony orchestra concert, randomly returning back to our hotel to find a performing string duet, riding a surprisingly well developed subway, before posting up at an American bar selling craft IPAs. It was there that I accepted one job offer minutes before my job offer from Urbint came in.

With that job kerfuffle behind me, the three of us continued bar hopping. One bar had some corporate promotional immersive experience where we entered a dark booth and voices in Spanish tried to make us imagine we were in a prehistoric period. To be honest, I didn't understand much then and I remember even less now. I do remember asking the promoter "¿de donde piensas nosotros estamos?" mostly referring to Raquel, who is Brazilian of Japanese descent. "¿Tailandia?" she guessed, to Raquel's uproarious laughter. 

At a later bar, Antonio told me the group next to him were Portuguese. "Go talk to them!" I said. "Nah, not my style," Antonio responded. So I went up to the group, asked "Fala Portugues?" They replied "Sim!" At that point I couldn't think of any other Portuguese palabras, and gestured with two hands at Antonio and Raquel and stepped away. They hit it off comparing Portuguese and Brazilian differences. I then found myself talking to a bunch of rather obnoxious middle aged Englishmen on a stag do.

Bilbao is a lovely town to go out in. The nightlife has the pedestrian-friendly density you'd expect from an old European town, big enough to have entertaining city action and small enough to have few American tourists. Freed from my job drama, I practiced ordering vino y cerveza at the bars perhaps una o dos veces demasiadas.

The next morning wasn't a great one. Our plan was to extend the hour long drive to San Sebastian into a more epic roundabout that would include a transit of the rio Nervion - Nerbioi via the Vizcaya Bridge and the monastery at Gaztelugatxe. The Vizcaya Bridge is unique as the world's oldest transporter bridge, where the bridge does the actual moving instead of the cars. The entrance of the bridge was devilishly difficult to find amongst curvy one ways on steep river bank roads. Once on the bridge, surrounded by other cars, the experience was fairly odd - it just felt like a slow moving boat, terrible for my hangover, with the river view obstructed by other cars. Still it was cool to drive (sit) through one of just a handful of these bridges in the world.

On the other side, we stopped at the side of a playground to recalibrate the GPS. I stepped outside for some fresh air, and realized I needed a bit more than fresh air.  Noticing a dumpster a dozen yards away, I staggered towards it. I didn't quite make it, instead pivoting and retching deep into the hedges next to me. I remained in full vomit mode for over a minute before I could look up, and found a bunch of Spanish kids playing merrily along, their wide-eyed parents staring me aghast. They turned away quickly, as if they were the ones ashamed for peeking. 

The coastal drive was lined with stunning seaside views - or so I was told. My view from the fetal position in the backseat was not ideal. I was upright though when we passed by a mysterious castle. There were no flashing lights, there were no signs, there were no armored guards - there was just a castle casually hanging out within view of the road to San Sebastian. The castle was no large mansion, it featured numerous turrets, and the lack of tourism infrastructure made me suspicious. But there was no trick, this castle dating back to the middle ages was inhabited by Basque nobles. The interior was locked, but we got to walk around, admire the weathered masonry and pretend we were trying to scale the walls. This completely unplanned castle stop was a keeper. 
Tourism infrastructure did not lack in Gaztelugatxe. A lonely hermitage built in the 10th century on a peninsula jagging into the Bay of Biscay is made accessible via a scenic stone staircase snaking along the rocks, as well as hundreds of filled parking spots. What would otherwise be a charming but localized attraction exploded in popularity when HBO CGI'ed a castle behind those steps and called it Dragonstone on Game of Thrones. The steps were where Jon Snow and Davos Seaworth had many conversations. Admiring the incredible steps leading up to coastline views of lapping blue waves and grassy mountains - it reminded me of the west coast of Ireland but somehow Spanish - I felt fortunate to visit Gaztelugatxe. It's isolation precludes it from many a Eurotrip.

Another notable pitstop was in a Basque beach town where the Spanish language disappeared - at least in written form. Everyone still spoke Spanish, but when visiting the bathroom at the local pub, I had to guess between Gizona and Emakumea. We later drove straight through the town of Guernica, subject of a famous anti-war Picasso painting, but were too starved for time and tapas to stop. The road journey was an embarrassment of day-tripping riches.

Late afternoon we rolled into Donostia - San Sebastian, an instantly a new atmosphere was palpable. It felt festive and monied and distinctively non-American. Boasting an incredible beach but well off the path of a Madrid or Barcelona-centric voyage, San Sebastian seems to be where the French, Spanish and other Europeans go to party away from Americans. It was also one of the cities in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, which I had read just a couple months before. In honor of that, I will attempt to write my San Sebastian recap in the style of Hemingway.

Our hostel exit made us pass by an outdoor bar. Real damn teaser.  The group desired to get tight in the city though, not in a hostel which could be damn well anywhere. We were blocks to the beach, La Concha, and walked along the promenade until the promenade elbowed away from the beach. A gelateria was well-positioned at the elbow bend.  The promenade was a lovely scene, with trees down the middle and clean black tiles on either side, full of pedestrians, skateboarders and mirth. We took one of the first side streets coming out from the bend Calle Mayor and were instantly rewarded. We could see the street terminated at a gorgeous cathedral, lit at that moment by the pinks and oranges of a setting sun. Four or five blocks before us gave way as we edged towards the cathedral as if pulled by a magnet hidden within its naves. The mirth increased until it reached pure cacophony.

The church was a stellar one, with wide staid columns and flying buttresses. But it was another church, not a place to get pintxos or get tight.

"How about this bar?"
"It's really crowded."
"They're all crowded."
"Do we want to do a sit down or just grab pintxos standing?"
"Let's get a drink standing first, and then decide?"
"Ok."
We walked down a thin side street into another thin side street. There Raquel and I were able to order 3 generously round glasses of wine. Ham and cheese sandwiches were just sitting there while the wine was poured. We grabbed pintxos standing.

The thin streets opened up into a wide plaza. Antonio exclaims, "See Cal? Every city in Spain has a plaza de Espana."

The night saw us get tight, but not as tight as the previous night, for we were too old for consecutive hangovers.

San Sebastian is known for its fine dining.


We got up early to walk along the Concha towards the funicular, our second of the trip. The funicular led to a mountain with a sweeping view of the bay - it reminded all of us of Pao de Azucar in Rio de Janeiro.

At the end, the sideria may have been too good, because by the time we were in the car, Antonio had 13 minutes to do a 21 minute drive. I had personally been lapped by Antonio in a Cincinnati go-cart facility once - maybe twice - so I knew he could make up time. He made up enough of it for me to see my train slowly exiting Hendaye station. There's not much more to it then that - I exchanged my ticket for the next train 4 hours later, and sat next to an old French woman who was a retired English teacher from Bordeaux.''

There was a Cafe Iruña in San Sebastian, but it was not the same Cafe Iruña mentioned many times in The Sun Also Rises, which is in Pamplona. Later in Paris I would visit La Closerie des Lilas, which he habituated in A Moveable Feast, where I ruefully spent 7 euros on sparkling water.

Paris with another GE friend Valeriy I will skip, because Paris is Paris and I could not do it justice in just 1 full day even taking 40,000 steps, nor can I do it justice here without adding 40,000 words. I'll merely mention one encounter from the morning I left Paris. Searching for a Parisian bakery experience, I found a placed called O Coffee with flat white on the menu. I thought about how to say this in French, before realizing surely if it says flat white on the menu, flat white must be the French name. Before I could even get a word out, the barista asked me, "What would you like mate?" I sputtered out, "Je vou...je...I'd like a flat white please." The barista smiled and passed the order behind him in French. I stepped sideways in line, paused and asked, "Are you Australian?" The barista gave a bemused grimace, said, "Yes. Well bit of a mix really. Greek, French." 
"Did you know I was an English speaker?"
Slight nod.
"How?"
The barista shrugged. "You don't look French mate."
The flat white was terrific.

From Paris I took the train to Reims for a World Cup match. That match and my tournament in Windmill Windup will have to get its own post.