The Events of Tuesday, April 19, 2011

                This morning, we woke up, had an enjoyable last breakfast, packed up our luggage, and bid a sad farewell to our delightful vacation cottage in rural Mungia, Spain, before basically driving the same route as yesterday to San Sebastián. However, this time, we did not get lost, and we entered the city on a lovely, peaceful, wide, traffic-free, parking-free, congestion-free, construction-free boulevard along the river. It was a wonderful way to start our second visit to the city of San Sebastián, this time to see the San Telmo Museum, which we had not been able to visit yesterday. Next, we parked in the same parking garage as we had yesterday, in fact in the very same parking spot as we had yesterday, before walking to the museum. Doesn’t this seem a bit too familiar? Like a déjà vous? This was basically the way my last blog started last Tuesday, April 12, when we were in Seville, Spain. We departed from our accommodations, drove the same route as we had the day before, parked in the same underground parking garage as we did previously, and walked to our tourist sight.

                Anyway, we walked from our parking garage to Museo San Telmo along a lovely riverfront pedestrian walkway, made one left turn, and we were there! We walked in and discovered that Tuesdays the museum is free to all! Perfect timing! After placing our backpacks in lockers, we strolled through the museum’s five stops with relative speed, compared to our other museum experiences. This was understandable, as most of the museum’s literature were in two languages only: Spanish and Euskera (the language of the Basque region group, about whom we had come to the museum to learn). The first stop, after a brief stroll in the museum’s impeccably-kept grassy cloister, was a chapel of some sort, decorated with paintings of Basque history, religion, and other aspects of their unique culture. The museum, just newly renovated, now extends beyond its former monastery buildings. The exhibit rooms surround the monastery’s cloister.

                Next, we breezed through a small room with a lot of carved stones, which we guessed were of some great religious significance not unlike that of a Catholic church’s treasury, and a larger room with many video screens and interactive exhibits displaying the origins of the Basque culture. We gathered, by watching fragments of each video, that they were expert shipbuilders and that their culture was greatly influenced by nature, especially the forces of fire and water. Next, we hiked up several flights of stairs to the remainder of the museum’s permanent exhibits.

                The next section was the most enjoyable for all of us, as it gave us what we were really looking for: a glimpse into the customs and rituals of the Basque culture. We heard their folk music, which integrates instruments like a mouth harp and something that looked like a dulcimer, and watched silent black-and-white film clips of their folk dances, which vary from highly hilarious to intricately impressive. One dance involved a lot of jumping in 360-degree-turns and hitting sticks; another was a group of boys basically high-fiving one another with crash cymbals, in a very organized manner. Then there was something like the minuet, with a boy and girl holding hands, doing basically the same footwork, without ever facing each other. Another dance looked like a mix of martial art and ballet, with a lot of crazy kicks and funky footwork. This was followed by a dance in which two parallel lines of five boys each, sandwiching a flag bearer, squatted down and ducked their heads, while the flag bearer went crazy waving and twirling the flag about every which way. We saw influences of Celtic and Gaelic dances in some furiously fast footwork, while other dances showed more of a Greek influence, with little girls dancing in a circle, holding or clapping hands.

                The next room displayed a variety of sports equipment, with another silent black-and-white film that somehow managed to explain it all. They have some sports which are similar to ours, resembling bowling, racquetball, lacrosse, crew, and weightlifting. Other sports are completely original, or simply old-fashioned, like one involving splitting a tree trunk with an ax or hatchet while standing on the wood you are trying to split and not chopping yourselves in the foot.

                After a few more boards about their cultural exuberance and passion for individuality as a culture group separate from the rest of Spain, we came to one with a video about the terrorist work of the ETA (stands for Basque, country, and freedom, or something like that). Next came an art gallery exhibiting one hundred years of Basque art, which we breezed through, before descending back down the stairs, gathering our bags, and leaving, feeling good about accomplishing our goal of learning about the Basque culture.

                We walked back basically the same way we had come, but stopped along the way in a lovely little grassy park-like plaza for a picnic lunch, before heading back to our parking garage and driving on to Ore, France. We drove past what Ben thought was our ‘gite’ (the French word for cottage), and then had a hard time finding a place to turn around and come back to it, because of all the narrow roads with stone walls on either side. When Dad tried to turn around, we had to try to back up a steep hill with a drainage ditch in front of us. Finally, we were headed back the right direction when we ran into a very lost-looking Irish family in an RV. Trying to help them as much as possible and having no such luck, we drove on and found that Ben was right, that this was indeed the place. However, we had to drive past it and back to the main road and back again before we were sure. Our hostess, Carol, met us as we drove up and quickly showed us the place. You can see it for yourself at http://pyreneesholidaygites.com/index.php?id=22. Carol’s amazing English was a welcome relief from all the difficult-to-comprehend accents we have heard. I think we gathered that she was British.

                Next, we unloaded the car and moved into our gite. We were able to cook our dinner of frozen pizza with ease, because we had an oven, the first in months! After dinner, we cleaned up and watched one of the DVDs from our hostess’s vast collection. We enjoyed The Shaggy Dog, a Disney classic, starring Tim Allen, a hilarious movie that entertained us quite well, before heading off to bed.

                Having slept on an incredibly hard sofa bed for the last three nights, I was looking forward to trying out a new bed. However, the double bed I was to share with Abby was so soft that we spent the entire night falling into one another or trying to balance precariously on the edge. I felt like Goldilocks: the first bed was too hard; the second bed was too soft. Hopefully, the third bed will be just right.