Perigord and pinxtos: 6/15/08

We moved into the north western corner of Spain without even a border crossing check today. How times have changed. I remember one summer, a long time ago, being held up several times for several hours apiece at border posts as we crossed in and out of Germany, solely because Peter, with his long hair and beard in the seventies, looked like one of the much sought after Barder-Meinhoff gang. Today he looks more like a variation on Osama but no one even bothers to check if he is.

Initially, it was such a culture shock moving from our month of quiet village hops in rather remote parts of regional France along roads that were barely large enough to have a centre line, into the chaos that is the truck-ridden, smog-infested, labour-intensive autoroute-in-progress (still no tolls paid, Glen and Bill!) that is Spain. Still tonight we searched for peace and are camped high above Saint Sebastian noise -- where we have spent the day revisiting the pinxtos and passeo that makes Spain so special.

Saint Sebastian is just wonderful. The city sits low and flat on a big fat bay with waves rolling in from the sea and it is surrounded by lush fantastically high green hills, and on the top of each – and you don’t even have to look hard – you’ll find a tall white statue of the Virgin Mary, arms outstretched, looking down on you.

After a long afternoon exploring the city we joined the passeo there this evening, walking the old city streets (Parte Vieja), the new, and the long stretches of magical paths by the most beautiful bay – La Concha.

I had forgotten how many teeny tiny old Spanish ladies there are: some still in couples – holding hands at eighty-- but most, now, walking with just their girl-friends. One, two or three old friends walking arm in arm, talking animatedly. In ear-rings. Wearing exquisite makeup. In high heeled shoes, after seven score years and more. Making an effort to look stylish -- purely for their evening walk. While we, in our functional walking boots and goretex jackets (still!), look for all the world like gauche Aussie tourists. Yet still they smile. I so love the Spanish.

I had forgotten how they gesticulate as they talk. All emotive. The French are reserved in comparison. I had forgotten the beggars in the shabby streets: praying up at you from their favourite possies at the foot of worn columns in the Old City: pleading in their plaintive Latin chant for pennies from heaven to feed their starving children.

I had forgotten the alcoholics – who bother no one, but lie like stupified lizards on any patch of pavement, or benchtop, in the soft Saint Sebastian sun.

I had forgotten the gothic ornate white balustrades that decorate Spanish harbours and parks, and the tall ornamented white pedestal lights lined up all over the city. Too many white decorative curlicues can never be enough. The churches in the old and new city are popular with pilgrims. We had special smiles for the ones wearing shells stitched to their clothing. No worn or torn walking gear these days, though. Only the best will do. Berghaus mostly. Poor pilgrims no more.

The roads between France and Spain have been ripped up. We have been driving over incredibly high coastal mountain roads and down into the deepest little valleys on the narrow roads that often, even on a sat nav, have no name. But, even there, everything is being ripped up. Whole mountain sides have been bulldozed out and bashed into road gravel. Indents in between two mountains have been filled in with ugly layered high density mass dwellings. I don’t think the sat nav has recognised a roundabout since France – so much road work is going on.

Who is paying for these amazing roads being ripped up and rebuilt? Who lives in these multi-level high density apartments built in the middle of nowhere? It’s as tho’ Northern Spain is expecting in the very near future an influx of major population proportion from another land, and is preparing for it now. Not only is it an amazing expense all this infrastructure – but it is ugly. I won’t even like it when it is all done and there is no work to impede thoroughfare.

In France, the first home owners’ house and land packages are seriously ugly. They are all tiny villa type dwellings, somewhat similar to an extended hut in a campground but painted pink or beige, usually, with a tiled roof, plonked on any block of land regardless of infrastructure. In Spain, new high density apartment-dwelling is all the go.

Layer upon layer of hideous pink apartment blocks are being built everywhere, even in rural nowhere: pink or red clay besser block layers of ugly new apartments, filling in the spaces between two hills, destroying the view. Even mountains cut away for gravel look better. At least what’s left after the gravel is removed in layers is natural. While the ancient old stone homes, huts and barns languish: because they are too expensive to renovate.

I had expected not to like Bilbao – as it has a history somewhat like that of Newcastle: a major coal and iron city -- instead, we stayed longer. We visited (as do millions of others a year) to see Frank Gerhy’s work: the Guggenheim Museum, which was on our Must Visit list – a building somewhat akin to Sydney’s Opera House. It is, architecturally, fascinating. I loved, and hated, different parts of it. Sydney’s Opera House is organic. It makes sense in terms of its lines, space, proportion, materials and its setting. It is almost perfect in its conceptualisation.

The Guggenheim partly makes sense. And is somewhat similar in conceptualisation. The building looks like two large ocean liners docking, but too quickly, then…c.r.a.s.h! The building that can only really easily be seen from two sides is an agglomeration, a meshing, of this disaster. The ‘crash part’ is abstract, starkly beautiful, full of motion, all hard-edged silver and titanium in both harsh jagged pieces and smooth, perfect, gently-gliding lines: brilliant. A study in motion. Then, you have the rest: the dock bit - bulky, heavy, rectilinear, grey, concrete, dead. Debilitating. That bit of the architecture made no sense to me. That bit needed to be partly distorted along with the other mishshapen pieces in order to organically work. And it needed, like the Opera House, to sit on a huge expanse of water, not the little pool that seems too out of proportion. Space. The building needed more space, air - and water: to float. On all four sides. Then it would have been a truly beautiful piece of work.

Around it, there is Maman: the copper-tinged arachnoid scupture on spindly legs-- huge, with a fertile egg sac high overhead – looking for all the world as if she has just dropped in from an outerspace Gulliver’s travel set in order to bear her babies. Maman is huge, predatory, protective and -- extraordinarily beautiful. Then there is Puppy. Puppy is a silly massive dog sculpture, which looks as though it has been made by a group of kindergarten kids perhaps using wire supports for flowers in pots. It is almost the height of the Guggenheim and, sadly, it is parked right at the visual front or the museum so that it does little but diminish the entrance. It has little or no grace, style, or taste. I’d like it gone.

On to the medieval Old Town streets and the magic of the pinxtos bars. The Basques set out plates of pinxtos all along their bars twice a day: at aperitivo time, starting around 11am and before lunch at about 2 -- and then again in the early evening – or txikiteo (chick-e-tay-o) time. Pinxtos etiquette usually involves one drink and one pinxtos at each bar as you go barhopping with your friends searching the city for a later meal menu on offer that suits your fancy. Of the pinxtos we tried we loved the Basque classics of chunky wedges of potato and smoked sausage frittata, and bonito and mashed egg, and the delicious serrano ham.

At the back of the old town we found the La Ribera Fish Market and spent ages watching the fish mongers (the ladies were so strong) in their white waterproof aprons splattered with blood and gunk hacking away at fish that just that morning had been swimming in the sea.

We found here tiny little sea creatures being sold that were like nothing any of us had ever seen before--Percebe (pronounced: Per-theb'-ee). They looked like a length of a couple of cut-off joints of a tiny human finger, but a soft red-brown in colour, finished off at one end with a tough looking hard and very ugly grey toenail -- but smelling sea sweet and edible. All the seafood did – despite being served from the most primitive and basic concrete market stalls in almost medieval market conditions with ice, on which all the fresh fish were resting, melting rapidly and falling like rain into open drains in the floor at your feet.

We took home, instead, thick steaks of salmon for dinner at less than $A10.00 a kilo. Phenomenal flavour. And white asparagus was still around in the fruit and vege market upstairs, but becoming scarce. Though leeks are appearing everywhere, so we’re indulging in vichysoise, now, thanks to the smuggled pressure cooker – and to the cool weather which continues encouraging delicious hot hearty meals.