What? No Bull?

“You missed it!” she said.

“What?” I said.

“You missed the turn,” she said.

“Did I?” I said.

“You did.” She said.

“So...” I said.

“We’ll have to go around a gain,” she said.

“I didn’t see the road number.” I said.

“There was no road number,” she said.

“Then how do you know we missed the road?” I said.

“Because the sign said “Pamplona”” she said.

“And...” I said.

“That’s where we’re going.” she said.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“I’m sure it is,” she said, and I was glad to hear it in the midst of the dialogue beginning to sound like a Robert B. Parker novel.  It had been a long drive from, although Spanish tollways are excellent highways. I was tired. We found Hotel Pamplona with relative ease, parked the car in hotel parking, and planned our visit. 

Pamplona is one of the cities on El Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, and has existed for over a thousand years. Legend has it that the body of Saint James was carried from Jerusalem to the coast of northern Spain and buried at Santiago de Compostela.  The route is marked by an image of a blue seashell. But this was not why we were here. We came hoping to join in the Fiesta de San Fermin. The festival is held twice a year with the more famous one in July. This would be the mini-festival.  The July festival attracts more that a million people. But, then, that is when the bulls run through the streets with people, an event reserved for those lacking in some mental facilities.  Our friend Brian ran with the bulls. The event is also chronicled is Ernest Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises. But, alas, we would see no bulls run. However, we would join the festival the following day. 

Pamplona, like many old cities, is build on a river and has a wall surrounding it it.  The Hotel Pamplona was not within that wall, so we walked from the hotel, crossed the river, and walked up to the walled old city. It was only about ten o’clock in the morning when we entered the medieval city. I reminded Claudette  about the early hour and that I did not think that festivals began that early.  And then a young man with a trumpet walked past us on the narrow street. As we walked along more people  were going in the same direction. Now we were sure we had found the festival. We knew that the festival parade would follow the same route that the bulls ran in July but had not a clue what that route was. We continued to walk, and our pace quickened.  We heard horns and drums and people, many people.  We could tell that we were joining a parade.  But what kind? Did we really care?

The crowd had many families with youngsters on adult shoulders and some mommies pushing strollers with little tykes. The street is only about twelve feet wide including some of the tables of the sidewalk cafes. We continued to move faster trying to get to the head of the parade.  Then we saw them: thirteen foot tall giants.  Obviously there was a man underneath providing motivation for the giant king. Further up the street I saw kings and queens all dancing and swaying with the music.  We had stumbled onto the parade of “the giants and big heads”, a tradition for over one hundred and fifty years. Each royal pair represents either Europe, Asia, Africa, or America. We had to hurry on and get in front of the parade which had grown to nearly one thousand people by now. We ducked into a cafe for a restroom break and a quick cafe con leche.  We watched as the happy revelers went by and noticed that street vendors were out selling balloons kid stuff. Also, another band unattached to a giant and led by people carrying a banner had joined the parade.  We got back in the melee, enjoying the throngs of happy people and I was constantly checking to see that I had no strange hands in my pockets.  The parade goes downhill since it ends at the bullring. In july the bulls run from the bull holding pens to the bullring. But no bull today!  A few blocks from the bull ring is a large, life size sculpture of the running of the bulls. Ernest Hemmingway, as well as the sculptor, are depicted in the work of art. Shortly after viewing the statue we had an amusing encounter with a Spanish automated toilet.  Once again the lack of native language was our undoing.  But why would you need instructions to use a toilet?  Some of us do.  This was a self-cleaning unit. If you did not get out of the small structure within a certain number of minutes of flushing the door would lock, the light would go out and the floor would be sprayed with a cleaning liquid. Fortunately, this cleaning liquid does not stain ones clothes.  Later we found a plaza where many of the parade participants were singing while accompanied by guitars. We took the funicular back down to the riverbank near the bridge and walked back to our hotel. It had been a most enjoyable day. We walked around the area about our hotel but did not find a place we thought we would like to eat at and decided to eat at the hotel. It turned out to be good food and a good value. We turned in early.(In Spain that means before midnight.) It had been a great day of automated toilets and giants!

Down by the River in Basque Country

The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao,Spain

My most vivid memory of Bilbao, Spain is of a Basque driver screaming at me.  I’m sure they were obscenities with no doubt some reference to my mother.  But my lack of knowledge of the native language left me unscathed,  although perhaps deserving of the outrage. I DID cut him off at an intersection, but I didn’t hit anybody. In my own defense I find it difficult to understand street signs and directions in Basque cities such as Bilbao. 

Soon we were on a street by the river, and in front of us was the reason for our being here.  The Guggenheim Museum  was in full view.  Canadian architect Frank Gehry’s masterpiece emerges from the bank of the Nervion River, the titanium finish glistening in the afternoon sun like the sails of a silver sailing ship.  We crossed the river on the Princes of Spain Bridge and almost immediately found ourselves in the huge underground parking garage beside the museum. We took the elevator from the spacious parking garage to street level to walk a few hundred feet to the museum.  

The Puppy

Near the entrance is the “Puppy”: a 39 foot sculpture of a dog covered with 70,000 blooming flowers! Created by American Jeff Koons, the fifteen ton creation has been in San Francisco, Paris, Sydney, and Arolsen, Germany, before finding a permanent home in Bilbao.

One of the first things you notice upon entering the lobby of the museum is that everything is curved; there are few flat surfaces except for the floor. There are nineteen galleries and a permanent collection of modern and contemporary art from the mid-twentieth century to the present. I was surprised to see a small (one meter square) painting by American artist Jackson Pollack,  I did not realize he ever painted canvas that small in his “drip” style. 

We had seen New York’s Guggenheim collection in a museum designed by another famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Gehry’s museum is much like being in a multilevel maze of titanium, limestone, and glass. It’s quite exciting and encourages discovery. No photography was allowed inside the museum, and I followed this rule, I must say due to the encouragement of my travel mate. There are large terraces from which to view the river and river walk nearby.  Here I saw a most unusual thing. There was a wheelchair with half a male manikin (from the waist down, fully clothed) in it. “Pushing” the chair was the upper part of the manikin.  It was eerie and created quite a stir.  We looked for the person controlling it via radio but could not find him in the crowd. 

Back inside the museum we ate a sandwich at one of the museum’s cafes.  The food was good but over-priced. On our walk back to the garage we could not restrain ourselves from taking a look over our shoulders at the “flowering pooch of Bilbao”. I also realized that I had been in a museum in which the structure was more exciting than the art it housed.

Cathedral de Santiago

 After touring some of the city streets and numerous traffic circles we found the Hotel Arriaga overlooking the river Nervion.  It was almost directly across the street from the opera house and down the street from a cathedral, the Church of San Anton.  I double parked while Claudette went in and found where hotel parking was.  It was underground as usual, and I started down the ramp after the garage type door went up and I saw a slim dark-haired woman motioning to me to follow her. I squeezed the Opal into a spot near the wall after letting Claudette exit the car first. (Otherwise, she would not have been able to get out of the car.) The lady, whom Claudette explained was the innkeeper, indicated that we were to follow her. We barely managed to get ourselves and luggage into the lilliputian elevator while the innkeeper explained in accented staccato English that she must operate the elevator.  We were not allowed at the controls. The room was like something out of the 1930’s, but comfortable. We stowed our gear and hit the streets to check out Bilbao’s old city.

Walking down the street  outside the hotel we could see a cathedral bathed in the late afternoon sun.  The yellow limestone had a golden glow.  We entered the first street to the right and found ourselves in the fourteenth century old city. The old buildings now have modern shops of high fashion and expensive jewelry. Foot traffic is fairly sparse but will increase as the clock approaches the nine o’clock hour. We window shopped a bit before finding an old restaurant for a bite to eat.  

The Bilbao Athletic Club had some of the older residents  dining.  There was a counter down one side with a display case full of enticing tapas.  The walls were decorated with soccer jerseys, posters, faded photographs of soccer teams of the years gone by, and a glass case full of autographed soccer balls and trophies. The counterman was quite chatty with fairly good English, and an old fellow suggested we buy a certain tapas. “Bueno, bueno!”, he said as he pointed at certain dishes. Then we bought a selection of tapas but noticed that he bought something different.   We took our food to one of the about ten tables. It is cheaper to buy your food at the counter than from a table. We enjoyed our food and soon joined the growing crowd in the streets.  We walked  by Cathedral de Santiago. Bilbao is on El Camino de Santiago, the route of pilgrims following the path of Saint James. 

After a good nights sleep and a quick breakfast we were on the road again.

It's More Than Ham

We ducked into a small eatery near Plaza Mayor in Madrid for a quick bite.  Tapas would be our choice.  Tapas are small servings of food something akin to an hors d’oeuvre but larger.  Like most restaurants, the place was small with a lunch counter and a few small tables. What caught my attention was a large number of hams hanging from the ceiling. There were   at least twenty-five hams with small cups attached to the large end of the ham to catch any drainage from the meat.  On the counter Is a curious device  in which a ham is secured.  The device allows a man to cut thin slivers of the meat in the direction of the grain.  The man carving the ham noticed my curious stare and offered me a sample of the meat. The thin meat was very tasty but slightly chewy. And a bit salty for me. This was the famous jamon, Spanish ham.

Having grown up on a farm I was familiar with salt cured meat but it was different from this.  As a farm boy we would simply rub the fresh butchered ham with salt until it would absorb no more, then hang the ham in the smokehouse until we would slice off some for cooking. The meat was extremely salty and hard as a rock when fried but was good with grits and eggs for breakfast. Spanish ham is salt cured as well and is sold in different grades. The determining factors are the process, the breed of hog and the diet of the swine.  The meat is cured by covering it with a specific amount of salt for a given time then the ham is washed and hung to dry. It can be air dried for one year to forty-eight months. An expert determines when the jamon is ready to eat by taking a core sample of the meat. Different breeds of pigs are used, but the most preferred are the black ones. The most expensive jamon, approximately $95 per lb., comes from black pigs fed a diet of acorns foraged from forests of oak trees. 

We found that, except on the coast of Spain, jamon was always the featured meat in restaurants. I never sampled the expensive jamon but can vouch for the less expensive with tomatoes, olive oil, and herbs on toasted bread. It was delicious! In Madrid we did visit Museo de Jamon. The museum had a great bag lunch of a sandwich, soda and a piece of fruit for only two euros!

A Letter From Bubba

Just the other day I received a letter from and old friend.  We were in high school together and I had not heard from him in quite a while.



Dear Tony,

As you know me and Sonny are over here in Spain. We heard that these Spanish people really like roasted baby pigs. We’s pig farmers you know and we’re trying to get a better price for our porkers. You ‘member Sonny, doncha? He’s Mr. Jabe Mulinax’s oldest boy. He’s a big ‘un and that’s really good aroun a farm. An’ smart too. Finished high school and all. We’s here in Cordoba, Spain and las night Sonny said we should learn somethin’ about culture.

He said we was gonna see some flamingo dancin’. I’ve heared of a lot of things like racin’ pigs and such but never no birds dancin’! Anyway, it was dark when went out to this place that was kinda like a hole in the wall, a real cave. We had this table right next to this little stage. This young fella brought us a bottle of wine. I ain’t much of a wine drinker, I’m a beer man myself. This stuff tasted a lot like pine rosin, but I drunk it anyway. They had a bunch of straight chairs on the stage and the folks went up an sat down. One fella didn’t have a chair so he set on a big wooden box. There was this guitar player that looked a lot like that actor Antonio Bandaras. He commenced to try to tear the strings off that guitar when he played. The fella on the box started beating on it like it was a drum. This skinny fella dressed in black with long hair and cowboy boots got up and started to dance. He was stompin’ like he was trying to put out a fire. And the man on the box started hollerin’ like maybe he was in pain or like maybe somebody had run over his coon dog. The dancin’ man spun around and shook his head and me an’ Sonny got a shower of Spanish sweat. It was kinda like when your dog shakes hisself after he’s been the creek. Smelled a little better though. Everybody cheered when the dancin’ man set down. Then this pretty little girl got up to dance. She was about twenty-five and real easy on the eyes. She was dressed in this long frilly dress and commenced to dance while the guitar player played, the same fella hollered and the other fella clapped in a rhythm with the music. She done the same kinda of dancin’ that the man done but was a whole lot better to look at. They carried on like this for about a hour. Sonny, he’s right smart, y’know, said they was gypsies. My grandma was scared of gypsies. She said they would steal yo’ babies.

The show was over and we left. I never did see no birds. The dancin’ girl was by the front door when we left smoking a Chesterfield cigarette. And she smiled at me.

We’ll be tryin’ to sell more pigs tomorrow.



Your ole buddy

Bubba



P s say “Hello” to Claudette for me.