Monthly Archive

Whewwwww… okay, a little post to start with. You can do it Susan, you can do it!

I am now, right now, in Switzerland. I have been here for over two weeks. I have moved around the country a fair bit in this time, some of the trips productive (in a “yay, tasty brain and soul food!” way), some less so. I’ve based myself at a friend’s place in the Mittelland area and under his extremely sage advice embarked on my trips by train with the aid of a …drumrolldrumrolldrumroll… !! Swiss Youth Pass !!. Best tourist incentive ever. For a flat fee which depends on how long you want the pass for, you get to travel by train, bus and boat on the majority of possible routes available without paying or booking for them. I know! It’s crazy. And so freeing. Within a given destination, if you for some queer, impossible reason happen to miss your bus -ahem-, you can trot down to the lake to see what time the boat to the same location leaves and take that instead. And train hopping… it’s a beautiful thing. Not having to worry about timetables, just as long as you can get one of the several trains that pass through your desired station somewhere along their line. It’s funny because I am a planner. Well… hmmm. Sometimes I enjoy planning, sometimes it’s a burden. [Aside: Wow I'm feeling pretty equivocal right now "sometimes...... sometimes".] But I certainly don’t find it difficult once I know what it is I want. So the pass is a double-edged sword - on one hand I love flying by the seat of my pants and having alllllllllllll these options shaking their asses at me - “hey baby, wanna ride?”; on the other, because I like to feel like I’m making the best choice for that precise moment, I can be horribly indecisive in the face of such freedom and choice. The kicker is that indecision is a time-devourer. That’s always it eh, real freedom in any realm is ultimately tricky. You’ve either got to be mature or get mature to handle it.

I hope I’m a step closer to that but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Anyway, this has been a but a mite of a post to get back into the habit. To keep myself honest, I will state for the record that my next posts will be about my impressions and understanding of the Basque cause, and about my time and thoughts about dr Schwiiz, the country. Respectively. I also hope to further upload and organise my photos into sets so that I can link particular photos to things I’ve talked about or places I’ve described.

That will wait the weekend though. We are off to Zermatt tomorrow to hike for an indeterminate period of time and to gaze in wonderment at the Matterhorn.

Auso……

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(*Susan’s lame Swiss-related “in-joke”. To be revealed…)

One of my favourite parcels of time in Spain was the bus ride from Madrid to Granada. Gipuzkoa, where I had been, has quite different scenery to much of the rest of Spain; its bushy green hills very unlike the vast stretches of parched, gold-tufted land that have probably had more of a hand in shaping the Spanish spirit. Yet despite the presupposition of the imagination that dryness begets barrenness, the variety of colours and forms that I saw from the window were nothing short of enthralling. The area between Madrid and Granada was especially stimulating as the arid soil somehow still managed to give life to many green trees and shrubs.

The soil was magical, one of my favourite features. It was never one colour for several reasons: the soil type itself, whether it was fresh or set, and however shadow and light decided to transform what they fell on. On the whole the “natural” and most common colour of the dirt was pink-brown, and put like that it sounds fairly unappetising, but don’t think baby pink precipitating uncomfortably atop a brown background. The pink shines up through the brown, generating a tinge or a halo for the soil. It’s quite something to see the land as dry and so full of energy at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

I woke up one morning with the desire to not engage my usual routine, and more than that I felt compelled to go to Bilbao. I had planned on doing this for a while as the Guggenheim modern art museum has a much vaunted reputation, even if the city it resides in is much noted for its unattractiveness. Being uncharacteristically decisive, I decided to bunk my classes for the day and head out westwards on an excursion.

Two reasons led me to choose Euskotren over an autobus to get to Bilbao. The first reason is that I feel more of a sense of adventure when I travel by train than by bus. I think this is because trains seem to be able to sneak around to the hidden side of the hills and trundle through farmland that isn’t likely to be found beside the highway. The other reason is that I was more familiar with catching the Euskotren than catching the bus. Okay, okay, I had never caught a bus out of Sn Sn before and had gotten up too late to have time to sort it out. In general however it makes more sense to catch the bus rather than the Euskotren for this trip because the tren takes two and a half hours to get to Bilbao from San Sebastian, whereas the bus I believe takes an hour or less.

The journey there was essentially enjoyable because the train was empty for the large part, the interior further widened and brightened by the clear morning sun. What’s more there was the unexpected diversion of the travel soundtrack. Leaving the station at Sn Sn I was more than a little concerned to hear the horrendously earnest group accordion session being piped through the car. 2 and a half hours… of this??? Just as I was working hard on developing a method to deny the existence of sound, the music changed to a pretty recorder piece in the style of traditional Irish music. This revealed the pattern of the sound system - every two stops or so the music would change, the playlist including The Flight of the Bumblebee, The Blue Danube, and The Phantom of the Opera. Always instrumental, almost always classical. Was the purpose to add a touch of class to the train ride?

This post is about the Basque country by tren though, so I’ll let go of the ears’ story. My view out of the window contained the following: Read the rest of this entry »