Basque Spain

In the northern part of Spain where we were, street signs were in two languages. One was Spanish, of course, and we learned that the other one was Basque. And we became aware that the Basque faction and the Spanish faction were not on the best of terms. I never leaned the details of the problem and I never asked anyone their politics. I did, however, notice a trend. It probably wasn't true across the board, but everyone I met who turned out to be Basque had that beautiful blue-black hair, while the other folks had dark brown hair.

One day when several of us were having dinner in a restaurant, we saw a poster of a young woman with a swastika cut into her cheek. She was looking up with a very serene expression and a halo-like glow around her head, like a saint looking up at heaven. Rita was with us and she spoke perfect Spanish, so we asked her to ask the manager what it was about. They had a long, lively conversation, give and take, that went on for several minutes. At the end of it he went away to check on our order of paella and Rita just shrugged and said 'He doesn't know"! 

It was not uncommon to see armed police on the street, but occasionally they would show up with machine guns. One time when Randy was visiting, we came out of El Cortes Ingles to the sound of angry shouting. An empty bus had been overturned on the street and lit on fire. We got out of there. 

Later that same week when we were walking in Bilbao, we heard angry shouting again and saw, at the intersection ahead of us, a huge crowd of people running by, very fast. I wanted to go see what was going on, but Randy's cooler head prevailed and we left.

Another morning on my way to work I saw machine-gun toting police everywhere in town, even outside of our office. I was fairly concerned. Rita was back in the states and Randy had retuned to college in Illinois. Sola, one of the office staff, tucked her blue-black hair behind her ear, patted me on the cheek and said “Don't worry, they won’t do anything with you here”. I appreciated the sentiment but I kept thinking that (a) "they" didn’t know I was here, and (b) they wouldn’t much care, either. I called Randy to talk to him about it. He said if anything started to go wrong, get in the car and drive straight across the border to France. That made good sense to me, so I packed a small bag and kept ready to go. Fortunately, I didn't have to. In fact, nothing terrible happened during the seven months I was in Spain.