It’s a 7.30 am start most weekdays here. Pietro leaves for work at 8.15 (more on that in a later post...). Meanwhile, after my run – which I do if I haven’t damaged any body parts (various back, knee and ankle injuries stopped me running for a couple of years until this summer) – I settle down to work for the day, sometimes accompanied by Radio 4. (Sometimes, like today, I’ll distract myself by writing this blog – but usually I leave that for evenings or weekends.) This being a sabbatical, I am looking forward to some time shortly when I don’t have any work to do – but that hasn’t happened yet! I’m hoping that in late November, I’ll have time to start an intensive Spanish course, with classes each morning for a month or so.
The buzz of old town life goes on in the street outside, and occasionally I’ll have a look-out on the balcony and see what’s going on below.
The buzz of old town life goes on in the street outside, and occasionally I’ll have a look-out on the balcony and see what’s going on below.
Having a balcony is a novelty, and fortunately my vertigo can just about cope with one on the first floor. City life here (as in most of Europe!) is high-rise. Everyone lives in flats and there are virtually no gardens; most buildings are at least 5 or 6 storeys high. But I’ve realised that I have virtually no experience of living or working - or being - in buildings with more than 2 or 3 floors! The last couple of days we’ve been looking at one or two flats in nearby streets (as we’re possibly thinking of moving - another story), some of which have been on the fourth and fifth floor with vertiginous drops from narrow balconies. One fourth floor flat had an enclosed balcony with open-able thin glass windows right down to the floor... That freaked me out. (You can see the kind of thing I mean in the picture below).
Pietro gets home at about 6.30 or 7pm, usually, and this is one of the best times of day in the Casco Viejo. There are essentially two types of working day here: the European day (9 am till 5 pm with a short lunch break), or the Spanish day (10 am till 8 pm with a three hour siesta). If you work in a shop or café or library, you take the long break in the afternoon; otherwise, you’re most likely to do ‘office hours’, and you’ll be free between 5 and 8, when everyone who’s not working is out shopping, sitting in bars and cafes, or just doing the daily ‘paseo’. So at this time, we usually go out to buy our provisions, have a wander, and sometimes stop in a café for a coffee, watching Bilbao life in progress.
Coffee is a national pastime, as in Italy. People generally drink café con leche (= caffe latte), café solo (= espresso), or cafe cortado (= caffe machiato). As in Italy, too, there’s no American nonsense with different shapes, sizes and flavours, and take-away coffee is virtually unheard of – it comes in proper cups and you sit and drink it in a café, and it’s delicious. One of the great benefits of living here is that we haven’t set eyes on an American Corporate Coffee – or American Corporate Anything Else for that matter – since coming here. And ordinary people actually buy their food and clothes and household goods and books in proper independent shops and markets in their vibrant community streets, rather than the soulless aisles of monopolising corporate stores and supermarkets in otherwise devastated high streets. Living here is a daily reminder of just how much Britain has become a colony of the United States, and how the Anglo-American social model is so different from the European. (That’s not to say, of course that there aren’t supermarkets and big corporations here: there are, but the balance is quite different.)
Anyway, getting back to our early evening coffee: there are plenty of cafes tucked down the old streets of the old town, but the cafés in the cathedral square (Plaza Santiago) are a favourite, partly because the square is the hub of the Casco Viejo. It’s very, very popular with little old ladies, though, who swarm in groups to occupy the tables in the square early on and then don’t budge, so we often have to go elsewhere. (And yes, it is mainly ladies: their husbands are almost certainly in the tabernas drinking beer. There’s a lot more to be said about the differential behaviour of men and women here – for a later blog post!)
Coffee is a national pastime, as in Italy. People generally drink café con leche (= caffe latte), café solo (= espresso), or cafe cortado (= caffe machiato). As in Italy, too, there’s no American nonsense with different shapes, sizes and flavours, and take-away coffee is virtually unheard of – it comes in proper cups and you sit and drink it in a café, and it’s delicious. One of the great benefits of living here is that we haven’t set eyes on an American Corporate Coffee – or American Corporate Anything Else for that matter – since coming here. And ordinary people actually buy their food and clothes and household goods and books in proper independent shops and markets in their vibrant community streets, rather than the soulless aisles of monopolising corporate stores and supermarkets in otherwise devastated high streets. Living here is a daily reminder of just how much Britain has become a colony of the United States, and how the Anglo-American social model is so different from the European. (That’s not to say, of course that there aren’t supermarkets and big corporations here: there are, but the balance is quite different.)
Anyway, getting back to our early evening coffee: there are plenty of cafes tucked down the old streets of the old town, but the cafés in the cathedral square (Plaza Santiago) are a favourite, partly because the square is the hub of the Casco Viejo. It’s very, very popular with little old ladies, though, who swarm in groups to occupy the tables in the square early on and then don’t budge, so we often have to go elsewhere. (And yes, it is mainly ladies: their husbands are almost certainly in the tabernas drinking beer. There’s a lot more to be said about the differential behaviour of men and women here – for a later blog post!)
The cathedral (the Catedral de Santiago) is a lovely – though small and unassuming – 15th century Gothic building (and, like everywhere in the old town, it’s only 2 minutes walk from our flat.) It’s on the northern (coastal) route of the Camino de Santiago, on the way to Santiago de Compostella, so occasionally one sees pilgrims with backpacks and walking sticks passing through.
The route of the Camino is marked by special stones in the pavement as well as signs displaying maps with the local route.
The main alternative venue for our evening coffee is the Plaza Nueva, a classic Spanish arcaded square (built in 1821), again a great place for Bilbaino-watching. Before the centre of local life moved away to the new town, this square used to be where the Biscay regional government was based. When that moved out, the Basque Language Academy (‘Euskaltzaindia’) moved in. That also moved out recently but the name is still inscribed on the pediment. Otherwise, the square is lined with cafes and bars (under the arcades), and hundreds of people gather here to eat and drink in evenings and at weekends.
Supper is our main meal together (although in general in Spain lunch is considered the main meal). It can happen anytime between 7 and midnight. The Spanish wouldn’t dream of eating until 8.30 pm at the very earliest, and often not till much later. We have to make a decision each day as to whether to be British and eat at 7 or 8, Italian and eat at 9, or Spanish and eat at 10 or 11. (At weekends, the Spanish don’t eat until 10pm at the earliest: last Saturday we tried to eat out at 9.30 and the waiter looked at us as though we’d got off a space-ship. At 10, people had begun to trickle in, and the place was full by 10.30.)
After supper, we often find ourselves working or emailing or doing this blog or generally just sorting stuff out, but we’ve found time for a bit of reading etc. I’ve been reading some books about the Basque Country, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ recent novel ‘The Marriage Plot’, and have a huge pile of books I want to read in the next few months. We have been watching ‘Dr Who’ (sad, I know) and ‘The Thick of It’ on the IPlayer, and there’s always ‘The Guardian’ on the IPad. We’ve also been to the theatre/concerts a couple of times (more on this later…), and one way or another we’ve had visitors here quite a lot too.
If we haven’t had a coffee earlier, we might go and sit in nearby Plaza Unamuno at about 10pm for a few minutes. (The writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, 1864-1936, is Bilbao’s most famous historical figure: see picture of statute below). It was great to sit in the busy square in the long summer evenings, but now the evenings are drawing in, and people are moving inside the cafes. (It gets light late here, about an hour later than Oxford: this morning it was still dark at 8.15 am. And in summer it also gets dark a bit earlier than the UK, of course. But to compensate we’ll have longer days than the UK in the winter.)
After supper, we often find ourselves working or emailing or doing this blog or generally just sorting stuff out, but we’ve found time for a bit of reading etc. I’ve been reading some books about the Basque Country, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ recent novel ‘The Marriage Plot’, and have a huge pile of books I want to read in the next few months. We have been watching ‘Dr Who’ (sad, I know) and ‘The Thick of It’ on the IPlayer, and there’s always ‘The Guardian’ on the IPad. We’ve also been to the theatre/concerts a couple of times (more on this later…), and one way or another we’ve had visitors here quite a lot too.
If we haven’t had a coffee earlier, we might go and sit in nearby Plaza Unamuno at about 10pm for a few minutes. (The writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, 1864-1936, is Bilbao’s most famous historical figure: see picture of statute below). It was great to sit in the busy square in the long summer evenings, but now the evenings are drawing in, and people are moving inside the cafes. (It gets light late here, about an hour later than Oxford: this morning it was still dark at 8.15 am. And in summer it also gets dark a bit earlier than the UK, of course. But to compensate we’ll have longer days than the UK in the winter.)
With a 7.30am start each morning on weekdays, bedtime is between 11 pm and midnight for us, but even on a weekday evening many of the ‘tabernas’ outside will be open until the early hours, and there’ll be many people drinking in our street until 2am. Whole families – with small children and sleeping babies – will still be sitting in cafes at midnight. The Spanish seem to have an inexhaustible (and often quite raucous) appetite for public, daily and late-night socialising, and in this they seem quite different from the French and Italians. Many shops don’t open till 10 am next morning to compensate for the national tendency to late nights, but, even so, I do wonder how they manage to eat and drink and talk and go to bed so late and then get up for work next morning.
And so to sleep, with the distant hum of the Spanish indulging their extraordinary capacity for social life in the background….
And so to sleep, with the distant hum of the Spanish indulging their extraordinary capacity for social life in the background….
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