I am making up for my years of living in an all girls dorm at an all girls school by living in a shared apartment with 5 guys. Apart from my French Partner in Crime (FPIC) there
are two men from Pakistan, one from Romania, and one from the southeast of Spain, as well as occasionally our retired fish-salesman landlord. We get along all pretty well and surprisingly there are rarely fights over the bathroom. We have no oven, the dryer and dishwasher are permanently broken and there are bars on the windows of our kitchen, but I have come to love this apartment more than I ever thought I could.A day that really describes live in this part of Pais Vasco is the other weekend. It was a calm, sunny Sunday and my FPIC and I were eating breakfast when a parade went by our window. We dropped everything, excited, ran after it and followed it down into the little city center. In the center there was a giant tent set up. Inside there were 3 long tables set up with about 35 people along each table cooking fish in giant pans. It was a fish cooking competition. Each competitor had to use the same kind of fish and the same oil. We wandered around for awhile watching the people shaking their pans and standing around drinking wine. After awhile, my FPIC asked one competitor if there was going to be a time when the people watching could taste the fish. The man said that all the people belonged to different societies (like shriners except with women and children too) and that the fish was eaten in the different societies, but if we came back later we could try his. When we came back he said we were invited back to his society to hang out and have lunch, so after the judging (our guy came in 4th) we headed up the hill, with the 27 other people of this society, to eat. At a big long table with the women and children sitting at one half and the men on the other half , we sat and ate a ton. There was salad and rice and tomatoes with garlic, the competition fish (which was really good) a course of venison and then a course of beef, followed by dessert and accompanied with lots of wine and digestivos. Everyone was amazingly friendly and chatty. At about 6:30pm we finally left and made our way back to our apartment where we found our half eaten breakfast, just as we had left it, hours earlier.
Days like this happen a lot, where we stumble on festivities in town or people invite us and treat us like family. Although were we live is really not a nice looking town, it has in it some of the warmest and most welcoming people that I have ever met.
Also! I hosted my first Thanksgiving! The family of my FPIC and one of our roommates all joined in on my semi-auth
entic American Thanksgiving. I cooked a stuffed chicken and pie in a toaster oven, made my grandmother's stuffing recipe (enough meant for a 20lb turkey for a little 2kg chicken oops), and served the gravy in a coffee cup, but the evening was wonderful and I think I can call my first ever Thanksgiving a success.Until next time folks!
PS. Another festival, of Saint Andres, where the women and children dress up and go out in tradition clothing and then I awkwardly try to take pictures of all of them. :D
