Carter lives in Spain.

Hello all friends and family, welcome to my blog. With this blog, I will try to keep you all at least reasonably updated about some of the things that happen in my life in Spain. As of today, I have been in Spain for exactly 20 days, so I´m obviously off to a bit of a late start on the blog. There´s no way I can possibly recap all thats happened in the days I have been here so far, but I can tell you there is much walking, alcohol, and meat involved.

I now live in a homestay with a divorced women that I assume to be about 60 something, although I really have no idea. She has two kids, a daugter and a son, that are 33 and 37, and live in Holland and the Canary Islands, respectively. The daughter is a professional dancer. Although my homestay mother, Mertxe, is Basque and possesses a Basque name, she does not speak the language because she grew up under Franco when the language was banned. I have all my meals at home, or at least packed lunches from home, but without any of the strict mothering we were warned about in the homestay orientation. Another student, a German girl that is studying Spanish and apprenticing at a restaurant, but speaks English fairly well, also lives in the house. Henceforth, much of my going out and partying so far in this city has been with Germans, but with whom I speak mostly in Spanish, especially since at least one speaks better Spanish than English.

Because of my learning and speaking Spanish, as well as speaking English with a German at home, my English is becoming much more vulnerable to errors or idiosyncratic phrasing, as well as to my heightened consciousness and scrutiny of how to speak it. The other day I wrote in a compisition for class, in English, "... that Basque women are less likely to put up with harrassment than others", then proceeded to stare at and agonize over whether "to put up with" was actually a phrase at all, and if so, why I couldn´t make sense of it.

One of the most important aspects of my situation right now is that I am in the Basque Country. I have heard this idea in various ways a few times, and saw it summed up well on a shop window the other day that read, "Remember tourist, that you are not in Spain. You are not in France. You are in Basque Country". There is quite the nationalist presence here, and it is for the most part leftist or "lenkar" (sp) nationalism, which is quite an interesting tendency. Last week we had the fiesta of "el día de San Sebastián", which is a very complicated holiday to explain, but it currently has very little to do with any saints, and much more to do with people beating drums for 24 hours. This is ostensibly a reenactment of what the people of the city used to do while waiting in line for water, in order to mock the music of the French soldiers while the city was occupied, and also something to do with a battle against Napoleon, I think.

But in the Plaza de Constitución, during the raising of the flag of the city at midnight, which officially starts the festivities of the day, there were probably a hundred different banners, including one for ETA, which is the radical Basque nationalist group that is best known for its various bombings and assasinations. Political prisoners are hugely important here, as many people have relatives that are imprisoned by the Spanish government for various levels of involvement in activism on behalf of Basque nationalism. The cousin of my host mother was evidently imprisoned and tortured for a year for putting a poster on a wall during a demonstration. During the fiesta, I was with my conversation partner that is a native Basque, and ended up at something that was like a mix between a protest and a celebration of the holiday, but which involved much information and chanting about Basque political prisoners, as well as the conflict in Palestine. Thinking about it now, sober, and knowing the tensions that run here between protesters and police, I don´t know if I will be attending many more of this type of event, but it was an interesting experience at least.

I am currently in a Basque Language and Culture class, as well as Basque and Spanish Gender studies, and will continue to spend time with my Basque "intercambio", so I will be learning quite a bit more about this very interesting and unique language and culture. The language is unique in that it is fundamentally unrelated to any other language in the world. Yes, since the dawning of the modern era it has appropriated many Spanish words and Euskarized them, things which did not exist for Basque to name in its prehistoric roots, like coffee, Spanish:cafe, Euskara:cafea, but delving more deeply, to words like mother, die, etc, it is not related to any of the Indo-European languages that surround it.

Alright, I am no longer able to write any more. As was expected there is much that I have left out even from the immediate subject at hand of Basque language, culture, and nationalism, not to mention all the other things that I would like to relay that might be of interest to you all. Oh well. However incomplete, this blog will hopefully at least give you a glimpse of my life here. Adios.