I arrived back in the heat of Bilbao on a Wednesday afternoon three months ago. I walked from the bus station past the bars and concrete blocks of downtown towards my friend Kate’s, who had kindly offered to put me up for a week while I found proper lodgings. I rang the buzzer and climbed the stairs to find them having just risen from bed, freshly breakfasted and deep into watching one of the middle seasons of Friends. There was glitter in their hair and in many of their visible orifices. It was mid-afternoon during fiestas.
As far as I know there is no equivalent to fiestas in the Anglosphere. My favourite football writer, Phil Ball writes:
Spain is a deeply ritualistic country. It puts an impressive amount of time and effort into preserving a kaleidoscope array of traditions, most of them celebrated in the form of local fiestas. The ultimate book on Spain would be one in which the author spent each of the 365 days of the year in a different pueblo with a different fiesta…
Brought up on a paler diet of irony and individualism, the British settler cannot fail to be impressed by the back-slapping togetherness that he or she will encounter on a dizzying number of social occasions throughout the year.
Every town in Spain has their fiestas, mostly focused on summer. In Bizkaia there are fiestas in the various pueblos on most weekends from May to October. The big ones though, are the Bilbao fiestas at the end of August that mark the end of summer vacation and the start of the new working year.
In Bilbao the epicentre of the week of celebrations is the river front between Abando train station and the Udaletxeko Zubia bridge. I have been told there are events in front of the Arriaga Theatre during the day time, like races for the children. I wouldn’t know because I could never bring myself to leave the house before the late afternoon. As far as I can tell, the real action begins at night.
Along the river different organisations set up tents called txosnas (pronounced ‘chose-nahs’) in which they have bars and music. Each one has its own character, music or gimmick (e.g. glitter). People move between them carrying their own cups, buying drinks, dancing and talking in groups.
As well as the txosnas, all the chinos (off-licence corner stores so-called because they are mostly operated by Chinese immigrants) are open throughout the night selling wine and beer. There’s no need to carry your drinks for the whole night around with you. You can just pop into a nearby chino for more red wine or coke for your kalimotxo. Then there are the various trolleys selling bokatas (sandwiches) or barbequed meat on skewers.
Coming from New Zealand, two things are striking. Firstly, there seems to be a complete lack of commercial exploitation. The drinks at the txosnas are cheap, generous and the profits go towards the continued running of the organisation. There is no area you are corralled into to be ‘in’ the fiestas and in which you pay inflated prices for your drinks. It is not ‘7-Up Fiestas of Bilbao’ or ‘Bilbao Fiestas brought to you by Qatar Airways’. It’s just a community looking to party.
The second thing is the complete absence of aggression. It remains a mystery to me why drinking in the UK, Australia and New Zealand seems to be inseparable from male douchebaggery and violence, but why this is mostly absent on the continent. According to the OECD, for example, Germany and France both consume more litres of alcohol annually than do the UK or New Zealand. And, judging from fiestas, there is no shortage of binge drinking going on. There aren’t, however, packs of dudes roaming around projecting their belligerence and looking for fights. Culture matters, I suppose.
No, fiestas are great. The road is a great sea of merry, uninhibited people with the blue bandanna of Bilbao fiestas around their necks, dancing, eating, standing around or sitting on the curb with their drinks and talking to friends. Torrents of urine run down the alleyways as men, and often women, line up against walls or behind dumpsters to relieve themselves.
At around three or four in the morning people begin to peel away and head home but the party stretches at least until dawn. Sometime after daybreak the whirring street sweeping machines rattle round and collect up all the discarded plastic bags, food packets and cups, spray the streets with water and disinfectant and by midday the empty streets are spotless and shiny again. Then the next night the process is repeated. Like so much else since I’ve noticed since I arrived, these Basques have got their shit on lock down.
After a week of relentless merriment, the city gathers down on the waterfront on the Sunday night and fiestas end with chanting and the burning of an effigy on a raft in the river, and then people go back to their homes to start the new working year.
The wine doth spilt, I had two weeks to find a place to live, carry my box of things to my new place and set up a home. I live with John, an Englishman from Southampton, in an area of Bilbao called San Francisco that stretches up the hill from the river, across the bridge from the old town. In Bilbao it has a reputation as the rough neighbourhood.
It’s a diverse place with North African men loitering on the street corners and boxes of yams and plantain outside shops serving colourfully dressed West African women. At the other end of San Francisco, away from the train tracks there is the gypsy area and it’s not unusual to see dishevelled alcoholics sitting on steps with cans of beer from midday onwards. It’s a gritty, motley place, the sort of place where women get whistled at, though I’ve never been catcalled, no matter how short the skirt I wear.
One sunny morning in early September I got up early, got on a bus and presented myself in my new job: as the newest oral English teacher at an Ikastola out by the airport.
Ikastolas are Basque schools in which pupils are taught predominantly or entirely in Euskera (Basque language) instead of Spanish. For forty years under Franco, Euskera was forbidden in public and education in the Basque language was driven underground with clandestine classes in people’s apartments or homes. However since the Generalissimo’s death in 1975 and the advent of democracy and Basque autonomy, the Ikastolas have spread and bilingual education has flourished. Now, at most Ikastolas, students are taught in Euskera from kindergarten until graduation, with Spanish relegated to ‘Lingua’ class and English the language of instruction in only a handful of others.
After being shown around the grounds, collecting my keys, signing a contract and being shown the lunchroom I had a week to make the most comprehensive and exhausting introductory PowerPoint about myself imaginable. I burnished my presentation, otherwise known as The Alex Rothman Experience, with flying animations, population and GDP per person statistics on the various nations that I’ve lived in, photographs of me and visual gags. I was in my natural habitat.
In this fashion I’ve spent the past two months. I have a two week rotation of English classes, presenting PowerPoints, playing English games and stopping teenage boys from drawing dicks on their nametags. The nights have drawn in as the cold has crept up the valleys and the trees down by the river have turned red and golden. Daylight savings has wound the clocks back and it is dark outside when I get up in the mornings.
I’m well and truly ensconced now. I have a new job, a new flat, a new circle of friends and a new routine. I have a walk home, a grocer and a way of hanging my washing out over the balcony. I’ve gone to football games at San Mames and I’ve made plans for Christmas.
Recently I have been going back through the video I shot in Bhutan and editing it into scenes. As well as reconnecting with some of the things I saw and lived last year, it is also a way to reflect on what that experience was, and what my life is now.
I can’t help but miss Bhutan. I miss the openness of the people and the excitement of being in a truly foreign place. Mostly, though, I miss the knowledge of why I was there that grew out of the ever-present feeling of growing and learning. In some ways I feel like I should still be there.
I’ve always been prone to nostalgia and sentimentality, of course. I get sentimental when moving out of a flat that I’ve lived in for a year, or throwing away a pair of old shoes. With my parents in Wanganui I’ve stored shoeboxes of ticket stubs and concert programs from life events that I thought would be someday important to me. I’ve always struggled to make sense of leaving things behind.
I’m happy here in Bilbao. It is a fantastic place to live a nice life. And it is also necessary to rebuild my bank balance and pay my dues to New Zealand’s Inland Revenue Department. But now, with Jake having emigrated, I do find myself feeling a little listless. The privilege of options comes with the conceit of self-questioning. Then I open my computer and return to learning Spanish, or pick-up my guitar for my daily practice. Everything moves forward.
At night as I meditate before I go to bed, several floors below and across a scrubby field, I can hear as the train quietly rattles along cold tracks, pulling into Abando station.
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