Muskitz, Navarra

Picture perfect house and village.

We are in a small village about 24 km north of Pamplona, in the country house of the Ayestaran family.  As we have never seen anything like this in real life, it is most like a movie set.  I am in the living room/dining room area on one of two large and comfortable couches in front of a fireplace that is big enough for a bed.  On the mantle and the beam above are collections of bells, small copper pots and crockery pitchers that have accumulated from the various families that come here for their weekends together.  All around the room are collections like these: antique copper cookware, dishes, tools for making sheep's milk cheese.  There is a long dining table with twelve chairs, and lots of space between all the furniture.  But what is most remarkable, other than the countryside just outside the windows, is the construction of this house, which must be four hundred years old.  A stone house with walls that are two feet thick, dark, hand-hewn beams holding up the ceiling.  White washed plaster between the beams on the ceiling, tile floor. On the level below are the tools and supplies that relate to the outdoor work of having a garden, some amount of surrounding yard, two donkeys, and cutting firewood.

There is a three year old coming down the steps as I write (hooray!) and I can hear the chatter of the family members on the other side of the kitchen door.  Upstairs Jon and Benjamin and Peio and Antxon are still sleeping.  Instead of glass windows, there are wooden shutters that keep every bit of light out when they are closed. It is easy to sleep long into the day in that much dark.  I haven't counted the bedrooms, but Peio says this house sleeps twenty easily.

Yesterday morning we were supposed to leave at about 9:30 to go to a farmers market in a village to the northwest.  I woke up when I heard some creaking boards and I asked Jon what time it was.  9:30.  We hustled into our clothes and came downstairs to find Benjamin on this couch and others in the kitchen but Peio and his brother were not yet up. Phew.  We had a quick breakfast of toast and oranges and grapefruit (local) and then we piled into the minivan for a long day of touring.  I felt like we were traveling with Uncle Babe and Auntie Arlene -- the plans were all made, all we had to do was sit in the back and listen to the stories and background about what we were passing.

We are in the Basque Country.  No flat areas, all hills, with mountains all around.  The roads are narrow and winding, sheep are on the grassy slopes (we saw a shepherd moving a flock down the middle of the road in one village) and the villages are clustered tightly with no houses on the hillsides between.  We drove on a road that followed beside a brisk stream, winding through the woods, and Laura told us that this area had been early to industrialize, as it had water power and lots of natural resources.  Over the years, this part of the region got richer and more people were landowners than in other parts. As we got closer to the town with the market, we saw various large factories tucked into the landscape.  Lumberyard, cookie factory, and then we were suddenly in town again with roundabouts and narrow streets and no easy parking.  All the signs are in Basque and in Spanish.  

Cheeses at one end ...

... and vegetables at the other.

The market was far more sophisticated than our markets -- it has probably been in existence for centuries, in some form.  It has a large covered space with no walls, heaters in the ceiling, benches down the center facing outward in both directions, and the vendors are lined up all around the outside edge with an aisle between them and another row of vendors.  Just outside was the river, with boats of young rowing teams practicing.  It was a stunningly beautiful day, with deep blue skies and sunshine, about 17 degrees C.  In season now: leeks, cauliflower, cabbage, chard, beets, carrots, cardoons, endive and escarole, spinach. The leaves were sometimes full of holes.  Everything looked like it was grown without pesticides.  Also lots of beans that the region of Tolosa is famous for, and every possible cut of pig meat.  The market provides the space, the tables, the table cloths (as far as we could tell, since they were all the same and there were carts of tables at one end of the building), electricity.  It would be so much simpler to load up to go to market if all you were bringing was the food.  There were no grand efforts to display anything differently from the others.  They just put the vegetables out on the table, loose or in boxes. Benjamin bought a bowl of beans from the Slow Food kitchen at one end of the market and they were tasty, just plain with nothing but a slice of bread.

The colors were irresistible.

The cafes were packed at midday.

We walked around the town, wandered through other markets, stopped at a bar for a pintxo (Basque for toothpick, but it is the same as tapas).  At noon the bars were crowded with people stopping for a drink and a snack, as lunch was still a few hours off.  We had some hake, some fried calamari, various beverages, and moved on.

The family discussed the various options for our next destination -- with 20 km of coastline and 17 villages, they were trying to decide which one was best to visit.  We would not have known the difference. Everything was picturesque and beautiful to the extreme.  

Peio, Benjamin, Antxon. To the left is France,
to the right is Spain.

Out of place maybe, but still
scenic.

We went to a fishing village, Hondarribia, crowded with cars and walkers on such a gorgeous day.  Parking was hard, so Ramon let us get out and he went to find a place to put the car.  We walked down the wide street lined with bars, with tables and people outside. The street echoed with conversation.  The trim on the houses was brightly painted in green and red mostly, and Antxon said those are the only true colors.  The blue houses were inappropriate in his view.  The sidewalks were swept clean, and all the buildings were in excellent condition.  We walked out to see the boats and to see France on the other side of the bay.  We could see surfers and walkers in France, probably speaking French or Basque.

The family, and we, take part in the ritual.

We meant to stop for a quick pintxo, with someone going into the bar to choose the plates, but a waiter came out so we just ordered and ended up having a light lunch. Sardines, anchovies, mixed salad, mushrooms, croquettes (fried balls of ham and cheese), drinks.  By now it was about 4:00, maybe.

Then on to the next town.  I think only Ramon stayed awake, since he was driving.  We woke up in a large and elegant city, probably less than a half hour from the village.  We were in San Sebastián, where it feels like Nice or somewhere on the French Riviera.  A wide promenade with a fancy white iron fence to walk along and stop to lean on as you look over the beach and the surfers and the other people walking up and down.  We ambled along. Benjamin tried to listen to the languages going past to see who was here -- almost all Spanish and Basque, a small amount of French and almost no English.  All the most expensive real estate overlooks this view.  It surprised me that they weren't all hotels, that real people live in those grand buildings at the edge of the water.

The carousel and city hall with the spires. The whole
town, plus tourists, on the promenade.

We sat down on a bench to watch the carousel with all the cute kids, we watched someone blowing giant bubbles, we went to the Naval Museum where we thought we would see an exhibit on boats and history but it was a new exhibit on Women and the Sea. Ah well, we learned something about how women do most of the work in fishing, really, and they don't get paid as much as the men, and they have been an integral part of the industry forever.  They don't go out on the boats so much, but  they do all the prep work with nets and gear, they pull the boats, and they do all the post-fishing handling.

Pintxo, on the bar in San Sebastian.

The sun setting behind Jon, Benjamin and Hana.

Then we wandered the streets of the old city, looking in the shop windows, admiring all the bar food, stopping once for a quick snack. I wanted a bag of potato chips that were being made right in front of our eyes, so Peio bought them for me (why struggle with language when you have your own Peio). The main plaza, once again, was something out of a movie.  Surrounded on all four sides with identical arches on the ground floor, and identical windows for four stories above.  The windows had numbers above them to show where the spectator boxes went during the days when the plaza was used as a bull fight ring.

Ramon, Laura, Hana, Benjamin, Peio and Jon,.

Antxon filling a glass with cider,
at the typical distance of 3 feet.

Finally it was time to go to dinner at the cideria, back in the country closer to their village.  We took a bigger highway this time.  The village was completely dark, with winding streets, no light shining through the shuttered windows, but we wound our way to the parking lot behind one of these huge stone buildings and ducked into a doorway. A low-ceilinged room with huge barrels of cider along one wall, tables and benches around, and one small wood stove in the middle of the room. It seemed like the show started at a certain time, as everyone arrived at once, at about 9:15. The proprietor would open a barrel, yelling "gozhe" (or something like that) and everyone would crowd around, glass in hand, to catch the stream of cider as it poured straight out of the barrel. Peio told us to catch the cider, letting it hit the edge of the glass, and to get about a finger or two and then step back and let someone else catch the cider.  This went on all evening, with pauses. The owner would yell GOZHE again and everyone would get up to taste the cider from a new barrel. It was stronger than English cider, and less sweet.  After a few small samples, I was done. Dinner was served without plates, just a serving dish to the middle of the table, and we each had a knife and fork. First course was an egg and cod omelet. Yum.  Second was a hunk of steak, warm all the way through, grilled and juicy on the outside, rare on the inside. We ate and ate. She brought a second plate out and we ate some more. Peio said he could have eaten more but the rest of us were finished. Dessert was quince jam and sheep milk cheese.  All of this was with two giant loaves of bread. At the very end of the evening, the last barrel was in the room where  they press the cider, and we all wanted to see the press, so we waited to the end. The owner explained it all to Ramon and Peio in Basque, while the rest of us tried to figure it out for ourselves. The machine could process 3000 kg of apples an hour (about ten of our little 17 bushel bins) and it was understandable up until the part where the pressing actually happens.

It could not be more authentic: the post-and-massive-beam construction, the wide plank tables, the small wood
stove in the middle of the room, the 2200 liter cider barrels, the basic menu of bread, eggs, fish, meat and
cheese, he loud communal atmosphere fueled by all the hard cider you could drink.

We got home by 12:30 and went straight to bed.  Touring is hard work, even when you stop to eat a bite every few hours.  Tapas is a way of life, not something that happens only in one restaurant.  And dinner is late. What a day.