Friday, May 16, 2008

Basque Country

Bill and I are struggling with the French language. Since our first highly successful and delicious meal in Lourdes, we have been unable to really communicate successfully with any of the people. Lourdes is a fairly small town, so it’s possible that the villagers just don’t speak English as they might in a larger city. Our problem, however, is that French just isn’t intuitive to us in the same way that Italian and Spanish seem to be. We don’t even know how to pronounce many of the words. We are cognizant of the fact that we are guests in their country and we aren’t perturbed that they don’t speak English; we are just frustrated that we don’t speak any French.

This frustration, however, hasn’t deterred us from experiencing all things French. Today we got in the car and drove to the Basque country of France via little two-lane highways. We visited St. Jean-de-Luz, which is very near the France/Spain border, and is a coastal community on the Atlantic Ocean. Just as the Barceloneans are connected to their Catalunyan ancestry, so are the people of this area connected to their Basque heritage. They have their own flag and their own language, though most people speak both Spanish and French. For our part, we had an ice cream cone and watched the people wandering around. It had rained for most of our drive up, but the sun came out when we got there. Unfortunately, we forgot the camera, so we don’t have any photos to share.

Upon coming home, we were very tired and not feeling like trying to make a waiter understand what we want to eat. So instead, we went to a cafeteria at a nearby store called E’Leclerc. This store, from what we can tell, is France’s version of Wal-Mart. In fact, they even had RVs parked in their parking lot like they have at Wal-Marts. While we weren’t expecting a grand dinner, we were delighted to find we could get really wonderful food. We had mussels and frites, a pork stew, a small bottle of wine, and dessert. The total bill came to 18 euro! Way to beat the sinking dollar!



One last word about Our Lady of Lourdes shrine: Literally busloads of people come in each day to visit the shrine and pay respects. Apparently many are very sick people who come and check themselves into the hospital that is just down the hill. The nurses take them daily to visit the grotto and they do it as sort of a procession. (When we first saw the nurses, we thought that they were nuns because they were wearing uniforms with caps and veils. We finally figured out that they were nurses and that this was their uniform.) Here is a photo of that surrealistic procession.

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