Never were more innocent words spoken. I just wanted a glass of white house wine. We were at Restaurante Nicolas last night, for our first real late-night Bilbao dinner (nobody goes out to eat before 20h here). Once we figured out the obscure “restaurants are located behind a secret door at the back of the bar” system, we were flying.

Our small pale balding old waiter, every inch a gentleman, brought us a simplified English menu, which was a saving grace at the end of a day of stumbling our way through Spanish. Catherine ordered the lamb chops, and I the hake with red peppers. And the aforementioned “vino blanco de la casa.”

In short order the glass of wine arrived, and after a couple of sips, along came the bottle.

Those who know me will know that I am just as likely to cut off my foot as to drink more than a couple of glasses of wine, so this came as something of a surprise. But being still inside that “strangers in a strange land” terror that is foreign language tourism, I smiled and undertook my task. Thankfully Catherine pitched in to aid.

The hake was very good, and it was followed by a dessert called, in English, “a little bit of everything” which was just that — tart, chocolate, eclair, puff, ice cream. Dreamy all of it. Catherine’s lamb chops were very good as well, and she ordered the same dessert and had the same reaction. Oliver had a little bit of all of the above, and seemed to enjoy it as much as we did. The waiter took a liking to him, and brought some roll cookies out at the end of the night which made him very happy.

At the end of the night — about midnight — we headed off into the raininy Bilbao night, and, thanks to Catherine’s clear head, made it home to our hotel in one piece. I haven’t ordered wine since.

Today it rained, again, and our spirit was slightly diminished as a result. We made the best of it all, though, and took the wonderful Bilbao subway out to the edge of town where we rode across the river in a giant car carrying gondola, walked up the side of the opposite town in the pouring rain, walked back down along the ocean in the pouring rain, and returned, in the pouring rain, to Bilbao. Where it is pouring rain.

Tomorrow we say good-bye to Bilbao and head south-east by train. We decided not to make for Barcelona in one day, so we are stopping, for at least a night, in Zaragoza. Imagine the ‘z’ pronounced with a slight lisp, and you will see the attraction. We know nothing of the city, which is the point. More to report from the frontier.

I recall that when Peter Jansons first opened The Dunes, it was to be a tapas bar. Perhaps I am imagining this. In any case, tapas are the lifeblood of the eating scene in Bilbao, and yesterday we had our first experience thereof.

We set out on our snacking mission at about 7.30h. About 15 minutes in, it started to rain. Hard. Fast. Wet. We sought shelter under the canopies of shops. Somehow Oliver, by placing his fingers in the lowered shutters in front of a chi chi clothing store, caused an alarm to go off. We left that storefront quickly. Eventually, growing ever more tired and wet, we ambled into Cafe Iruna. This joint was jumping, apparently busy not only from the Sunday evening crowd, but also because of special events surrounding its 100th anniversary.

The idea of tapas is that a wild collection of small snacks is displayed on the counter, and, you order little bits of whatever strikes your fancy. In an orgy of soggy hunger, we quickly polished off a couple of slices of french bread covered with ham and marinated mushrooms, followed by some lamb shish kabob roasted on a barbeque in the corner, followed by a couple of glasses of red wine, followed by some ham and cheese. Oliver drank pineapple juice, ate our leavings, and seemed generally content about the entire affair. Total bill was about $8.00. The plan was to head off into the night for dinner afterwards, but we were so happy and well-fed that we simply went home and went to bed.

This morning the soggy theme continued, with the added flourish of having just used up Oliver’s last disposable diaper. We set off into the damp (but not rainy) Bilbao morning, eventually locating the only pack of size 5 diapers in the city in the back of a cosmetics shop near the Guggenheim. We grabbed coffee (and zumo del pina) in a smoky bar, and then made our way, under darkening skies, to Restaurante vegetariano, one of two vegetarian restaurants in the city.

This proved to be exactly what we needed — a four course vegetarian meal (salad, soup, main course and dessert with tea). The food was excellent, and the service wonderful.

When we emerged an hour later, the skies had opened. Fortunately we had purchased an umbrella earlier in the day. Unfortunately, our ‘one umbrella should be fine’ theory proved naive, and Catherine and I got drenched while Oliver hung onto the umbrella, for dear life, in his stroller. A thirty minute dash later, and we arrived soaked to the skim at out hotel.

The rain (in Spain) has let up now, and after Oliver has a nap, we will venture out again. Tomorrow is our day reserved to tour the Guggenheim, so I’m sure there will be much to report.

I must be at least a little close to being an Islander — the first thing I did after I checked my email and updated my website was to check the deaths on the the website of the Guardian. Of course if I was a real Islander, I would have checkd them first.

So we have arrived in Bilbao. It is 36 degrees and sunny here — like we magically teleported ahead by 2 months into summer. After a day of walking around Bilbao, here is what I have noticed (I cannot find the apostrophe on this Spanish keyboard, so I am forced to write without contractions — my first year Classical History professor, David Page, finally gets what he wanted!).

• Everyone walks everywhere. At least on Sunday. We saw more families walking along the river this morning than I have seen in Charlottetown in a decade. Of course I never go outside in Charlottetown, which might explain part of this.
• Everything is in Spanish. Chock this up to stupidity or North American-o-centrism, but I do find it odd that everyone speaks Spanish in Spain. Bilboans would not, I think, find it odd that we speak English in Charlottetown.
• Everything is beautiful here. Manhole covers. Bridges. Mailboxes. Bridges. Trolley cars. Urinals. Sinks. Street lights. They say Bilbao is reinvented since the Guggenheim, but I think there must be a strong design ethic bred into the culture here, because you cannot get this beautiful that quickly otherwise.
• As in Thailand, children are cherished. Interesting 24 hour contrast through Halifax (tolerance), London (annoyance) and Spain (warm acceptance). The mother of the owner of our hotel said that Oliver was perfecto — her daughter explained that she was saying that Oliver was too perfect to be a real boy.

…into the wild blue yonder. Play amongst yourselves.

Like “Kleenex” means “tissue” and “Jello” means “gelatin,” FedEx, at least in my mind, means “overnight.” I always thought the reason we sent things FedEx was so that they would be there the next morning.

Apparently, however, if something is sent from the U.S. to Canada, sending it FedEx means not overnight but rather “in a couple of days.” The FedEx International Priority page describes their international service as “time-definite delivery typically in 1, 2 or 3 business days.” Their delivery standard for Prince Edward Island is delivery by 5:00 p.m. the 2nd business day.

It seems to me that among the things that restricts Prince Edward Island’s economic development this would be at least on the middle of the list. Of course it’s not something unique to the Island (although I suspect FedEx parcels to Toronto and Montreal are next-day delivered most often). But Boston is close enough to Prince Edward Island that you can almost spit on it, and to take 48 hours to wing a parcel here seems closer to “forever” than it does to “overnight.”

Caveat emptor.

As usual Rob is at his best when writing from personal experience.

We the family are headed off on vacation on Friday. The vacation was inspired by a long, cold, dark winter of gallbladder infused hell, plus a well-timed Air Canada seat sale that gets us all from Halifax to London return for $2000.

Mindful of the fact that Europe is one big relatively cheap airline spiderweb, our plan going in was to jump off from London to somewhere “on the continent.” We solicited suggestions from friends and family, and the most compelling response came from Rob Paterson, who sung the praises of Spain, and especially Barcelona and Sitges.

Alas when we dug into the issue of finding a hotel in Barcelona starting this weekend, we kept running into brick walls. It seemed, through the fog of the Internet, that there wasn’t a hotel room left in Barcelona. It wasn’t until I received a helpful reply from the City of Barcelona that we came to understand the reason for this.

With Barcelona out of the running, at least for the early part of the vacation, we set our sites west towards Bilbao.

Given our sucess travelling as Frank Gehry groupies in the past (Fred and Ginger in Prague in 1998 and EMP in Seattle in 2002), Bilbao, with its Gehry-designed Guggenheim, seemed like a logical destination. Stories I’d heard from Islanders who travelled to the Basque area of Spain in the 1980s to investigate the co-op movement there only confirmed that this was a good destination.

And so we land at Heathrow on Saturday morning at 8:25 a.m., and then up and fly to Bilbao the same day at six in the evening. We plan to spend 4 or 5 days in and around Bilbao, and then, somehow, gradually make our way back to London, flying back to Halifax on the 17th.

Stay tuned for updates from the road.

This website was crawled yesterday by the servers at TurnItIn.com, which bills itself as “the world’s leading plagiarism prevention system.” Their Technology FAQ explains their crawling as follows:

We have compiled a massive database of digital material by continually cataloging and indexing the entire Internet using automated web robots. Our robots retrieve millions of documents from the Internet every day— Turnitin.com has one of the most current and extensive crawls of the Internet available.

Using this Big Database, they can then compare academic papers submitted by professors or students, and create what they call an “Originality Report” which rates the possibility that the paper was plagiarised.

Not only that, but they say that they:

…archive all papers submitted to our database by registered users. Extended use of our service builds a comprehensive archive of papers and ensures that students will never recycle papers from previous classes.

I’m not a plagiarism advocate, but this sort of thing strikes a chill into my bones. If education has sunk so low that teachers need robotic assistance to gauge originality, then teachers have ceased to know their students, students have ceased to know their teachers, and education has become something akin to a chicken grading line. I can’t imagine why this approach to education is a benefit to society at large.

Back in the day, when libraries were classified in the public mind in the same aesthetic headspace as prisons, sanitoriums, and hospitals, the public library in Charlottetown moved into the Confederation Centre of the Arts.

The result was an giant room painted off-beige, with walls occasionally broken up with modern art circa 1964. The effect was not, shall we say, enlivening.

On Monday I got a call from one of the librarians there, announcing the arrival of Peter Coyote’s autobiography on inter-library loan. I was bemused by a Monday call — the library is closed on Mondays — and the librarian explained that they were all working overtime to get ready for the Big Paint Job.

Yes, the Confederation Centre Public Library is getting painted!

And not only that, it’s getting new carpet (the existing carpet being of a vintage and condition usually reserved for “on the garage floor to prevent the oil drip from the car from staining the floor”).

I went in to pick up the book yesterday, and you could already see evidence of the work: the back walls are painted an off green. The librarian at the desk told me there’s a rather vibrant rust colour coming as well, and what she characterized as a “very vibrant colourful carpet.”

Life will never been the same. Welcome to the new century.