I arrived at the start of February, late at night. The airport was tiny, it had maybe 4 gates. The whole airport looked like it hadn’t changed since the eighties. My colourful clothes clashed against the brown chairs and the dull yellow walls.
As soon as I decided to leave him I found myself with little options of where to go. I couldn’t go back to live with my mother. In fact, I would delay telling her as much as I could. My best friend, Silvia, had been teaching at Deusto University for the last 5 years, and being separated herself, she had plenty of spare room in her apartment.
She welcomed me warmly when I arrived. At least there was a view of the water from the living room. It wasn’t the ocean but it would have to do.
“You won’t find much use for those here for at least five months.” said Silvia glaring at my colourful dresses as I unpacked the clothes I managed to gather into suitcases. I didn’t have much else to wear. “Why don’t you go for a walk around the river when you’re done?” Silvia continued. Here they called it la ría.
“But it’s raining”, I said, as she glared at me with a look I knew well.
“Laura, if you’re going to wait for the rain to stop to go out, you’re never getting out of this apartment.”
I’d barely ever left Barcelona, which was common amongst most of my friends. We would never venture up as far as the Basque country, where the sky was always pouring with rain. The Basque country, where we’d have to restrain ourselves from using Catalonian words in public. I had no interest in learning Basque. Most people here spoke Spanish, or castellano. Despite the familiarity I felt from hearing and speaking castellano, everything felt very… Odd. The modern feel of the city centre was quickly overtaken by the men with mullet haircuts and leather jackets, and the women wearing short fringes and way too much black eyeliner. Like the one thing they could do to preserve their sense of the ‘old Bilbao’ was to dress like they were in it.
February was possibly the worst month to arrive. I got used to seeing the sun rise with a few clouds in the sky, quickly putting my running shoes on, and by the time I’d circled the muddied watered river around to the Zubizurri bridge it would be hailing; on my way home across the other side of the river bank a thin rain had settled.
I’d decided people were as temperamental as the weather. Silvia’s friends, who were also university professors, queried me on why I’d left Barcelona. There was sarcasm in their voices. “I’m surprised you left Barcelona to come here, of all places”, more than one of them had said, more than once. “I would think someone from Barcelona would prefer to live in Andalucía, or at least somewhere you can see the sun most days?” Was this one Itzal? Or Itxaso? All their names had X’s, or Z’s or K’s in strange places. In fact, every other word had unnecessary consonants in them. I confused the names of locations and people, and I felt out of place in more ways than one.
(To be continued...)