¡Qué guay!

"¡Qué guay!" translates to "how cool!" in English, as we learned in my Hispanic Literature class.  It's one of the first slang terms that I have learned here.  "Guay" is pronounced like "guy," but with a "gw" sound at the beginning of the word.

Updates!  The newest place that I visited on my cumpleaños was Gernika, which is a small, historic village near Bilbao.  It is in Urdaibai, which is a collection of small communities that are dedicated to preserving Basque culture and language.  It was a pretty cool birthday, I’d say – first we visited a government building, and we saw a tree stump that was significant because it was super old and the kings of Spain used to take an oath by the tree saying that they would respect the Basque laws and customs.  To be honest, I was too far away to hear most of what the tour guide was saying, but it was still nice.

Super old oak tree stump

Then, we went to a museum that was dedicated to maintaining peace.  Apparently, Gernika was bombed in 1936 by forces attributed to both Hitler and Franco.  The village was mostly obliterated – a notable exception was the tree stump.  In the museum, it was a little hard to understand what was going on because I didn’t know any of the history, so after the guided tour when we had time to explore, most people just went outside and enjoyed the sun. 

sitting outside the museum

After all that, we went to a restaurant where we got more paella (seriously considering learning how to make this) and a sweet ricotta cheesecake with blackberry sauce – I know, yum!  Finally, my favorite part was when we went to the beach.  The beach sort of reminded me of Plentzia, but it wasn’t quite so tame.  Apparently, the beach at Gernika has the best “left wave” in the world (whatever that means), so surfers come from all over to visit.  The waves were pretty big, but the shallow part of the sea stretched out really far, so I was able to wade and collect seashells. 

After we arrived back in Bilbao, the rest of my day was not overly memorable, but my July 4^th was quite exciting, so I needed a rest anyway.  On that day, my friend and I went and explored some of the shops in Bilbao and we got churros with chocolate – delicious!  We also took the metro to the student gathering in a city called Areeta that night.  Thankfully, the venue didn’t mind that a bunch of college students were singing American patriotic songs quite terribly.  When my friends and I were going back on the metro, they sang Felíz Cumpleaños to me at midnight, which was awesome.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited because I think it is FINALLY supposed to stop raining this week, and I can’t wait to hit the beach and hike on the trails at Plentzia.  Also, my friends and I have a tentative date to visit southern France, and we are currently looking into a longer weekend trip to somewhere else!  Hooray!