What a reunion – just by chance Astrid was visitng Juliane that day, when i arrived. She and her husband were on the way to….Portugal and had a night over. In 10 years they both changed supprisingly little, we could connect very well and exchanged the stories of the last years.
Juliane lives now in a house in the country side, in the mountains, and exept for the fig tree infroon of the house it could be somewhere in Austria. They build the house from ruins and indeed made it a very beautiful and luxury home. We both discovered, that we had started to collect audio books, so we exchanged a lot, and I got a big gift of beautiful spoken books. Thank u Julina, for this big gift and all the hospitality! They have a path tube with jakusy! Heaven! And so clean! For dinner we had Tortilla, which reminded me of Malole, and of a way to combine potatoes and eggs I really like.
We visited a huge cave, which is full of stalactites and -mites – and also excentric one, which to neither grow up nor down, but look like roots or corals. They are very seldomly found and yes, this cave is a special place. When the guide closed the lights while we where leaving, she made a joke about returning into the darkness – I would have love4d to spend the night there in the dark – what a mystical place.
Another aspect of the visit was the hear a little, just a little about the political reality in the basque country. My first reaction was the naive: “but this is the ueropean union…” People in jail for years for doing nothing more than some graffities, being beaten up and tortured before for some activism, for wearing a t-shirt with the picture of a “terrorist” in prison – not just anyone, but friends of them. The climate becoming even more hostile, now that there is a spanish govenment in power… “This is possible in EU ??” and yes, forget the propaganda about human rights, be it the refugees in Austria or the Roma and Sinti people in italy or the Slavic countries, just because its EU it does not mean, that human rights are secured. We just tend to forget, to close our eyes to the cases we get to know, and then, with each new case, it like – oh whow, this is possible in the EU ?
On the other hand the basque country is quite rich, with a good social welfare system, better medical system than in the rest of Spain, and yes, u can see it in the towns and villages. I thought that it is the perfect country for me, lush green mountains directly at the coast of the atlantic ocean, Austria at the shore, very nice. But who is profitting frrom the war here, how is the welth and the terrorism connected ? Who profits ? I did not dig too deep in this topic, like in all permanent low-scale war areas, the people try to forget it. Just one thought for to end – all this is in me as well ….
