A friend of mine from French class, Jon, (pronounced more like Yon than the American name John) invited me to see some of the mountains near his hometown this weekend and so this AM we went for a lovely long and chilly hike near his small town of "origin" near Éibar, called Soraluze. The natural park where we started was called Karakate and on a clear day you could see to the sea and to the southern region. Just the drive up was quite the mountain drive, and it wasn't too steep an incline of a hike, but a lovely walk. We trudged through mud and snow a bit, making my Camino de Santiago training more effective.
The funny little objects are mailboxes that sports societies/clubs used to use for a sort of game. I found them quite comical and so took pictures of the several at each of the mountain peaks. Jon has great patience for speaking Spanish with me and I learned that "mancho" means calm or kind of lazy, it's the opposite of savage. We had seen some horses that were just grazing on the mountain side, that were "mancho". Jon had told me that a gentleman who owns horses regularly has to go looking for them because they wander too much in the mountains. It was a pleasant inside view of Basque life, some good Castellaño practice and amazingly I ran into some students that I knew up on the mountain. Despite being on top of the world, there were people I knew, which is a really pleasant thing being in Eibar and a smaller town. Off to coffee with some friends¡
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