My name is Joe, I am a graduating senior in the class of 2014 studying Political Science and Spanish here at UMass, and in the spring semester of 2013, I travelled and studied abroad in Bilbao, a city in the northern Basque Country in Spain. Looking back on the trip, it was without a doubt one of the greatest experiences of my life, and the five months I spent in Bilbao, I made connections with not only people from the city but with the city itself in a way that makes me still today feel as though Bilbao is in some way my city. I was not there very long in the scale of my life so far, but that does not mean that the city and its people didn’t have a profound impact on my life; because it most certainly did. The thing is, though, that I am not writing this to tell about how much I love Bilbao or any single person I encountered while I was there. I would love to do that, I would love to just sit and recount my experiences one by one as a way to relive them through stories, but I am actually writing this to express that the reason that I chose to study in Bilbao is perhaps a silly sounding reason, but that there is no such thing as a silly or wrong reason to choose a destination for studying abroad. For the most part, I believe that, wherever one ends up studying will be exactly where they were supposed to be and that they will have an awesome time as long as they are open to truly experience the new cultures.
The decision process for where to study abroad is an easy one for some people. I know people who knew since freshman year that they wanted to study abroad and knew exactly where they wanted to go. Maybe they had family ties that they wished to explore or maybe they had studied one particular place and wanted to experience that place they had learned so much about. I wasn’t like that, and I know that many people aren’t. What I knew was that I wanted to study abroad. Where? That I didn’t know, and when I started looking into programs this was the hardest part of my process. Studying Spanish, one thing that I knew for sure was that I wanted to end up somewhere where I could use the language. This put me down to basically two options: Spain or somewhere in the Spanish speaking “Latin America.”
I knew I’d like Spain. This wasn’t something I struggled with, I had already been there a few times before. My grandparents are both from the Basque Country and I still have many aunts, uncles, and cousins living in various parts of the Basque Country and even down in Madrid and Huelva. I had travelled over a few summers to Madrid, Sevilla, Huelva, Granada, Valencia, Tarragona, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Arcos de la Frontera, and many places in the Basque Country, like Bilbao and Lekeitio. I loved the idea of spending five months in Spain, more specifically in the Basque Country near my cousins who I am close with but do not get to see in person very often except for when we travel there or they travel here every odd summer. The problem with Spain for me was that I knew even if I didn’t study abroad there, I would be back eventually. It seemed like too safe of an option to me. That worried me, and that was why I chose instead to look at South America. More specifically, I looked into a few programs in Argentina and Chile. I thought: heck, when will I ever visit South America if not now?
It made sense to me that this was where I wanted to go for study abroad. It would give me an opportunity to experience totally new cultures and customs while living in a totally foreign place and still use my Spanish. I was settled. I was going to go to Argentina. I didn’t though. As I said above, I ended up in Bilbao. So why? This is where it starts to sound a bit goofy, and I admit fully that it felt just as goofy to me then.
For my whole life I’ve followed a soccer team from Bilbao; Athletic Club Bilbao (Just Athletic Club or Athletic for short.) The club is one of the oldest and most successful teams in Spain and indeed in all of Europe, and although this is not a tangible statistic, they happen to be one of the most romantic teams in all of sports. What I mean by this is that they have a very special policy called the cantera (which means quarry in Spanish) which dictates that they only sign players from within their region in Spain or who developed in their youth academy. The idea of the cantera is that the only players they employ are the ones from their cantera that they “mined” and developed. This ensures that they are only playing homegrown players, which breeds a local connection and loyalty that rings special in the sports world, a world dictated largely by money. The players that where the famous red and white striped jerseys of Athletic Club have a special bond with city and region they represent because they were born and raised there. The fans know and love them and they know and love the fans. It would be like if the Red Sox only signed players born or developed in New England, except that the Basque Country has about 12 million people fewer than New England.
The fact that I am very proud of my Basque heritage, handed down to me by my two Basque grandparents, makes this club of local Basque talent very special, but what makes it so spectacular is that this policy that, while very romantic, is very limiting. While the teams that Athletic compete with are buying the best talent in Europe to improve themselves every year, Athletic is limiting themselves to a very small pool to draw from. Yet despite this, they are historically and currently one of the best teams in Spain and Europe. Along with Barcelona and Real Madrid, two of the most famous and highest spending sports teams on earth, Athletic is one of only three teams who have never been relegated from La Liga, the Spanish top division.
The combination of this romanticized view of Athletic and my own Basque background made Athletic Club instantly my favorite team, maybe in all of sports. It was for this reason that during fall of 2012, when Athletic announced that it was going to be demolishing their old, storied stadium, San Mames, the oldest stadium and Spain and one with such a reputation as to earn it the nickname “La Catedral”, or the Cathedral of European Football, I decided on the spot that Bilbao would be my destination for my study abroad experience. I went to the IPO, I found an API program at the University of Deusto, located right in the city, and I went through the process to apply and study in Bilbao, and to see an Athletic game in San Mames while I still could, before it was gone forever, relegated to sports folklore and legend.
My problem with this was that I was nervous. I was not nervous about being abroad, or living in a foreign place, or using a foreign language, or eating a new cuisine. I was very excited about that, and seeing as I had been in Bilbao before, it was not all that unfamiliar to me. What I was nervous about was that I would be missing out. Now that I was officially going to Spain, was I missing something in South America? Was I depriving myself of a life changing opportunity? I was afraid that I had chosen to go to Spain for the wrong reasons, but then I got to Spain, and that fear subsided to excitement, and I can still remember the exact moment when I realized that no matter how silly my reason for choosing Bilbao may seem to others, it was the right reason for me.
I had been just exploring Bilbao and the surrounding towns with some of the kids that I had met through the program; we had started off just walking around the city, which I was already becoming very comfortable navigating around in, and eventually our exploration led us to the metro. We rode it from Bilbao to Plentzia and walked around the beach, stopping at a number of Pintxos bars and getting som canas (small glasses of beer) and trying a variety of pintxos, which are like small tapas, usually with some sort of fish or seafood. We had been out all day and Nati, my host mother sent me a text letting me know that she would be eating dinner early because she had to work that night, so if I was planning on eating with her I should be back soon. Even though I wasn’t particularly hungry, I figured that since it was still the first week, I should make as much an effort to get to know the woman I would be living with for the next five months as I did trying to get to know the city and its other inhabitants. I split off from the group and hopped back on the metro to get back into the city.
Once back on the metro, I started to notice the scarfs. There was an Athletic Club game that night at ten against Rayo Vallecano, a team from Madrid, and people were starting to swarm into the city decorated in red and white scarves and the red and white jerseys that Athletic have made famous throughout Europe. Even there on the metro, forty minutes outside the city, I could start to feel the energy of the fans. It was this that made me decide to get off at the San Mames stop right outside of the stadium and walk home from there rather than take the metro three more stops to my apartment. I stepped out of the station and walked up the stairs and the city just hit me. There in front of me was the facade of the old stadium, with the historic logo lit up as they always showed before every game. Every sidewalk and street was covered, the bars were full, and there was an electricity in the air.
For years I had followed Athletic from afar, looking up results the day after a match, to watching highlight videos on YouTube, and eventually as the internet started allowing me to do so, streaming matches so I could watch them live. Athletic had always been a team that only I followed, I used to talk to my friends about them and their games and although some of them are soccer fans and some even liked Athletic (through me), none of them followed the club like I did. To me, the red and white logo was something that I had on my wall and I saw on small, pixelated, choppy streams on my computer; but now… There I was, standing in the street, surrounded by a city that lives and breathes Athletic Club.
People were drinking and singing and partying. It was a moment that I will never forget because it was right there that this team that always lived in my computer came to life for me. Storefronts dawned the logo and women stood outside the old delpitated stadium selling bocadillos and cigarillos for inside the stadium, and even though I didn’t even have a ticket for this game which had sold out, I still felt like I was very much a part of all of that. I made my way home (very slowly) and ate dinner with Nati, and when she headed off to the theater to work for the night, I knew where I was going to spend the night. I did end up going to two Athletic games in my time there, and I had the fortune to see the last ever Basque Derbi (A very heated game between Athletic from Bilbao and Real Sociedad from San Sebaastian, another Basque city) in the old stadium. I even ended up taking a tour of the stadium, getting to go into the locker room and even onto the actual field. And although I enjoyed all of those experiences immensely, that first time outside the stadium will always be a moment that sticks with me as the moment it truly hit me exactly where I was and why I chose to study in Bilbao.
I apologize retroactively for my lack of brevity in this post, but what I intend to say with these many words is that there is no silly reason to study anywhere. As long as there is a reason, or perhaps even if there isn’t, the study abroad experience is going to be a life changing experience. Athletic did not end up defining my time in Bilbao, the friends I met and the days I spent with them in that magical city did. Studying abroad is about going out and experiencing something, a new culture, a lifelong dream, or just whatever gets thrown at you. For me, it was in Bilbao, and even though I was nervous that I would regret going to Spain, I have never felt that regret for one day since I stepped foot in that city.