The Basques (also known as Euskaldunak) are an ethnic group with their own culture and language whose historical home straddles the Pyrenees mountains, occupying northern Spain and southwestern France.
What makes the Basques so intriguing? Let’s start with language. I’m sure you’ve heard of some of the major language families, such as Romance Languages (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese), Germanic Languages (e.g. English, German, Dutch, Swedish), and Slavic Languages (e.g. Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian). These are groups of related languages that all evolved from a common ancestral language. In fact, languages all over the world can mostly be grouped into “families”… but Basque (Euskara) doesn’t fit into any of them. It is a language isolate, meaning that is bears no relationship at all to any other surviving language. Its origins are utterly mysterious, and the culture it belongs to… oh boy.
Ya’ll, the temperatures here were like -20° C (-4° F). I think this was a bit of a cold snap even by local standards, but that didn’t make it any less painful. According to my FitBit, we did about 30,000 steps on our first day here, all through the frigid cold.
However—and I never thought I would say this—I think the cold made Stockholm all the more magical. This was truly one of the most idyllic trips I’ve ever taken. I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what winter travel to Scandinavia has to offer, but to me, Stockholm was nothing short of a winter wonderland. And the fact that the cold forced us into cozy little bakeries to warm up about 3x as often as we would have otherwise stopped didn’t hurt either.
Matanzas is a small sea-side city that sits 56 miles (or 90 kilometers) east of Havana, on Cuba's northern coast. It's located in the Bay of Matanzas and is the capital of a province that is also called Matanzas, and it was definitely one of my favorite places in Cuba.
We arrived in Matanzas via camione, and then our adventure began...
Spoiler alert: this was one of my favorite places that we visited during our time in Cuba.
