The kermes , or feast, features live accordion music, family-style platters of sliced meat, countless bottles of bad wine and, yes, games of spin the gerbil. Spinning the gerbil, in case you didn't know, involves placing the hapless rodent atop a wooden disk, which is spun rapidly. As the disk comes to rest, the dizzy gerbil staggers off his perch and then stumbles punch-drunk towards a ring of numbered chutes. If he enters the chute with your number, then you take home a prize. His grab-bag prize held two bottles of Spanish wine, a can of green beans and a spooky looking china doll.
Bigger towns feature indoor courts where an even faster-paced version of the game is played.
Another favorite, and a source of much excited speculation at the feast in Ascain, is the ham-heft. For a few francs, you can hoist a meaty haunch of local ham and guess its weight. In Ascain, a skinny farmer offered an astonishingly accurate estimation and literally took home the bacon. Seventeen pounds of it. Including southwestern France and northeastern Spain, the Pays Basque stretches from the Pyrenees to the Atlantic coast and is home to more than 2 million people.