Seducida por San Sebastián

If you later ask me where I truly fell in love with this trip I am doing, I am going to say I was seduced by San Sebastián. This is one of the most amazingly beautiful, peaceful and easy-going cities I have ever been to.





I got in French driver Typh's little Peugeot outside Bordeaux around lunchtime. Along with us went also a Spanish girl my age, and after a short turn-off from the highway to a tiny French rural village in the middle of nowhere (with maybe fifty houses and two churches) we picked up a Spanish guy. He did not speak any other language than Spanish, though living in France, and I did not understand many words he said, which all made me a little bit curious to find out how I was going to communicate once in Spain... Though the girls reassured me that his Andalusian accent is impossible even for a lot of northern Spanish people to understand.

We arrived in a rainy San Sebastián (Donostia which is the Basque name and this is very important to them), I took the bus to Antigua which is a quiet part of town just by the surf beach. I rented a room at a very nice young couple, two guys from Brazil studying in San Sebastián. They were interested in theatre and musicals and had travelled a lot themselves, so we obviously had a lot to talk about and they welcomed me as a long-known girlfriend.


Thursday evenings in San Sebastián means free pintxos (tapas) at many bars, so I picked the most popular one on the street, where it was crowded with Basque-Spanish people aged 3-83 or so (!). A beer was €2 and I eat enough deep-fried gambas, creamy tuna on bread roll, deep-fried potatoe croquettes and deep-fried pimientos to not have to buy a proper dinner. Then I tried a walk on the beach, but wind and rain made it everything but pleasant, so quite early bedtime for me.

Next day I had breakfast at a café around the corner and a hailstorm broke loose for a few minutes. I had gotten the advice not to trust weather forecasts here, and that was good advice - the forecast had said grey rain all day, but after the intense hail storm it cleared up, got sunnier and sunnier and after having climbed the hill Monte Urgell to see the saint statue that overlooks the city, I sat on a bench having fresh strawberries, bananas and cold drinks for lunch. However, every Basque carries an umbrella, because there may always be a quick shower in the afternoon even on a good day this time of year. Luckily, I spent that time in a very dark and original café where they surprisingly had free wifi so I could work a little. I also wandered through the winding little streets of the Old City.

Pintxos for dinner again seemed like a good idea even though I would have to pay for them, so I went back to the same bar and had tortilla de patatas. Then I had been advised by everyone to have seafood, so I tried a seafood salad... the only seafood that seemed edible to me was the gambas, the other creatures looked like grey worms,  and when I cut my tomato they sort of quivered. I had to look out the window instead of at the plate when swallowing tomatoes and salad. No more unknown seafood for me.

But, social life in this bar was very entertaining! When I did not understand, they would patiently use different words, point, speak slower etc, and I thought they were very polite not switching to English. Until I realized most of them probably did not speak English. I worked hard on smiling to get away with my linguistic mistakes... An "elderly" Basque man (at least 80) found my hat funny (he had a real Basque beret of course), so I had a conversation with him. He was ever so surprised I had been taught Spanish in a Swedish school, and even more so when I told him it is actually the most popular third language to learn in Sweden. It turned out he was horrified - to him Spanish is the "evil oppressors' language" and he thought Swedish schools should teach Basque instead if they had to teach other languages at all! He was however very friendly to me, and it was a very interesting Spanish lesson (or castellano, because "Spanish is just a passport nationality" according to this man).

The evening was not too cold and it did not rain, so I went for a long walk back and forth along the ocean, also sitting down just watching the waves come in.

 

Midday yesterday I left San Sebastián, thinking that had I known what a wonderful place on earth that is, had I planned to stay longer. But, Bilbao was waiting for me, which is no bad place either - I will tell you more about it next update.