Spain (iii): San Sebastian

"Even on a hot day San Sebastian has a certain early-morning quality. The trees seem as though their leaves had just been sprinkled. It is always cool and shady on certain streets on the hottest day."

When we arrived in San Sebastian, it was overcast and much cooler than it had been in Madrid. We wore light jackets as we crossed the town to our hostel by the beach. San Sebastian, like Madrid, is almost unbelievably picturesque. The streets are lined with Parisian apartments dotted with intricate wrought iron balconies. The atmosphere had the tranquility of a place perpetually on holiday. As we emerged on the other side of the town from the train station the street opened up to the small, crescent shaped enclosed beach. An inlet from the Bay of Biscay bottlenecked by two large hills, one topped by a castle and the other by a large statue of Jesus. Even under the clouds, the beauty of this place was almost hypnotic in its ability to make the outside world seem very far away.

"I looked around at the bay, the old town, the casino, the line of trees along the promenade, and the big hotels with their white porches and gold-lettered names. Off on the right, almost closing the harbor, was a green hill with a castle... On the other side of the narrow gap that led into the open sea was another high headland."

We strolled along the harbor for a while admiring the place until dinner. We made our way to the back alleys at the east end of town for our first pintxos crawl (pronounced pinchos - the Basque variation of Spanish uses a lot of X's). Pintxos is tapas, more or less. The main difference is that, unlike tapas, pintxos are traditionally skewered to a piece of bread. The cultural intricacies are beyond me, but pinxtos bars are a lot of fun. Both nights there we made our way to several different pintxos bars and procured a smattering of small dishes accompanied by wine. If you ask me, I couldn't tell you the name of any of the dishes, but most ranged from very good to delicious. Everything is very casual and the crowd usually spills out into the street. The quarters are close and conversations blend into one another. The nightlife ends much earlier than it did in Madrid (12-1am as opposed to 3-4am), but it's a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an evening.



We began the following day by hiking up the eastern hill to the Jesus statue. It didn't take as long as I had thought it would, but the view from the summit was breathtaking. After taking in the view and taking pictures, we made our way down and stopped at a small hillside cafe overlooking the bay. It was run out of a small hut by a middle aged man and his 3 or 4 dogs. The dogs were calm and socially aloof in the way that only dogs that aren't doted upon and are simply treated as members of a social group can be. Not pleading or unctuous, they regarded us indifferently as we maneuvered about them. As I stopped to take a few shots of them, the owner of the cafe handed me a strip of paper with his email address. He motioned to my camera and then his dogs and, through one of the spanish speaking members of our group, asked me to email him some of the pictures of them. I nodded vigorously, happy to oblige such a genuine request for a simple service that I hope will brighten his day.

While we were enjoying some ice-cold Cokes and Fantas (made with real sugar, as I mentioned before - I drank so much soda on this trip to take advantage of this as much as possible) enjoying another fantastic view of the town and bay, the sun made its first appearance. As the clouds burned off and pillars of light filtered through, color slowly began to creep back into San Sebastian. The sky and water regained their azure clarity. The green in the hills grew lush and verdant. The clay tiled rooftops burned fire red. As we watched the sun warm the town, we grew eager to return to the beach that was so lukewarm the day before. We rushed down the rest of the way and back to the hostel to change. The next few hours were spent sunbathing out on the sand and getting pummeled by powerful, 10 foot waves.



One thing I always hope for is to catch the edge of a weather system during sunrise/sunset. This results in solid cloud cover or empty, featureless skies more often than not, but with the clouds rolling out of San Sebastian, I knew that the sunset would be spectacular. That evening after the beach, we walked around the town for a bit. We found ourselves at a church atop a small hill overlooking the rooftops. From there I could see the water and the clouds that had parted just enough to provide room for the light to play off of them at different elevations producing a wide range of reds and oranges. We made our way down back to the beach, admittedly at my insistence so I could capture the sunset over the water, and I spent the hour there taking it in while the others went to a shop and returned just as the sun dipped below the horizon.



The following morning we caught a bus to Pamplona, this time making sure to leave enough room so as not to repeat the harrowing dash to the train in Madrid. I was sad to leave San Sebastian. It was tranquil and rejuvenating. I don't think I could stay there for longer than a brief time, but it's certainly a place where I'd like to vacation again. At the bus station, we encountered numerous groups of people arriving from Pamplona. Many wore the all-white garb of San Fermin and many of those were covered in splashes of red and pink - an ominous signal of what we could expect in Pamplona. I fully expected Pamplona to be a very different experience than it was in San Sebastian - not relaxing so much as frenetic and chaotic. It turned out to be a bit crazier than I had imagined, for reasons that will become clear in the next installment.

"We drove out along the coast road. There was the green of the headlands, the white, red-roofed villas, patches of forest, and the ocean very blue with the tide out and the water curling far out along the beach... Back of the rolling country we were going through we saw the mountains we had come over from Pamplona."