weather

Air from Africa, good and strong. A regular old heat wave engulfs Spain. If it hits us, we’ll get close to100 degrees today. And then, I’m told, a powerful thirty degree drop.

Well now, I can’t complain. It’s Wednesday – three weeks behind us and one in front and fact is, with maybe a one day exception early in Sorede, the weather has been perfect. (Remind me of that later this week when I write about chilly temps and wet rains.)

Weather is always a big topic for me. When we travel, it defines our days. I can’t say rains cause trouble, but they mix things up a bit. You spend more time in cafés and bars and less on mountain trails and in the ocean. When I’m at home, I monitor it too. How to dress, how to move around – it’s all weather driven. (Ed, on the other hand, cares almost not at all how it is outside, though if it’s hot, he’ll find a cool spot and stay there.)

As people grumble here about the heat, I retort  – in American, where I live, it’s been like this all month!  (You need to stretch the truth a little when you boast.) And in the winter – such snows we have! (Well, not so much this year, but most every other year. Or so.)

Air conditioning here is modest. In fact, our Pension doesn’t have it at all. (Beware, all you cold loving AC addicts!) This doesn’t bother me at all. You close the shutters and wait for the sun to move away from your window.

We start our day slowly (meaning late) and without any desire to be adventurous. Café across the street (the Otaegui) had good pastries yesterday. Why look elsewhere today.

We set off to explore the city. About time. Our last day here! So, don't think from here, it looks just a tiny bit like Paris?

We ask about the local markets. So now you have to put up with local market photos. And just a few minutes after the first market, we find ourselves at the second (maybe lesser) market. I’m sure you’re not going to mind if I mix the two market photos up. Let’s review them all and move on! (And by the way, if I had to pick out a theme, I’d say – fish, artfully arranged and mushrooms. And always in Spain – the hams.)

At around noon we pick up the shoreline trail that allows you to walk the entire coastal area of San Sebastian (because of the dips and bays, it comes to a perimeter of 7 kilometers). We throw in some hills as well for the views. That’s a hefty chunk of walking to commence in the heat of the mid day. But, we’re hearty types and so we set forth. Initially, with very little shade. The views are good, interesting, pleasant, if a tad repetitive.

Climbing the hill that is positioned right between the two beaches allows you to look out at the full expanse of both and especially at La Concha (which actually has two ribbons of sand, too broad to capture in one photo).


 









...unless you do a panoramic sweep:





... We come pretty close to running down to join the bathers, but, by the time we’ve completed our circuit up toward the Jesus statue (like Rio!)...

... the clouds start rolling in and so the heat is diminished. Bilbao, less than 100 kilometers east, got the 100 degrees. We stay at 80.

So down we walk and actually, we cut out the remainder of the coastal stroll, satisfied that we’ve done our touring bit and now can retreat. With a stop at the best ice cream store in town for a berry laced frozen yogurt.

The weather continues to be at the forefront of consideration (if not discussion... I should think that all the hours spent in conversation here, as in France, have to move things beyond just clouds, mists and blasts of hot air from Africa). If ever there was an evening (is 5 o’clock evening?) for the beach, this is it. We leave all personal belongings (including camera) in the Pension and head out.

As does the rest of San Sebastian.

We’re at our own beach (on the Gros side of the river) – the wilder one where surfers like to hope for waves. Typically, this is less crowded, but today, groups of kids, families, people done with school, with work, done with the dreariness of everyday chores, head for the water.

There are several kid surfing classes in progress and I watch one, of little tykes, beginners, learning the moves, the positions.

Okay, ready to hit the water.

A push...

...and a sense of accomplishment!

The tide is low and there are vast stretches of wet sand, with a sandcastle activity going on.

As you can see, I have my camera again. After a plunge and a frolic in the small but still powerful waves, I dash back to the Pension and retrieve it. Ed spends a longer period of time in the water. Body surfing at last.

As we stroll afterwards, looking at the people around us, Ed comments that he’s never seen so many people, in one spot, having such a good time.

(A whole family rallied around this project  -- of adding male and female body parts to the buried one.)

In the real evening (now we’re close to 9), we head out for tapas (we can’t ignore all these pintxos bars!) and dinner and now you can tell that the hot air has indeed managed to crawl up and lick at the margins of San Sebastian. Thermometers register about 34 (94F) degrees right now. Very unusual for this region.

We’re in the Old Town again. Neither of us really loves this part – Ed says it’s like the East Village some years ago. Lots of people passing through (like us!) in search of drinks and cheap nibbles. But I have in mind a couple of pintxos places and indeed have gone to the trouble of identifying some we mike like so off we go. (And if I did not remember that the fight for separatism continues, there are signs to remind me.)

At the A Fuego Negro bar, the Basque scribbles are as always incomprehensible...

... but the person at the bar speaks enough English to tell me that what I ask for has long since been off the menu but hey, here are a couple of suggestions. And I ask (finally) for Txakolina – a Basque wine that’s light on alcohol but heavy on tradition – poured always from up high.






... Ed drinks cider, or as we call it  -- hard cider (another Basque favorite) and we munch on pieces of salmon with hard blue cheese and apples and olives spiked with something (I thought she said vermouth jelly) and mussels in tomato and cream and it’s all good even as you have to wonder if we needed the extra calories and the expense of it all. But, let the record show that we ate pintxos in San Sebastian.

And if we’re to be deserving of dinner, then we should certainly pause before the next indulgence and stroll off these small plates. We go to the harbor and I watch the clouds do their back and forth and, too, the boats coming in from doing whatever it is that men do out at sea.

It is a fine way to spend one’s last evening in San Sebastian.

Dinner is at a sister restaurant to last night’s place (this one is called La Fabrica) and it’s fine, very good in fact, the best being my mushroom dumplings because when in Basque, you eat mushrooms, no?

But the problem with the main course is that I order another Basque favorite – cod – and it is at this moment that Ed reminded me of last year’s supper somewhere in the far reaches of Quebec where we were served bowlfuls of so much cod (this, after reading about the overfishing of cod by the Quebecois) that I swore I could not, would not ever eat cod again and now here I am, ordering it, too late, too late, here comes the cod... With a delightful apple pastry for dessert.

As we leave the restaurant and walk home, all hell breaks loose and buckets of rain fall down from a swirling sky. Thunder crashes and Ed of course doesn’t mind, but I do. We pause only for a minute because the swirling clouds have taken their rains back to sea, leaving only wet and empty spaces behind.

delay

A morning bus and a train to catch. Posting will have to wait.

I write this as Central Time moves closer to midnight and my own clock here, in San Sabastian moves closer to 7 a.m. I walk with two clocks running in my head all the time and though I don't love the hours of delay between home and place of travel, I remind myself that for the rest of the year I have it easy -- my two girls and I share a time zone. I need only think in terms of one.

Best guess is that all connections will be easy and WiFi in the next place will be a breeze and post will go up in eight hours. Now, let the reality unfold!

In the interim -- a photo from a day when temperatures shot up and humanity went to the cool waters of the Atlantic:

clouds

San Sebastian. Heart of the autonomous Basque region in Spain. When you say the word 'Basque,' many people will think of the separatist movement and the violence that came with it in the last fifty or sixty years. Officially, that ended last October, when the separatists called for an end to terror. Not necessarily an end to the struggle for independence though. That’s still very much a topic of conversation.

Not that you or I can understand that conversation. About half the people here are fluent in Basque and use it daily. When Ed spoke to a waiter about the food, the very affable man patted him on the back and said Ed spoke great Castilian. As in – what they speak over there, in central Spain.

To me, San Sebastian evokes memories of the first time I ever took my girls to Europe (they were eight and five then). We traveled on an overnight train from Madrid to Paris and I remember waking in the middle of the night to a long pause in San Sebastian. Shadows outside, eerie lights and stillness, followed by a lurch and a slow movement toward the French border, at a time when crossing a border in Europe still meant something.

Our own train pulled in from Barcelona on Monday, after 9 p.m. (one minute early!) and there was no sign of darkness yet.

We walk the ten minutes to our pension - the very inexpensive, very simple, very new, very white, very clean Pension Ondarra. (Just five very basic rooms on the second floor of an old apartment building in town.) We’re not in a hurry to eat – isn’t San Sebastian the tapas capital of the world? Don’t Basque people eat all day long and late into the night?

Though we don’t often include cities on our itineraries, San Sebastian is manageable. Somewhere between 250,000 and half a million, depending on where you draw the borders. And it has the great beauty of wide beaches with pounding Atlantic surf.  We are stopping here for three nights and the hope is that Ed, at some point, will enjoy some of that pounding surf.

So think of this place as two bays flanked by tall hills. Sort of like a small Rio de Janeiro. With two great beaches – a calmer one (La Concha) in the bigger bay and a somewhat wild one across the river, where we are – in the old working class or bohemian (not my choice of descriptors) section called Gros. I should mention the other two sections of San Sebastian (and I really should use its Basque name – Donostia, as that’s what most people here call it): they're the Old Town and the Romantic district and actually neither is very old as the city burned down many times over and was completely rebuilt in the 19^th century with all the ornamentation of that era. Think Rue de Rivoli, Paris.

There are indeed plenty of bars and tapas eating people. But here’s the thing – I keep forgetting that Ed really is not a great fan of the tapas noshing that takes place in Spain.

I never know how much to order! He complains. A sit down meal makes more sense! And I admit that going out for tapas (called pintxos in Basque -- most every word I see here has an 'x' in it!) is a challenge. We enter one bar and pick a small slice of bread with shrimp and a fried dumpling with seafood. Ed says – you eat it.

This wont work. So we search for 'real' food. And San Sebastian has great restaurants, starred treasurers that are not within our price range, but also humbler eateries. But we miscalculated the eating habits of people here. This isn't Catalonia anymore. Dinner is an earlier meal. More like 8:30 or 9. We're pushing 10 and 11 now. 

(Some evening views of La Concha and it's opening out onto the ocean.)

So it is quite fortunate that we do find an open place, a nice if modern spot where the genial waiter is happy to have us order a full dinner of appetizers...

...followed by the waiter's favorite (and I admit, I love this too) – paella with squid ink (hence the purple color) and seafoods.

We aren’t done until well after midnight. Our first Basque night and we can’t get the eating habits in line with local custom. Next day we’ll do better!

And next day is of course Tuesday and weather.com tells me it’s to be a sunny day, that indeed the sun is shining right now, except that when I look outside, I notice a low overhang of something that’s maybe cloud, maybe fog, but decisively obstructing any blue sky and, too, any summits that flank San Sebastian.

We eat breakfast at the café bar across the street. A café con leche for me with a chocolaty croissant and another chocolate speckled roll for Ed. We're back to the simple beginnings of bread product with coffee.

And we take a good look at the second beach, Gros beach -- our beach, just a five minute walk from our Pension.

The coast here is (they say) a surfer’s paradise. On most days. Today, there are plenty of surfers waiting for good waves that never quite seem to get it together. Still, we walk to the water’s edge just to watch the kids take to the boards (there are school groups here learning to surf).

There is a crazy abandon to these fresh and young surfers that I find so very compelling. They haven’t the grace yet of the more adult surfers, but they have quick, jerky movements that show off their imagination and agility. Of course, they crash into the surf again and again. Unfazed, they get right back on the boards and paddle out to try again.

Ed and I are not ready for a swim. I suggest a hike up one of the hills – the one to our side, you might say the lesser one – a touch wild, not that beloved (these days) by the locals (but as we find out – very much beloved by French hikers). I’m thinking – a 45 minute walk up, a good view and then back to town for further exploring.

So how is it that this evolved into a day long hike along the rugged coast, putting us in the neighboring port town of Pasaia?

Very early into the hike, the views back toward the Gros beach and, too, the city, are exquisite.

Here, let me zoom in a tiny bit so you can get a feel for this gorgeous sweep of sand and of the ribbon of surfers waiting, paddling, waiting...

But the trail then quickly plunges into a forest that obstructs further views. 

And when it opens up again, we see that we've rounded the hill and so the city is lost somewhere behind. 

And where are we anyway? We see a complicated sign. Ed takes out the iPhone and starts working on a translation. A French hiker coming towards us pauses and offers some information.

If you continue on this path, in a few hours you will be in the next town along the coast.

Is it a nice place?
An interesting port. And the climb is along the coast. Very nice.

And so we have a plan. And maybe no one is surprised that on our first day in the city, we are actually hiking outside the city, in the lonely quiet of a cliff side trail.

We make a detour to the peak of Monte Ulia. That was, after all, the initial destination. And I cannot say if it's the fault of the clouds or the fault of the trees that have sprouted at the summit, but the truth is you can't see anything at all from this peak.We spend some time sitting on a step watching a grandfather make a bow and arrow set for his grandson.

 

 And then we pick up the ridge trail again and continue the hike. This is when the clouds thin out.

We begin to feel the heat of the day. We're not prepared for a longer hike. We each have only one bottle of water (that fits in a pant pocket). But, the views are multiplying -- one beauty after another and it's really not that far now, just beyond this lighthouse...

There, down we go toward Pasaia. And let me say this about Pasaia: the entrance to the port is quite pretty.

And there are many reminders that we are in the Basque region:

...but in the end, Pasaia is a commercial port. The kind where freighters pull in and have scrap metal dumped into their hold. So, it's loud. (Sound carries over water)

We stay long enough to buy a very refreshing glass of freshly squeezed juice and catch the bus back to San Sebastian.

In the heat of a now almost sunny late afternoon (early evening?), people have flocked to the sands. The beaches are crowded, even as the waves are still insignificant, from a surfer's perspective.

Some are still waiting, paddling, waiting. Others take their boards and pedal home. Impressive how they can do that, through the busy streets of San Sebastian.

So should we swim? -- Ed asks.

Ice cream first. Then a brief rest...

And maybe it's because suddenly the air is sticky and very warm, or maybe it's because we (unexpectedly) hiked for a good four hours today, or, let's be honest -- maybe it's that the little white room with its small bed has superb WiFi -- for whatever reason, we never make it to the beach on this day.

We do remember the lesson from yesterday: don't wait too long for dinner. By 9 we're poking into bars and hunting down eateries and, too, taking in all the commotion, because here, as in Barcelona, as in perhaps most cities in Spain, you come out in the evening for a stroll. To walk, talk, drink, nibble, take in the street theater.

 It takes us a while (many false turns, disappointing discoveries, padlocked doors) to locate a dinner place. But there it is -- in the Old Town -- a really sweet little restaurant -- La Muralla. It has a simplicity to it that, for us, is very appealing. And it has a fixed price menu that's a steal. 

If there is any unfortunate part to this meal it is that I tell Ed that I think using a finger to assist in the clearing of a plate is perhaps not a great plan. (With a main course, he'll use bread for this, but as he points out, that is not an option with dessert.) Anyone who has seen the two of us in this mode where I give 'gentle' pointers on what is appropriate to do in public (or, more often, what is not appropriate to do in public) will I'm sure be smiling. Because you'd think that I will have learned by now that when I nudge him in his way, he responds with an impish continuation of exactly that which I suggest (again, 'gently') he might want to put off for another time.

So here's Ed, finishing a delicious chocolate dessert:

And here are the lights of San Sebastian as we cross the river to return to our sweet little white room in Gros.