Is this real life?

Our route from Barcelona and through Pamplona to San Sebastian!

It is 7:00 am. Imagine the sleepy streets of Barcelona, still dreaming, the sun not yet rising over the rooftops. It is still dark, peaceful, and quiet. Now imagine you hear the loud clomping of heavy hurried feet, followed by the unmistakable sight of blond hair (not so common in Barcelona) racing through the crosswalks. Yes, that would be Betsy and I running through the streets to catch our bus to San Sebastian. After getting used to this lifestyle of staying up late, the early morning was quite the struggle! Nothing like a 7 am jog to get your blood pumping though, right?

Our second stop in Barcelona, before heading out to San Sebastian

After our rushed wake-up and barely making it on the bus, we settled into our seats for what we thought would be a five hour bus ride (but really turned out to be eight). Napping a little bit along the way, the beautiful scenery was more than enough to keep us entertained on our drive.

Sunrise in Spain

Our quick stop in Pamplona. This was about as much as we saw of the city.

It was a good time to reflect about my time in Spain so far, as I tried to really let it sink in that I will be living here for the semester (I still can't believe it!). There is such an interesting mix of old and new here - you will see an old villa with a satellite dish attached, for example.

A stop before San Sebastian

 Driving through the mountains was SO beautiful. Nearing San Sebastian we went through a series of tunnels, each one leading to a panoramic view more beautiful than the last. I could hardly wait to arrive to our destination!

When we finally arrived to San Sebastian, we only had the address to our hostel, Olga's Place. We took a quick look at the map and it didn't look too hard to find; we just had to walk along this waterway:

It didn't take us very long to find the hostel - San Sebastian is very small and everything is much closer together than it looks on a map! The hostel we stayed in was very nice. It had clean bathrooms, a common room, internet, free towels, and felt very safe. Since San Sebastian is a surf town, our hostel was filled with young Australian surfers who were all very friendly and laid back. Our room for the night:

Pretty nice, huh? We dropped our stuff off quickly because it was already the afternoon and we wanted to make the most out of this trip! We asked Olga where to grab a bite to eat and she pointed us in the direction of a place on "San Francisco" street, only we were surprised when it was spelled like this:

Once there, we had a DELICIOUS lunch at a place called Casa Senra. San Sebastian is famous for being one of the best food cities in the world, and, having more Michelin stars per capita than any other city (including Paris), we knew we were in for a treat. For under 20 euros a piece we enjoyed fish with salsa and pistachios, mushrooms stuffed with foie gras and covered in aioli, and a salad for two covered in fresh Basque crab meat. SO GOOD.

Full from our wonderful meal, we headed - where else? - to the beach, which was only three or four blocks from our hostel. The unbelievable view we had from the beach:

After a few hours in the sun, we returned to our hotel to clean up, rest, and get ready to go out for dinner. We went out a little early which ended up being a good decision because as we wandered around the streets of the old town, we became VERY overwhelmed trying to find a place to eat. Every restaurant is a tapas bar (except they call them pintxos, not tapas) so everyone orders from the bar and eats standing up. It is VERY chaotic! Not knowing any of the basque language (like Catalán in Barcelona, they speak a different language than Castilian Spanish), how to order, or where to eat, we wandered around aimlessly for around an hour. I'm sure the people in the streets thought we looked quite strange! In the end, we decided on Bar Zeruko.  It was worth the wait and all of the confusion because I had the BEST meal of my entire life. I wish I had brought my camera, because all of the food was culinary art - to see some examples, just click on the Bar Zeruko link above. We ordered the Tasting Menu - for 25 euro, including wine, our meal consisted of:

- Gel Canneloni stuffed with foie and mushrooms, topped with Pedro Ximenez wine sunflower seed bread and Idizabal cheese (#3 on the website)
- Crispy black pudding (sausage) rolled in crushed pistachio (#4 on the website)
- Bonfire of smoked cod "La Hoquera" (#2 on the website) - this was a three part dish, brought out on a hot iron grid, you grilled your own piece of fish for thirty seconds, followed by a cracker with aioli and a mini green shooter
- Rose of lobster - a tiny cup of lobster rested above a shot glass filled with foggy liquid nitrogen
- Squid hamburger with black wasabi sauce
- Pork wrist - the guy who brought our food described right away "most foreigners do not like this one..." we still ate it!
- Grilled steak with foie
- Lemon mousse dessert - This was designed to look like an egg, where you broke a small circular pouch of passion fruit syrup into the lemon mousse and then dipped a light sponge-like cake into the mousse. We called this one the nectar of the gods. I could have died happy right then!

To finish it all off, they gave us a tiny Szechuan flower called the "Sechuan button" that you ate to cleanse your palate... and they were not kidding! After we ate it our mouths became tingly and numb for about 5 minutes! Needless to say, we were seriously almost crying the food was so delicious. We asked the chef to sign a menu for us so now we have a little souvenir of our amazing meal! I'm not sure I will ever be able to top this one.

The next day we let ourselves sleep in for a little bit, said goodbye to our hostel, and then decided to explore the other side of San Sebastian, called Donostia. We made sure to sign the map in Olga's Place before we left:

We were planning to spend our day relaxing on another beautiful beach and later hiking up the side of Mont Igeldo, when we found ourselves in the middle of this:

Little did we know, we had stumbled upon the Bandera de La Concha, a rowing regatta held every year since 1879. Attracting crowds of around 100,000 people, it is the biggest sporting event in the Basque country. Very exciting! I didn't get any pictures of the race, but here are a few aerial photos I found online:

Pretty amazing! We managed to squeeze our way through the crowd just in time to catch the winning team pull their boat out of the water:

And a video:

A member of the winning team celebrating

As you can tell, there were people everywhere! After all of the excitement, we waited for the crowds to die down and then headed back to the beach for a quick siesta. Afterward, we decided to take the funicular up to Mount Igeldo.

The top of the mountain boasted a lighthouse with the "best view in the world." Although it was starting to cloud up, I could imagine how that could be true on a sunnier day:

After admiring the beautiful view, we hiked back down the mountain. We still had a couple of hours before our midnight bus ride home, and we were a little under-dressed for the cooler weather (we forgot not every place is as warm as Barcelona in September!) so we decided to stop at the Cine for a movie. We ended up watching a Spanish movie about Lope de Vega, one of Spain's most important playwrights during the Golden Age of theater (siglo XVI). Being completely in Spanish with no subtitles, it took some concentration to understand what was going on... but we would like to think we saw a good movie! Completely exhausted, we began our walk to the bus station. Our bus left at 11:45 and returned to Barcelona at 6:30, giving us just enough time to take a quick nap before class at noon. It was a good thing, I didn't get much sleep on the bus! What an amazing weekend.

I know this has been a long post, so if you've made it to the end I'm impressed! I'll leave you with a couple of notes I wrote down along the way:

"I am addicted to the foreignness here. I already can't imagine what it will be like to return to the States after this... This place is simply incredible. Maybe I'm still in the 'honeymoon phase,' but I already know my life is changing from being here..."