So I went to Spain this weekend :) the trip started off very strangely--I spent the night in the dorms with a friend so that I could be closer to campus and not have to wake up so early or walk so far. I slept on the floor (it was freezing and made of concrete) and she left at 630 in the morning to go to campus and chat on the internet with her boyfriend, She just left me in the room so I could sleep for a little longer since we didn't have to meet at the school until 830. Except, she forgot that the door has to be unlocked with a key, even from the inside, and she didn't leave the key with me!! I gave her about 20 minutes, then 10 minutes until we were supposed to leave I called the program director and told him I was locked in a room and that, if he saw Allison, to tell her to come let me out! Finally she did (she had totally forgotten about me) and I made it to the bus only about 20 minutes late. It's a good thing I called Ryan, though, because otherwise they would have left without me and I would have been stuck in that room all weekend! :P Great way to start off a trip...
Our first stop on the way to San Sebastiàn was Bayonne. It's a cute little town at the delta of two rivers, and we toured the Roman ruins (of course I opted for the tour guided in French--every little bit helps :) ) including an ancient cave that is hidden below a parking garage! It felt like somewhere you could easily get murdered--but no one did, so I suppose that's good :) The day started out overcast but it ended up being a really nice day, so all our pictures of the really interesting cathedral had pretty blue skies in the background. I thought the cathedral was so interesting because the first 3/4 of it were built in the 14th-or-so century, and the rest of it not finished until the end of the 16th. Thus, it's composed of wo completely different styles of architecture and made from two different types of stone, making it two different colors. Pretty cool :)
We had lunch at the tiny Victor Hugo Café and then wandered around the town; it's famous for its chocolate, especially a frothy drink that's just melted chocolate in a cup, so of course we went in search of the chocolateries! We found one, Atelier de Chocolat, which sold 'bouquets' of chocolate. They had all different kinds--hazelnut, coconut, canded orange, even chocolate with pepper in it (another famous product from Bayonne)! Of course I bought some :)
After Bayonne we made our way south to San Sebastiàn in Spain. The day was perfect--blue, cloudless, and warm. Our hotel was right down the street from the beach, so after our much-needed siesta, we dropped our things and headed straight for the ocean. We toured through the Old City, caught sight of the oldest apartments in the city (from the days when the church was first built in the 13th or 14th century), and scouted out tapas restaurants. The whole standin-to-eat, trusting-to-pay, grab-your-own-everything concept was a little foreign to us, but we ended up mastering it and getting some kickass tapas. We found a paella restaurant, too, and I was SO ready for some black rice paella (rice and seafood cooked in rice flavored with squid ink), but I was the only hungry one (and no one was really keen on the squid ink) so instead we looked for some entertainment. We found what we were looking for in the basement of a bar called the Leize Gorria (the 'a' at the end of 'Gorria' is actually an anarchy star, if that tells you anything about the rebellious, underground feel of this pub). They were having an open mic night, so of course I Jumped up on stage, and everyone loved it because my friends had never heard me sing or platy guitar, and the locals had never heard anyone perform an American song in fluent English! We jammed for a couple hours, well past midnight, and headed home.
The next day we left after breakfast at the hotel to go to the Aquarium across the bay. It had a hands-on tank with a giant octopus in it, and a glass tunnel where sharks swam right over you! Plus, everything was in Spanish and the Basque language, which is a strange mélange of X's, T's, and Z's...I can't make any sense of it. We spent the rest of the day lounging on the beach. It was perfect--the water was just cold enough to wake us up, and we swam out to the edge of the swimming area to a platform with diving boards and slides.
We ate a late-for-us-early-for-theSpanish (they usually eat lunch around 2) at a fun little bayside outdoor café, then left San Sebastiàn in midafternoon to head to St. Jean de Luz. It, too, was a beachside town, but it was far smaller, and our very first impression of it was a giant streetside market with cheese, sausage, homemade wine and beer, fish, jams, meats, honey, bread-- basically every organic and delicious thing you could every imagine at this sprawling seaside market. It was great :) We bought ice cream (a staple for beaching) and found a spot on the sand and spent the whoel day people watching. Just around the time we were going to leave, a squadron of fighter jets whipped across the sky with big wakes of red, white, and blue powder, presumably for tomorrow's nation-wide Journée de Patrimoine, which celebrates France's historical legacy. They did acrobatics for a good while, and then it was time to get back on the bus. All in all, a great adventure in Spain. If you'd like to see the pictures I've posted on facebook, follow this link. You can also see all my photos of the city of Pau by following this one. Enjoy!!
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