I went to Spain to meet my friend Melissa from Atlanta. We spent two days in San Sebastian. It was fun… mostly. Definitely an adventure.
I ran into Jessica (a French student, even though she has an American name) on the way to the train station. It turns out she’s the first person from Metz (the first Messin) I’ve met at Supélec. I’ll have to see if she’s going to be around for the summer because most of the French students are leaving in a week or two. In fact, I think I hear one of their farewall parties through my window…
I had a bunch of time to kill, so I wandered around Montparnasse. There was a cool looking military history museum, but I was closed. I had my first French crêpes, which were kind of interesting. I think you can get literally anything on your crêpes. The crêperie had much better Sangrias than the ones in Spain…
From Paris, I caught a TGV night train to Irun. The TGV night trains Irun, in a word, suck. The seats don’t even recline, and I’m incapable of sleeping while sitting up. Add to that the loud French people on my car, the dude with the headphones playing way too loud, and the fact that I didn’t know there’s apparently a lightswitch on each car (so I didn’t try to turn the lights off), and I probably got 3 hours of sleep all night. The train ride from Irun to San Sebastian was nice and painless, especially given that there’s some local train bahn.de hasn’t heard of that runs every 20 minutes or so.
When I got to San Sebastian, I found out Melissa had only been able to get a two person hostel room for her and her friend, so we spent two hours trekking around San Sebastian looking for a bed for me. It turns out there was some kind of convention in town, so I ended up paying 120 euros for the last bed in a pretty nice hotel. Ouch. Good thing I worked non-stop for a month before coming to France. The next night we were able to get a triple room at a pensione. If you’re ever in San Sebastián, Pensione Larrea is comfy, clean, comes with bed linens and towels, and the woman who runs it is super duper nice.
San Sebastián is seriously into tapas. Apparently in most other parts of Spain, the bars only have them during certain times of the day. In San Sebastián, they’re pretty much in the bars constantly, and they’re all pretty good. The bars all also have a local white wine called Txacoli (it’s Basque, pronounced chacoli). It’s a little bit fizzy, and it’s apparently essential that it be poured from as high as possible, because all the bartenders did that. Before I learned its name, it was easy to ask for it by just miming a pouring motion from the top of my reach.
So we ended up not doing much of anything, because the weather was pretty crappy (cold and wet) which ruled out the beach. On Saturday, after getting a bunch of tapas and some Txacoli, we hiked up a hill in the town to see and ruined castle and a giant Jesus statue. The view was pretty nice: the ocean on one side, the city nestled between lush green hills and the beach on the other side.
On Sunday, there was a fair representing all the different regions of Spain, with good and fine from each. I sampled the wine of Rioja (a region that apparently includes San Sebastián), which is some seriously good stuff: I brought a bottle back with me. I also got some wine from Extremadura that I wish I’d gotten the name of. Finally, I tried some Manzanilla, which is a kind of Sherry from Andalucia. For some reason it at first gave me the impression of being sweet, even though it was very dry. It was some pretty good stuff too.
I had serious problems with Spanish. I couldn’t stop myself from sayingOui instead of Si. Plus, every time I would search for a word in Spanish, I’d usually come up with an Italian one instead. And, I would always try to pronounce Spanish words in Italian. In spite of that, I could understand a surprising amount of spoken Spanish (like maybe 1 word in 4, but usually those were the key ones), and even more written Spanish.
Getting back to Metz today was an adventure. I needed to get to Hendaye (Hendaia to the Spanish) at 10:30 am. Unfortunately, I got the time of the train wrong (it left at 7:45, not 8:45). So, I hopped onto a train to Irun, hoping I’d figure stuff out from there (no one in the train station in San Sebastián spoke English or French, so I could only do the most simple of communication). The people in Irun did speak French, but they had heavy Spanish accents and there was a jackhammer going full-tilt in the station. So, I ended up getting help from a Brazilian migrant worker of all people, who showed me where to get the Topo, a metro that went from downtown Irun to the train station in Hendaye. Good times.
The TGV back to to Paris was cool. TGVs, in case you were wondering, are fast. It’s hard to realize because the ride is much smoother than with trains like the EuroCity. But when you see how fast you’re passing cars on the highway, it really sinks in.