jimandclaire.com

Thursday 19 January, 2006

San Sebastian

Filed under: Claire's Entries — claire @ 6:15 pm

Ok the final instalment of our Spanish holiday, we’ve been back for over 2 weeks and we were only gone just over 1 week! I find it hard to write about something and much easier to write about nothing (make of that what you will). But I know years from now I’ll kick myself, as I am already for not documenting our previous trips, but we do have the photos.

So San Sebastian less than an hour away from Bilbao and just 20minutes from the French border. Of course we had heard lots about the place and despite all the rave reviews I have to say it wasn’t on my must see list. I’m not a big fan of European Seaside Resort Towns, villages by the beach or on the coastline yes, casual cities with a beach again no problem, anyway just my funny preferences. However we had not heard a bad word about the place, it was on our way home, we had a hard time booking accommodation so the city was going to be full and after all it was still in Spain, so surely it was a good place to spend New Years. Well you would think!

Jim and I headed out just before 9pm to make an early start on the drinks and tapas, earlier on it had been very buzzy out. So as we are just gearing up for the special night we notice things are decidedly winding down, we are pretty much kicked out of a bar, standing on the streets it slowly sinks in that everything is closed and the place is all of a sudden a ghost town. I make no exaggeration here the place is deserted and everything is closed, EVERYTHING. We head to the old town to not only confirm that it is the same there but to be hit by a sudden down pour with fierce winds that blow the rain horizontally. After huddling by a door we cant help laugh, that kind of laugh when things are so bad, but not in a life or death way, that the absurdity of it all takes over. We head back to the pension, which turned out to be clean and good value but devoid of any other life or character. I of course am most upset because we have no food and as I said NOTHING AT ALL was open, Jim went off to see what was in the car. He returned to announce we’d hit the jack pot with an in case of an emergency bottle (and it was an emergency!) of Australian Sparkling, a tin of Spanish tuna, a lemon ( le Grec always has a lemon) and some stale oatcakes. In the meantime I noticed by some stroke of luck our pension had a tv and I had found a pack of cards the size of a matchbox that was in one of our xmas bonbons. So there we sat on the bed playing cards, drinking sparkling from the bottle, eating tinned tuna (but with lemon of course) and watching the New Years countdown from Madrid. At midnight we hear fire works go off and head to the promenade to find that people are hitting the streets again. So not what we imagined but nothing to complain about, we were happy together in Spain and the seaside sure looked pretty lit up by fireworks.

If you go to our flickr badge it will lead the way to view all the photos from our Spanish holiday.

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