thduggie’s blog

I should have posted this sooner.  I went through quite some trouble to memorize a number of things worth posting, and I may even have written them down, but I’ve lost both the note and the memory.  At least you’ll get a few pictures of the old town of San Sebastian, which in the warmer time of the year is supposed to be humming until late.  I didn’t see much of that, but the location on a scallop-shaped bay and the design of the old town and its alleys made it easy to visualize.I began my evening in a pintxo bar (tapas bar in Spanish).  The word reminds me that I wanted to include three Basque words for you to translate, merely to make the point that Basque doesn’t seem to be related to anything.  Here they are:
Jatetxea
Komunak
Eskerrik asko

The answers will come after the photos.

Kukurruku pintxo bar in Donostia - San Sebastian.

Donostia - San Sebastian: Waterfront with Mt. Urgull barely visible above the town (look for the statue roughly above the four-story building that’s three windows wide).

The Basilica de Santa Maria del Coro at the foot of Mt. Urgull.

Donostia - San Sebastian’s Constitution Square - a former bullring and site of the former town hall.

Another view of the square.

A street in the parte vieja of Donostia - San Sebastian.

The above picture is close to the jatetxea where I had a donostiarra soup and a fine duck confit.  After dinner I used the komunak, then paid the waitress, who said eskerrik asko and bade me good night.

I found out on the taxi drive to the bus terminal that “eskerrik asko” will get you a grin every time.  I also learned that the Basque country is so green because it rains a lot.  Fortunately, I was spared.

Move over, Fiddy.  Too-Turdy-N is here!

1. My Spanish isn’t worth squat. That said, Spain from above seems plenty beautiful to merit learning the language - plains with gullies etched across them, razor-jagged ridges dusted with snow, red earth giving way to lush green.

2. Priority tags in rare instances don’t mean anything. In Philly, they were plain ignored; in Bilbao, it turned out a little differently. I was one of very few passengers waiting for luggage, and since the airport is smaller than the airport in Basel, it takes almost no time to get the baggage to the belt. In a few minutes the belt had emptied, but just to be certain, I waited a little bit, until a Spanish lady buenas tarded up to me and asked if I was waiting for my baggage. I said yes, and she asked me where I had checked in. Switzerland, I replied. Oh, Switzerland must be non-Schengen (”no, we’re Schengen”) or non-EU (”that we are”) and might my baggage be the lone item circling the belt over there past the glass? When I shrugged in an affirmative sort of way, she took me through glass sliding doors and into the other part of the hall. “Your bag is over here because you need to take it through customs,” she said. I picked up my bag, turned around, and found that the “nothing to declare” lane at customs took me right back out the glass doors through which we had come in. Nobody there, nobody to care.

3. Spanair operates like a US airline: everything at cost. Fresh from the lounge and its unhealthy delights, that didn’t bother me much on a 40-minute flight. I also learned that although I thought of saying “I’m a Senator, I don’t pay for food,” I didn’t, or rather, couldn’t.

4. Spanair also flies an old MD-83 on that stretch - not exactly a confidence-builder after their crash last summer in Madrid.

5. The Spanair flight isn’t tightly timed for the bus to San Sebastian. The wait is three-quarters of an hour - but on the bright side, I got to eat a little soft cheese/ham/jam sandwich.

6. San Sebastian must not be a wildly popular destination right now - I’m the only person on the bus. The highway runs along steep valleys, but in the dark I can only see that they are lined with a surprising number of multi-storey buildings and car plants. The topography quite feels like home. Oh, and for those who were wondering why I’m on a one-hour bus ride: the train takes at least twice as long and requires changing in some out-of-the-way town.