toussaint

Okay! Sorry for the lack of entries lately. As most of you probably know, I have been traveling for the past week...now I am back home in Albi, taking some deep breaths and celebrating my last day of vacation by not even leaving my house on this dreary day.

So, my adventures. We hopped on a train before the sun came up last Sunday to go to San Sebastian, in the Spanish Basque country. We stayed there three nights in a youth hostel. I love youth hostels because they are cheap, safe, and you get to meet all kinds of people from everywhere. I met a guy from the Netherlands named Joost...he seemed to know everything about everything. He's in the process of trying to get a job and live in Spain. He claimed to not really speak Spanish, yet he never hesitated to ask random people on the street if he had a question about directions or something. We climbed up to the highest part of San Sebastian with him (the big ol' hill with the giant statue of Jesus at the top). San Sebastian is absurdly beautiful. I was kind of worried it was going to be super touristy...and there are a lot of tourists, but it doesn't necessarily feel overwhelmingly full of them. It's also not exactly tourist season, I guess. But anyway.

new friend Joost

Probably the best thing about San Sebastian is the food. The city has more Michelin stars than Paris. That is dang impressive. Not that I could afford to go somewhere with any Michelin stars. Ha. But we mostly ate pintxos, which are the Basque version of tapas. Basically the way it works is you go to a bar and they have a bunch of pintxos on the bar, and you get a plate and take one or two, order a glass of wine, and when you're done you tell a bartender what you had and he'll add it up at the end. It's kind of an honor system, which is cool. Then you go to another bar and eat their pintxos. Etc. So delicious. And really fun. It's like snacking, for dinner. Or lunch, or whatever. 

pintxo bar

We took a day trip to Bilbao to go to the Guggenheim and explore a bit. It was kind of a dreary day and we almost didn't even find the cool part of town, but we figured it out (based on a bus map...ha, we were really prepared, as you can see). 

Then we headed to Pamplona! It was kind of random that we decided to go there...basically I was looking at a map and said to myself...why aren't we going to Pamplona? So we did. We couch surfed with this lady named Rachel (brief explanation of couch surfing: there is a website/network of folks who are willing to host people who are traveling...for example, on their couch, for free, with the idea that some neat cultural exchange will come of it). She is awesome! It was so nice to hang out with someone Spanish who could show us around and do a bit of translating. And, she lives in this old apartment on the 5th floor (9 flights of stairs...whew!) on the street where they do the running of the bulls. She rents out her balcony to people during the festival in July. That's how great her view is. 

view from Rachel's balcony

And there is this whole network of couch surfing folks in Pamplona who get together on Thursday nights, so I got to meet people from all over and even speak a bit of French with a super nice guy named Nico. And there are some bars on Thursday nights where you can get one pintxo and a glass of wine for 2 euro. So absurd. It is so frustrating how much cheaper everything is in Spain than in France. Even San Sebastian, which is supposedly the most expensive city in Spain, was cheaper than France. Oh well.

 On Thursday we were going to hike up this mountain, but it was raining so Rachel suggested that we go to this little town called Olite where there is a sweet castle. Well that was great, and we would have never thought to do that on our own. Also there was a bit of a hitch with our travel plans that I don't think we could have worked out without her. Our original plan was to take a bus to Bayonne and a train from Bayonne to Foix. We had looked up the bus times and figured it all out. But when we went to buy our bus tickets the day before leaving Pamplona, we found out that there are only buses to Bayonne in the summertime. Nice one, Spain. So we had a few minutes of panic, then realized we could take a bus back to San Sebastian and then another bus from there to Bayonne and still make it on time for our train.I can't believe how lucky we were in Pamplona...what an incredible experience. Absolutely the best part of the trip.

Olite

After saying our goodbyes (more like see you soon...) we headed to Foix. After a long day of traveling, we arrive in this little French town perched on the edge of the Pyrenees. I love mountains!!! There isn't much to do in Foix, but there is a really cool castle on a hill, and we hiked up a mountain, so that was great.

Foix