San Sebastian

Two buses, two trains, several stretches of walking between them. Crossing between countries is difficult, even when they’re in the same federation (some sort of European Union…never heard of it). I make my fourth passage through Dax, very much the Crewe of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. I get a fleeting glimpse of Hendaye and Irun, the latter of which has a station which is not so much under-construction as mid-demolition. I wander around for a long time trying to find the platform, squirming between metal fencing which stands between me and angle grinders and pneumatic drills. The station at Donostia-San Sebastian is equally clamorous and tumbledown. I almost lean on some wet paint. 

I emerge into the daylight and realise that my hostel is far on the other side of the city in Antiguo. My route once again takes me past endless roadworks. It is like Spanish people are waiting Truman Show-style for me to choose a path so that they can all come pouring out in tightly choreographed chaos and begin disassembling everything around me, moving me through my own personal construction tunnel. It’s like having a private raincloud. I make it to my hostel which is at the top of a hill that feels about 45 degrees steep and doubtless didn’t exist until five minutes ago, where it surged up having been given the signal that I was around the corner. Hostile architecture indeed. 

 

Desperate for a cold beer I make it to the nearest bar I can find. I've been navigating French with such aplomb, but I come crashing back down to earth. I'm sure I say the right words! But then it's blank stare and hand gestures and surely, surely I'm saying cerveza right, I've done this before. I think I also commit a faux pas by going to the bar for service but I'd been sitting outside without so much as a glimpse of bar staff. Where the hell did everyone else's beer come from? Did they bring their own?

I drink my one beer and flee in shame.

Not too many tourists in Antiguo as far as I can see. It's hectic. The squares are absolutely bursting with people, kids, litter flying about, mysterious spillages, footballs whizzing past at head height (I do not get to demonstrate my ability to trap a dead ball). After the knock to my confidence I head for side streets and end up in a student bar by the university. It's only the first day - I've been on buses and trains since 9am - so I'm not going far or attempting anything complicated. 

Coming here made a lot of sense. It's beautiful, the food is amazing, it's just down the road from where I was in the French Basque, it's on the way to where I'm going. Check check check. But San Sebastian is a very stupid place to come for someone getting over an Achilles injury. Half the place seems to be fucking vertical, full of little stairway rat runs snaking between apartment blocks, filled with metal benches, graffiti, fag ends, bursts of wildflowers. By the time I've made it down it's time to come back up. What a place to build a city. You’d think I’d have learned from Lourdes. It’s pretty much the same mountain range. 

Tomorrow I'll go to the old town and see the other side of things. Santander (Cantabrian rather than Basque but only up the coast) was very polished and dignified. Donostia-San Sebastian so far has been building-site train stations, bedlam in grubby squares, calves burning up the 300th step, it's not even that bastard warm. I'm tired and I want to go somewhere full of tourists. God help me it's true. I'll even talk to an American.

[Okay, listen. I kept all of the above in the account because it’s honest. I really felt like that. Unfortunately I am a cretin.]

I've run out of words for how good this food is and I haven't even started. Two pintxos in a random bar in San Sebastian and I'm seeing God. Jesus Christ. There's no point even describing it. It's olive oil and bread, fish and eggs. Lemon and thyme and cheese and anchovies and roasted red pepper. White beans, sheep's cheese, cider, ham and blood sausage. I truly don't know what they are doing to it. I wish I did. I'm a very competent cook but this is simply out of my area. Fish on bread should not taste like this.

It's a funny thing. Every bar you choose in Google Maps has a review saying, “the pintxos are the best things I have ever eaten” or some other rhapsody. Every bar! And they can't all be the best, but to that tourist they might as well be. The food is astonishing. I love to eat but I don't think I'd consider myself a food tourist first. I'd come back to San Sebastian exclusively to eat though. Morning noon and night. Bar to bar. I could do this until I died. I just had to clean sausage grease off my Kindle from where it spurted out. Barbara Kingsolver: I meant no disrespect. My eyes were rolling back into my head. I was speaking in tongues. The Holy Spirit moved through me and I was receptive. 

Here's the other side of the coin to me discovering I speak better French than I realised. My Spanish - perhaps just in comparison to my French - suddenly feels totally inadequate. I want to ask if there is music on in a bar nearby tonight. In French - which I will insist I do not speak - I would not even need to use Google, though I would certainly cock up some tenses and cases. Spanish is a similar language but I just don't have it. I decide to seriously commit to learning (and by seriously commit I mean listen to a podcast as I walk, repeating words out loud, and fumble my way through as many conversations with Spanish people as I can).

Oh and I did talk to an American in the hostel and he was absolutely delightful. He was a pilgrim (although since we are now in Spain, a pelegrino), and he gave me a sticker. It reads, “Santiago de Compestella - ‘It’s within walking distance’”. It’s on my laptop now. I save several bar recommendations and he corrects my pronunciation of pintxo. I wish I could remember his name.

+

God my heart could burst. I'm in San Sebastian on a Friday night in a jazz bar. I've got a cold beer. A gyrating old woman on the dancefloor wants me to join her and I just might. Actually I say it's jazz but the DJ just played Sleaford Mods. I dashed over and managed to communicate something about Nottingham. We shook hands, although he was missing several fingers, so we shook nubs. The bartender looks like Michael Stipe. Bald, turquoise eyeliner, gold hoop earrings. Two dogs sleep peacefully on a cracked leather sofa. Some sort of French New Wave film is playing on the projector. I don't recognise it. Please cherish being alive.

[I don’t want this to become too self-referential but permit me to refer back to this passage a moment as well: I won’t pretend it’s good writing but I am keeping in “please cherish being alive” because it speaks to my state of mind at the time. San Sebastian makes me overwrought. It’ll happen to you.]

The hostel is strange. The bedding units are pale wood in a vaguely Scandinavian design, boxy and clean and with tasteful handles to get onto the upper bunk. The side of the bed is almost entirely open to the room, with only the head end concealed behind a foot of privacy. I wonder if this is a strategic anti-wanking feature. If anyone fires one off I don’t notice. 

+

It's nice that Spain is so family friendly. Children aren't treated as an inconvenience. They come out with their parents to the bars and cafés, there are playgrounds every few blocks with children swarming over them, laughing and stumbling and chasing each other. Why should mothers and caregivers have to hide themselves away like lepers? All of this I think while the child at the table next to me shrieks like a dentist drill. It's fine. I grit my teeth. This is all a good thing. The parents are hammering rhythmically on the table now as they sing a song. Another baby starts up a drill of a slightly different tenor. Someone drops a glass. Caring community politics are good but sometimes they should come with earplugs.

At this point, once again, the notes begin to stop making sense. I put this down to my discovery of vermouth. I am buried beneath olives on cocktail sticks, orange peel, boquerones, olive oil. I dab vinaigrette from tiny white plates with the last torn curl of bread, spilling some on my chin. I eat deep fried lomo in a Real Sociedad supporter’s bar and watch Arsenal win the Champions League, which lifts my mood to dangerous levels. Several more celebratory vermouths follow. 

I write: “Sometimes I'm having such a nice time in a pub I feel like I'm getting married or watching the birth of my child.”

I write: “Pelota. They really fucking hit it don’t they. Wham.”

I write: “There is a closeup of the balls in a little basket.” 

Pelota is the Basque national sport, and covers a range of methods of slamming a ball into a wall. The one I’m watching they seem to just be using their hands, which must be the approximate weight and density of meat mallets. 

A older man on the way to the toilet touches my knee for no clear reason. It feels oddly intimate. God bless the Spanish. Perhaps I am touch starved. Maybe he thought it needed reassurance. Whether I did or not, I am reassured 

A group plays a card game on a green felt mat. There’s a little pile of blue and white tokens in the middle. Cards which I don't think are playing cards, they look like dominoes. It's a Saturday night in the pub.

I move bars to the one over the way, which is heaving and has about fourteen different vermouths.

I write: “Vermouth.”

A man comes in, announces that he is from Gambia, and says he wants to give me a bracelet to make me strong. I am delighted of course. I would love to be strong. I am often terribly weak. This is just the kind of tonic I need in my life. I insist on giving him a handful of coins, I have no idea how much. 

Two zoomers reverse into my table to take a selfie. I watch curiously over their shoulders (it occurs in retrospect that I will have been clearly visible doing this) They apply a chad filter to it. Their chins bulge out and sprout hair. Their cheekbones sharpen and their brows become heavy. They take the photograph. I am thankfully not close enough for the phone to recognise me as a face. Either that or I am already too much of a chad. No filter required. 

I end up on the beach watching the fishermen at dusk. Gulls fly overhead and the sunset is brassy on their wings. I continue being overwrought. I even shed a happy tear. I write down some lyrics from a Neutral Milk Hotel song:

And one day we will die

And our ashes will fly

From the aeroplane over the sea

But for now we are young

We must lay in the sun

And count every beautiful thing we can see

It gives me no pleasure to disclose this to you now.

I stand in the sea as the sun dips below the horizon. My feet sink lower into the wet sand with every retreating wave. 

There are several notes after this but none of them are meaningful. One of them simply reads, “Shit brickhouse”. One says, “Incredible, inarguable piece of advice from the American: never go to a place which has its pintxos arranged under glass. Let them make them fresh”. This seems like excellent advice but the definite article suggests this American should be known to me in retrospect. I’m afraid they are not. A second American has hit the travelogue.

I leave my nice hat with the pigeon on it in the taxi home.

+

This is the other side of San Sebastian: it is flanked on every side by mountains. I have a wholesome day and shake off my hangover. You can go from beach bar to forest in the space of about ten minutes. I climb Mount Ulia. Everything is so green. The air has the rich, slightly sour smell of hot bracken, birch tree and sandy path. There are wartime emplacements at the top of the cliffs, now overgrown. Beetles dash across the road. It is quiet and still, without even much wind to stir the trees. Find a gap in the trees and you can see the slow curves of the two bays that make up San Sebastian. 

I spend several hours up the mountain and return feeling, if not refreshed, at least a lightly spritzed. This is the other thing about San Sebastian: the mountain is right there. You can just walk up it. And then back down to have…black pudding with cider relish and what I think is a dill oil, though I wouldn't swear to it. And I suppose I am to an extent just doing this because I am a tourist but people who live here must do it too. Hard to comprehend waking up in the morning and knowing this is all outside of your door. It must ruin you.

It becomes tempting to just write away my days with a gesture, an “I eat pintxos….I snooze on the beach….I drink vermouth”. Affecting a blasé attitude to paradise. It’s hard to write about having a nice time though, and I’ve been having a tremendously nice time. I’m not a food writer and I don’t want to spend hundreds of words enumerating the best food, pound for pound, that I’ve ever in one place in my entire life. Just know that it isn’t just outrageously good, fine-dining fare, but that it’s delivered across the counter of a hole-in-the-wall bar overlooking the sea for the price of about half a Subway. Don’t try and tell me that’s just the holiday speaking. That’s good whether you’re here for a day or a decade. San Sebastian is something else. 

A second African man tries to give me a free bracelet in exchange for change. I feel stupid. I suppose feeling special is the game, but I always fancied myself more canny than that. I was several vermouths deep. I don't know whether I want to keep mine any more. It's an ugly thing. A strip of red leather, a plastic elephant charm, bound in white string. I must have handed over about a euro fifty for it. 

I realise, unsettled, that these two men must be about the only black faces I've seen all three days in the city. One tiny step above begging. I think about rewriting the whole thing and removing every reference to paradise. But if this piece is just an account of me stumbling slack-jawed across a city, brain entirely subordinated to mouth and eyes, then let this be the most egregious example. 

On the bus home I spend the whole journey staring at an advert about plantar fascitis. I make the mistake of going into a craft beer and street food bar, and pay the Dickhead Tax of the first average food I've eaten the whole time. An okonomiyaki themed burger - what the fuck was I thinking? I get an early night but it makes no difference. The room is already like an oven. Nobody closed the curtains, and all day it’s been getting hotter and hotter, degree by degree. I’d be cooked and I wouldn’t even notice.