It was a time in my life where I was always in Spain and enjoyed promoting Spanish tourism. A long, complicated and arduous project concluded that week and I was in dire need of a holiday. I thought why not go to Madrid and hang out with my friend Olivia? Visit Seville and see the hometown of my spiritual adviser. It would be a good idea to meet the family of our business partners in Salamanca too. But for me? Truly, the trip for myself was visiting the Basque country, specifically San Sebastian and Bilbao.
Then and now, I still have a split personality of being torn between food and development (I thought it was called government and politics when I was younger). Pais Vasco appealed to me on two fronts. First, my curiosity about its autonomous government and concerns about ETA - an armed nationalist separatist organization that then sought independence from Spain aside from its earlier function of just promoting Basque culture. Second, related to culture, is the food. There's tapas and then there's pintxos - the cornerstone of northern Spain's culture - differentiated from tapas because everything is held together on a spike with the bread opposed to just small plates as it is with tapas.
So there I was after Prague, Madrid, Seville, and Salamanca, on a train by myself to Donostia-San Sebastian. It was a trip without plans except to rest and enjoy. I only had a hotel booked and didn't even arrange for transfers. Travelling solo was not novelty or cool to me. It was simply no big deal. I used to believe that if I wait for a companion to do something, I'll never get around to doing it.
To get our geographical bearings in order, San Sebastian is a coastal city in the Basque country of Spain, about 12 miles to the French border around the Atlantic ocean. In several occasions, it took turns with Gipuzkoa as the capital. Its iconic landmark is La Concha bay (shaped like a shell) and my hotel was right before you reached Igueldo, which was a great place to see the rest of the bay.
I was aware San Sebastian is one of the cities with the highest concentration of Michelin stars per capita but I didn't make reservations for any. After my walking and bus tours, I just moved from one bar to another, having a pintxo or two, leaving trails of table napkins and toothpicks on the floor as it is done in Spain. Unlike Madrid, I also saw a lot of shops and bars selling bacalao (dried cod) in so many ways too. Such a pity I couldn't bring home slabs of bacalao that my mom could cook so well!
