Finding the washer still
locked this morning, we abandon the wet towels inside it as we have no choice
anyway. We leave the flat’s keys on the table and descend to our waiting taxi, the
driver having arrived just as promised. He takes us and all our junk to
Barcelona Sants. For disabled loading, the train people want us there an hour
early. For a 7:30AM train, this translates into a 6:30AM appearance at the
train station. In the early morning hours, Bear forages, gathering tea for me,
coffee for himself, accompanied once again by bad cafeteria train station quasi-food.
Slightly before 7:30AM, the
RENFE people load Bird and me onto the train. Our adventure begins! The train
leaves the station, heading northeast. Wouldn’t it be cool if trains still
chugged? Probably not, those coal engines really stank and blew soot
everywhere. Ah well, so much for romanticism. Aboard, gazing out of the window,
I watch the terrain change from gentle Mediterranean seaside to harsh endless
desert. A few green fields pop up, fed by irrigation, the only green for miles
in any direction. A misquotation of My Fair Lady floats through my head “the
rain in Spain does NOT fall mainly on the plain”. In the rather early morning, Bear
slumbers contently. After an hour or so, while he snores, olive trees dominate
the landscape, grove after grove after grove of them. Leaving the olive trees
and desert behind, we approach the Atlantic through the mountains of Basque
country. The scenery becomes gentler and green, much greener. The train continues
onward as the land rises, while the hills roll with pretty deciduous trees.
After all of the hustle-bustle of Barcelona, we look forward to a quiet,
relaxing weekend by the sea.
We arrive in San Sebastián around
1 PM. A very kind English-speaking RENFE employee escorts us from the train
into a very small station. He tells us to arrive twenty minutes early for
Monday’s trip down to Madrid. He then calls a handicap taxi cab for us. The cabbie,
another Anglophone, delivers us near our Airbnb apartment.
Patricia, the Airbnb manager,
meets us on the street. The taxi can’t park in front of the apartment because a
huge street fair has monopolized all space in front of the flat.
Pushing our way through the
fair, we gain and enter our temporary home. Wow! What a nice place! We have
real wood, with everything easily large enough for a wheelchair, for good or
for ill: smaller places often have more things for me to grab. Unfortunately, I
then may encounter the problem of pulling things off of the walls. Details!
Patricia talks to us for
about an hour, telling us all the good things in San Sebastián. I ask if the
Basques plan to secede from Spain as the Catalans voted to. She sighs, replying,
“All the money is up here or in Barcelona. Madrid will never let us go. Down
south, they have 50% unemployment.” How do you run a country with 50%
unemployment? (Fact checking, I find Spanish unemployment rates for all adults high,
25%, hovering around 50% for younger folk in the 15 to 25-year-old range, but
pretty much the same throughout the country.) “The worst part is that we have
to pay for the monarchy. No matter how badly they behave, they’re untouchable.
We can’t even sue them.”
Patricia also gives us
washing machine instructions in English! She, in fact, has a laminated sheet
explaining each and every appliance in the apartment, in English. She claims that
street fairs constantly occur, part of the price of living in a major tourist
area. She strongly suggests we buy food and whatever else we want at the
grocery store today, as she fears all will be closed for Monday’s huge,
all-consuming holiday. Monday is Columbus Day in the States (no biggie here),
but Spain’s National Day and very important to Spain.
Keith begins laundry, although
annoyed that no one in Europe seems to have a dryer. Dryers may be considered
major energy hogs and frowned upon. That’s my theory at least. Our multiple
electric stoves denote a lack of natural gas.
Our apartment feels like
something out of Romeo and Juliet. We
open the large window doors, step onto the balcony and look at the people in
the street below. Juliet could declaim her sorrow from this balcony. I’m not
sure that Romeo would hear her over the noise of the crowd. Today, she would
require amplification.
But we have let ourselves get
too hungry, a major problem with MS. I must be fed, watered and nap regularly. Keith
adds that he needs to change my nappy. Attempting to avoid feeding-time-at-the-zoo
problems, we go out to find something to eat for lunch. Unfortunately, we
encounter the entire population of Spain joining us here for the holiday. Forward!
We find the grocery store and purchase supplies for the weekend. We take our
prizes back to the apartment, where Bear puts them away.
Then we resume our search for
lunch. Following Patricia’s recommendations, Keith walks back and forth between
two equally stupid places to eat, neither of which has an open table.
Forty-five minutes later, we wander farther down the street and find a spot
selling some really bad wine and bad American food. We avoid the hamburgers and
chicken wings. Gag me! We accept the wine, hoping the alcohol will mollify our
desire to kill all the other tourists and/or each other.
Ravenous, we roll over to the
old section of town hoping to find bars with good food. However, we find
nothing even vaguely handicap accessible, as all places have very tall
barstools. Homebound Sven, back in the States, has a motor that can lift him up
in the air to barstool height, but Bird does not. Bird expresses her jealousy
and disgust that we would even think of Sven when she has worked so diligently
on this vacation, sacrificing even her wheels, which were fine before but now
make scary noises. She’s become arthritic aiding us! When our appliances begin
to bicker, we always lose.
We seek the famed pintxos, the
local tapas-like delicacy, and special food of the region. We find only massive
dough balls. Aside from the dough balls, most bars feature bad American food accompanied
by bad American music. For some reason we have to listen to the shit hits of the
past 60 years. So on top of being ridiculously hungry, I also have the joy of
having “Proud Mary” earworming its way into my head. And unlike the Spaniards,
we can’t avoid knowing every fucking word and its theoretical meaning.
So we wander and wander and
wander in search of food, Bear finds nothing acceptable. One place has too many
people. Another too much sunlight. Another too close to the road. We struggle
mightily with hunger and spacing out. We finally find some mediocre food
resembling tapas. (Pintxos perhaps?) These tapas seem to be either dough balls
or mayonnaise balls. I down a couple of mayonnaise balls to keep me going.
From the second we arrive in
San Sebastián, Bear begins to complain, “We don’t have enough time here,”
although he personally approved every bit of our itinerary. Thus far, this
place sucks so badly, I’m fiercely glad we’re leaving Monday. If I lived in
Europe, I would probably like to come here for a holiday but as it is, we find
only a horribly heavily overly-touristed spot with nothing really to recommend
it.
The streets change names
repeatedly. Keith gets lost so often that I ask if he has had a stroke. “No!” he
responds vehemently. But I get a big star today, because I direct us home after
Keith turns himself around for the 35th time. My red letter day marks
the first time in our relationship I know the way somewhere and Keith doesn’t.
This has never happened before and will probably never happen again. Keith now
denies that this happened at all.
Upon returning to the house, we
look at recommended restaurants, which I printed out in Denver and brought with
us. After complaining mightily about the crowds in San Sebastián, we decide to
go out and have a nice dinner. We seek a place lacking Michelin stars. (I knew
the woman who edited those books and am not impressed.) We choose a restaurant
called Ikaitz on Paseo Colon. I look up directions on Google Maps, but type in
the wrong street, which I nonetheless proudly direct Bear to. Whoops! I am a
bit spaced, thanks to starvation.
Lost again due to my stellar
map reading and navigational abilities, we search for the restaurant. Numerous
very friendly, helpful people direct us to the eatery. As early diners, (8PM)
our lack of a reservation doesn’t preclude a table and we’re invited in. (Mom
told me of the lines of old people waiting in the Naples, Florida restaurants
at 4PM. Are we becoming the same old people? Would we admit it? NO!)
Our first dish, a flower created
from asparagus and red lettuce leaves, looks nearly too pretty to eat. But we
are Neanderthals, starving Neanderthals, so I will report that we devour the
beautiful flower, finding it absolutely delicious. We split a bottle of good
wine, which also greatly soothes our spirits. For our main course, we divide an
order of monkfish jaw, the best food of our entire vacation. We finish with a
sumptuous dessert.
As we finish dinner, the hordes with reservations
begin to arrive. Many appear to be older men with younger women. ¿Las otras? (The others, or mistresses) I
wonder. Am I primed to see this by the intra-lesson gossip of my devoutly
Catholic Spanish tutor? Is this the legacy of a country that was once so highly
Catholic, with divorce forbidden? Per UN statistics, Spain’s current divorce
rate of 61% exceeds ours of 53%. Or are las
otras the cause of the high divorce rate? According to many observers,
Spanish Catholicism encourages mistresses ─ with no sadness involved due to
wide acceptance, even by wives.
Returning home after dinner, we
find the really tacky street quasi-medieval fair continuing outside our windows.
The massive throng of people prevents Bird and I from even seeing the fair.
“It’s not that bad,” says Bear. We like the fair a lot better on Sunday when it
features fewer people. On Saturday we find it merely really annoying. “Just too
many fucking people.” We go to bed.
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