I told you
I was going to try to post a bit more so here’s my first post on my one month
trip all over Europe. I promise that these posts won’t be as long and will have
more of my favorite pictures that I took. Again, I’m traveling with my friends
Mauro, Aleks, Tyler, and Robert and they’ve been a joy to be with the whole
three days of our trip. We have some high hopes for the next three and a half
weeks here and here’s just some short posts of our past two day trips.
Santiago de
Compostela
So we took a
RyanAir flight (really cheap discount airline) up to Santiago de Compostela on
the last day in January after sleeping the night in the hotel. Needless to say
we were pretty tired when we arrived there at eight in the morning. We walked
about around the city and got a quick breakfast because we couldn’t check into
the hostel but didn’t really see much. We checked-in and took a nap before
anything else because the flight just really killed us.
We woke up
and tried to wade through the rainy city to la Catedral de Santiago de
Compostela. This is an ancient church that was constructed after the pilgrimage
of Saint James. If you’ve ever heard of el Camino de Santiago this is the
ending point to the path and is where a lot of pilgrims end up. It’s situated
in the center of the city and without a doubt is the most important part of the
city. There’s a gorgeous plaza outside of it with a hotel (I have to imagine
extremely expensive) and town hall right nearby. It’s an old Roman-style church
so it is pretty but it can be kind of boring as well and to be honest I was a
little disappointed with it. That being said, I was blown away by the inside
and the gold-plated altar area.
Unfortunately, it's undergoing maintenance.
Unfortunately,
there wasn’t much more to see in Santiago. The city reminded me a lot of my
times in Ireland and England because it just seemed to continue raining and
everything was ridiculously green. It may also be that way because Cáceres is
quite possibly the driest climate I’ve ever lived in so anything that gets rain
more than six times in 6 months seems wet. I will say that the seafood here was absolutely phenomenal. Tyler and I split this delicious plate of steamed mussels and another plate of calamari. It was super fresh and it just was succulent, no way around it. I really enjoyed it here, but I will
say that I’m glad I only spent one day there.
San Sebastián
After a
ten-hour train ride through the mountainous northern coast of Spain we arrived
at the beautiful Basque city of San Sebastián. And yes that is 10 hours, let’s
just say we made due playing euchre and hearts and it didn’t seem to be that
long. We arrived and couldn’t quite find the hostel after forgetting to write
down any kind of information to find it. On top of that it was raining and
pretty dark. Not one of our better ideas. We finally got to the hostel, dried
out and headed out for some pinxos (pronounced "peenchos", tapas essentially). The pinxos were phenomenal: cod cooked with honey, mushrooms and raisins and cod with ali-oli, caramelized onions and toasted bread. We went and checked out
the beach quick but didn’t feel like getting rained on too much more, so we
decided to go to bed.
This is a
quick sidebar before the continuation of my time here. San Sebastián is part of
Basque Country which is a region of Spain that also wants independence from
Spain; so much so that they had a terrorist group until a few years ago.
Actually some of the convicted terrorists have recently been released from
prison based of off some European human rights law that says that no one can be
kept in prison for more than thirty years, even if they killed hundreds of
innocent people and were convicted for multiple life sentences because that
just not humane. It’s kind of a big deal here, but regardless they’re still a
bit nationalistic and they like speaking there own language, blah blah blah.
There was a
bit of rain in the morning when we went to the sea and we noticed that there
were was a lot of caution tape up. We didn’t think much about it and continued
down a side road to get a better view of the Ondarreta Beach.
My friend Robert and I at the side of Ondarreta.
We headed
toward the Old City where there was also a “mountain” to climb to get a
viewpoint of the whole city. Here again we found a lot of yellow tape and a ton
of people. One of the bridges was closed off due to the amount of sand and the
fact that one of the walls facing the ocean had fallen into the river. After
talking to a few locals and looking up on the news what had happened. There
apparently was a huge storm that had waves just slamming different parts of the
city and wreaking havoc on the man-made structures. There were many streets in
the old city that were closed down and a lot destruction from the
eight-meter-high waves that were crushing the shore.
We walked
the long path back down to the hostel and watched the crashing waves as close
as we were allowed due to the closing of the street. The waves were still
splashing meters into the sky and they sounded like a jet rolling in. I tried
to capture the sound with my camera but I don’t know if it was possible. We
honestly sat there just watching waves for like 20 minutes, it was just so
beautiful.
We grabbed
some great burgers with goat cheese and blueberries and headed off to the train
to Barcelona, which is where we currently are. I loved San Sebastián and I wish
we had one more day to see some of the other parts of the city and get some
more pinxos, but I can always come back. I would definitely recommend coming
here if you’re in Spain, especially in the summer. With that I will bid you
adieu and hope you enjoyed a shorter post. I’m having a great time and I hope you’ll
look forward to my coming adventures in Barça and Paris.
Adiós!
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