San Sebastian

San Sebastian is in Spain however the locals don’t call themselves Spanish (and got quite offended if tourists call them Spanish or refer to San Sebastian as being in Spain) they call themselves Basque and refer to San Sebastian as being in Basque territory. They even have their own language which apparently no one knows where it came from and it is considered to be the world’s second oldest language.
We had two full days in San Sebastian and this definitely was not enough time! San Sebastian isn’t full of must see sites but yet it draws in tourists who then stay for days, weeks or months longer than they originally planned. Our first night we went out with people from Busabout and a guy who worked at the pickup point hostel. He took us to a couple of pintoxs bars (pintoxs is what the Spanish call Tapas) and gave us a taste of some local cider which had a different taste from normal cider which was due to the grapes getting coated with salt from the ocean when it is windy. The cider wasn’t too bad, me and Ewen even got a chance to pour our own, you have to hold the bottle up as high as you can and then pour it (there was a special reason for this but I’ve forgotten what it was). The pintoxs was amazing; on the bar would be at least 20 plates of different foods all costing about 2 Euros each. We ended up having all three of our dinners in San Sebastian at random Pintoxs bars (usually 2-3 bars a night). Apart from eating pintoxs (pronounced pintos) and drinking sangria we spent some time at the beach mainly lying in the sun and reading but also walking in the shallow water (the water was ridiculously cold so no swimming for us). We also went on lots of walks around the old quarter of the town. The streets were beautiful filled with quirky shops, patisseries and gelato bars. At one gelato bar in particular we stumbled across SMURF FLAVOURED GELATI! Of course we got some to try, how can you see something like that and not taste it. Not too much else to say about good old San Seb except that we could have easily spent a week relaxing on the beaches, wandering the streets and exploring the dozens of pintoxs bars.

Ewen with a street performer. A few minutes before we took this photo we watched a woman go right up to this guys staring at him and when he moved she screamed lounder than i have ever heard anyone in my life scream and ran away. it was hillarious!

Ewen pouring the cider

Some of the pintoxs were more difficult to eat than others... this was a little red capsicum stuffed with tuna and then put onto a piece of bread. delicous but very awkward to get into your mouth without looking like a pig

Pintoxs in the first bar we went to

Ewen getting some tips on what to eat from our Busabout guide

Pintoxs in another bar

This is the sign of a good Pintoxs bar believe it or not

Ewen enjoying our dinner on the second night

SMURF!!!

Me really enjoying my smurf gelato

A church

This was in the window of a building

The beach

Me with a Jesus statue in the background

Lots of fish

Me on a jetty

Ham hanging in a bar. This is normal here, you can see all the ham juice that has dropped onto the glass. A good ham is one year old and an excellent ham is 4 years old (this is after the pigs have been killed by the way)

This was the last Pintoxs bar we went to on our very last night in San Sebastian. Check out the massive pile of rolls!!!

Madrid

I'm feeling a little lazy and have four blogs to write to catch up so this one will be more of a photo montage of our two days in Spain's capital city, Madrid.

We did a bike tour our first day in Madrid, it was in the rain but that meant not too many other people at the sites which was nice for a change, especially for short old me i didn't have to stand on tip toe trying to see what everyone else already could. The bike tour was good, our tour guide gave Ewen a run for his money in the random facts department

This is a cathedral in Madrid, it is opposite the Palace and all the locals hate it. I think this cathedral is referred to as the Cement Elephant by the locals. i have to agree with them, we have seen a lot of cathedrals in our travels and this one was pretty bland and grey.

The Palace behind its huge gates. It has something ridiculous like 2800 rooms and 50 of them are open to the public (for a price of course)

The oldest church in Madrid

Ewen with his man bag/raincoat in a park. cant remember why this park was significant...

The place the famous people go. This is a Flamenco Bar that over the years has seen many a famous person including The Rolling Stones, and an American President (cant remember which one) and several others.

The coolest town logo in the world

This one is for you Riki. Some cute old Spanish men in a square.

A statue of Madrid's logo

Our second day we went to the Prado Museum, this was a painting that really disturbed me...

Ham at the supermarket

Our second day we went back to the Palace for a better look around.

Doing our posh faces before going into the Palace

Posh face...?

The Palace in Madrid is supposedly bigger than Buckingham Palace

The line to get in

View from the Palace

Ewen the Prince

And that pretty much sums up our time in Madrid. Except that we tried Tapas for the first time. How it works is you order a drink (alcoholic) and they bring you free food! For every drink you order you get a different little entree i suppose you could call it. we had mini burgers, samosas, hash browns, chips, and a few other things. On our last night we went out for Tapas and drinks with Amy (my friend Laurens friend who has also been traveling on Busabout) at a restaurant near our hostel.

Valenica

Valencia is the home of the Holy Grail. A cup that Jesus drank from... if you believe that kind of stuff. It looked far too new to me but what do i know. Anyway we paid the money to see it despite our skepticism. It was pretty cool to see, it always surprises me how protected these things are, behind multiple layers of glass, then shielded by fences so you can only get within about 5m of the thing. in the same cathedral that had the holy grail they had a little museum i suppose you would call it, it housed multiple old arms and chest bones. very strange things to keep if you ask me. We also spent some time in the park (actually a lot of time, over two days we walked pretty much every inch of the thing) which used to be a river but it kept over flowing and flooding the town so they have diverted the river elsewhere and instead constructed this park in its place. parts of the park were beautiful but others were dusty and unkept. i think its still a work in progress. towards the beach end of the park was a collection of space age looking buildings, these are supposed to be the second highest tourists attraction of Spain. i think they were called the Palau de les Arts. Most of the
buildings didn't seem to be finished yet, the outsides seemed to be finished but the insides were still under construction on a few of the buildings. It took us a very long time to walk to the Palau de les Arts but despite our sore feet we kept going and went down to the beach in search of gelati. by the time we got to the docks it was about 5pm we were exhausted and still had to do laundry that night so we jumped on a tram missing out on Valencian gelati and went back to the hostel. luckily the next morning before we left we found a cupcake store so we got our sugar hit there for a nice healthy breakfast of brownies and cupcakes.

a cool fort

this was opposite our hostel

the entrance to our hostel

weird baskets at the supermarket

liters of sangria and beer

the holy grail

weird chesty parts

more weird chesty parts

random bones

an arm

fountain in the park

crazy space age building

more space age stuff

Ewen and the dinosaur!

down at the water

grumpy after all our walking and no gelati reward