San Sebastián, Spain
So, I'd heard a number of bad reports about the hostel accommodation in San Sebastián so I steeled myself for badness and was faced with complete farce, farcical farce. With some farce on top. In short, I booked a 6 bed, was put in a 12 bed that had no beds available and keys that didn't work. Was told there were no other beds available and that there was nowhere else in the hostel for me so I took one seemingly available bed and went out for dinner. We went to a bunch of pintxos bars which had amazing food, like tapas meets finger food, we also found a concert stage playing music with lots of locals dancing country dances, which we of course joined in with. Got back to find out that I had in fact taken someone's bed so they were upgraded, so much for no other beds in the hostel. I got up early in the morning in an effort to get a hot shower before everyone used all the hot water. There wasn't a skeric of hot water to be had on my floor anywhere so I had a cold shower and did an online test for a job application I'd submitted. I then found out that a friend had been in a 4 bed dorm which had had a spare bed in it for her entire stay, including the previous night. I made the right complaints and was moved in to that 4 bed and there was even hot water on that floor, amazing! Oh, and the keys worked. The rest of the stay in the accom was fine but it was a pretty ludicrous first 24 hours.
In the meantime, we'd been out for the most amazing breakfast at the cafe next door which had chocolate croissants to rival all pain chocolate ever. While we were sitting, we saw a marching band go by, which we thought was odd as it wasn't even 9am. We went for a walk around town but not much was open being a Sunday morning, but we stuck our heads in one of the churches and then ran in to another marching band, so we followed them. We ended up at the marina where it turned out some rowing regatta was getting ready to take place, we asked around and got the details, so we went and bought some Sangria and snacks, I went and moved rooms, and we returned to claim a place on the beach, drink and watch people exert more effort than use and race huge boats. Go that local sporting team!
The racing ended in the middle of the afternoon and we wandered around for a bit and decided to have dinner in the old town. The place was packed with drunk revellers, we're not even sure what team won, but everyone was celebrating. So we had dinner in a restaurant as we assumed the pintxos bars would be full and drunken. The restaurant was surrounded, so we thought it would be safest to stay for dessert ;) In the end we made a dash for it, weaving through the drunk 13 years olds (I wish I was joking) and headed back for the hostel. The streets were full of broken bottles and rubbish and it generally wasn't a nice place to be so we had an early night.
The next morning we got up and headed out for breakfast and a walk and were quite surprised at how well the place had been cleaned up. Nothing beats the smell of bleach in the morning... We went for a walk along the beach and I walked up the mount and found Jesus, turns out he wasn't behind the couch after all, but on top of a mountain. We headed for pintxos for lunch and I had frogs legs. May have played with my food a little bit...
That night some others and I went out to the Basque Cider House. Everyone had warned us that it's not like normal cider that we're used too, it's not sweet and so on. They didn't understand I've been living in London and drinking many a dry and even flat cider and loving it! The place was a big open barn-like place and we had a big wooden picnic table which backed on to huge cider barrels. The meal was a few courses, a cod omelette, fried cod with peppers, 800g T-bone steak and cheese with quince paste. But the best bit was the cider. There there about 8 different cider barrels with taps in a series of rooms and we discovered, after a few tastes of different barrels and some advice from the locals, that instead of filling a glass and taking it back to the table, that you're only supposed to fill a small amount and drink it in one go, anything left over is tipped out because it won't taste right after one taste. Oh, and the further away from the tap you hold the glass the more aeration in the cider which makes all the difference to the flavour. So, umm, I might have spent a lot of time in the barrel room ;)
Once we'd had our fill, we caught a taxi back to town and headed back to the hostel in preparation for the Busabout bus the next morning.