Bordeaux and Palmiers

The Parisians are famous for being stand-offish and cold. Whoever started that rumor obviously never met the Basques.

I don’t mean that as an insult: it’s more like the mild-mannered swing you take at the popular kids that you so desperately want to fit in with: I’m sure that if the Basques had welcomed me in with open arms, I wouldn’t ever consider calling them cold… they certainly don’t seem that way towards one another. But if they had welcomed me, I probably wouldn’t want to be part of it all so much: ah… a paradox. How lovely.

The attitude towards foreigners or strangers of any kind reminds me less of Paris, where you can get on someone’s good side just by bad-mouthing the other guy, and more of Lille, my first stop along a long list of stops throughout France and Europe in general: the northerners weren’t cold, just distant… and once they had grown to love and accept you, there was no going back. Which is perhaps why they deliberated so long and hard over their decision.

When spelled out in this way, I’m tempted to draw parallels with the weather, and in all honesty, maybe that’s it: cold and wet brings about the inclination to stay indoors with a cup of tea and never venture outside, where foreigners like myself are wandering about, unsure of what to do with ourselves. To befriend someone in either place is to welcome them into your home, something that should be done with trepidation when you’ve got weirdos like me wandering around.

I don’t really know the whys and wherefores: I don’t feel I’ve been here long enough to deserve to know. All I know is that when I watch their fiestas from the outside, I so long to be a part of the club.

A note on the photo:

A few weeks ago, the Basque regatta was held here, in San Sebastian. The streets of Parte Vieja were even more congested than usual, and as I waited for a friend outside our usual meeting spot–McDonalds (stood outside more than I care to admit, but I haven’t stepped in once since I’ve been here)–I saw something strange approaching from down the street, announced by screams and running feet in all directions…

I’m curious, so rather than run away, I whipped out my camera and stepped a bit closer…

To see a man running towards me with a fake bull on his head and fireworks spouting every which way.

I would like to be friends with this man.

I never thought that I would be able to love a city that had so much rain.

I had always knocked London and Seattle off my list of places to live for this very reason–we curly-haired girls have to be careful where we go. And although the torrential rain here sometimes makes it difficult to get out of bed and trek the 30 minutes I have to walk between Amara and San Sebastian proper, where I go to school, it all seems worth it on nights like this.

I love my life here: I love surfing every day and smelling the salt on my skin even though it’s technically fall. I love eating tapas instead of dinner and not remembering the last time I actually sat down to a normal meal. I love speaking Spanish–it’s that childish wonder I got the first time I started speaking French, where you just say the first thing that pops into your head and hope it’s right. I love the classes, I love the city, I love the beach. And most of all, I love views on nights like this, where I feel like the sun was setting over the bridge just at that moment all for me.

To hell with the rain… with all this surfing, my hair’s wet all the time anyway.

I’ve been pretty bad about updating this blog… will you forgive me if I say I’ve had a lot on my plate? I thought I was going to be traveling to an entirely new place–an entirely new continent for me–with new stories that I would have shared with you on this blog and new pictures, and then those plans fell through and I’ve been working on coming up with new plans to fit in where the old ones should have gone.

Regardless of whether that trip happens, I do have another trip to write about–one that we took over one of the three long weekends that the French are graced with in the month of May. Alex and I decided to head all the way to the Basque region of France, right next to Spain, to do some exploring.

When we booked the trip, we were looking forward to the warm weather that we assumed one of the last weekends of May would bring. I knew that I wanted to try surfing for the first time, and we booked a hotel right on the beach (the highly recommended Hotel Valencia–well-priced and with a bar beneath that looks out on the water). Unfortunately, we only had one great weather day–a day we devoted to at least trying to learn how to surf.

There was a silver lining, which was our decision to take the boat across the water ten minutes to Spain and the Spanish town of Fuenterrabia. It rained the entire time we were there, so we spent most of our time holed up in different Basque bars–not a complaint, considering that the Spanish Basque region is one of the best in the whole country for tapas, or, as they’re called in the Basque language, pinxtos. 

Hendaye and Fuenterrabia are small towns–there isn’t a lot of tourism to be done, and in the summertime, Hendaye becomes a tourist destination mainly because of the family-friendly beaches on the Atlantic, which are also a great place for surfers to come. Although the weather wasn’t ideal (an understatement… on our walk back to the train station, we huddled under a bus shelter to wait out a hail storm!) I really enjoyed our stay in Hendaye and our visit to Fuenterrabia… I highly recommend visiting, especially in the high season.

I really, really hate being a tourist.

Sure, if I’m visiting a new city, I’ll hit up some of the more famous museums and may even take a few pictures when no one is looking (mostly for this blog… you guys have made me a lot more photo-addicted than I used to be). But there are several things, that I simply will not do for fear of being pointed at and laughed at by the locals, including but not limited to eating at the Hard Rock Café, carrying around a bag of McDonald’s, wearing a visor, opening a map in the street, and, God forbid, riding on one of those heinous tour buses around the city. Nope. Definitely won’t do that.

Except that Alex didn’t know that. And rather than explain my phobia to him (in French) and be forced to a) be forever labeled as “crazy” by my new boyfriend and b) have to come up with another activity, I begrudgingly payed 26 euros for a 2-day ticket to hell.

Or so I thought.

Apparently, those bus tours aren’t so bad. The particular company we used had three different bus lines, two of which left from central Plaça Catalunya and visited the north and south ends of the city respectively, and one smaller line that focused on the redevelopment of Barcelona that occurred in the early nineties in preparation for the city’s hosting of the Olympics. Alex and I rode all of them on our two-day ticket, and I have to say, I learned something.

I hang my head in shame of my former attitude: not all tourist attractions are awful. Especially in a city as large as Barcelona, a bus tour like this outlining every main attraction in the city not only allows you to see a lot more of the city than you would have otherwise, but also lets you plan out things you may want to see later. One unfortunate side effect of my staunch refusal to use tour buses in the past has been that upon returning home, I almost always find something on the Internet that I woulda-coulda-shoulda visited back a week ago when I was in the city. Although Alex and I didn’t take as much advantage of this second perk as we should have (we had just gotten off six weeks of work and were plum tuckered out), I know that in the future (*sigh*) I’ll be riding tour buses and using them to map out the rest of my vacation.

Yep, you heard me. I’m a tour bus convert. So sue me.

The pictures accompanying this post were taken aboard the bus offered by a company called Barcelona Bus Turistíc. I highly recommend them, as they converted a former bus hater into a bus lover. You can find all the information about this company here .

Antoní Gaudí was known as “God’s Architect” for his work on this masterpiece. His cathedral has taken much longer than the Spaniard’s lifetime to complete: it is still under construction today. Gaudí was famous as saying that his employer–God–wasn’t in a hurry.

In Europe, every major city boasts an aquarium and a cathedral, and in general, all cathedrals and all aquariums are fairly similar. Sure, each cathedral has something unique about it: a statue, a painting, a patron saint celebrated with a stained glass window, but the Gothic architecture tends to be fairly similar with each cathedral, and on a whirlwind tour of the major cities of Europe, very few cathedrals stand out next to another.

The Sagrada Familia is different.

Where other European cathedrals tend to recall Notre Dame and gargoyles, the Gaudi cathedral is immensely different. The detail in all of the surfaces is incredible to behold, and touring the inside to see the plans that are still underway for the completion of the cathedral makes the work that goes into building a monument such as this so much more tangible.

Each visitor to the cathedral pays an entry fee, something that is not usually requested upon visiting a religious site. However, the fee contributes to the completion of the cathedral. Every visitor becomes a patron of the arts and of the Church, and every visitor helps towards the completion of this gorgeous monument to God and to art.

Barcelona is a large city that is spread out over a vast amount of land. Coming from Manhattan, seeing a city that is so large is always surprising. Especially after the city hosted the Olympics not long ago, even the previously run-down sections of town are being built up, and it’s difficult to pick a must-see true city center.

However, for years now, tourists and locals alike have been drawn to the Plaça Catalunya, the huge square that sits at the head of La Rambla.

La Rambla is a boulevard that runs all the way from Plaça Catalunya to the sea, and now it even extends onto the sea, with the walkway that is known as La Rambla del Mar: the Rambla of the sea.

While cars are certainly permitted on La Rambla, they will have a hard time getting anywhere: the street is always covered with pedestrians. Checking out the shops, stopping for a bite to eat, checking out the street performers or simply walking and enjoying the scenery, people are drawn to the vivacity of La Rambla.

When I was recently in Barcelona, we walked on La Rambla every day that we were there. Yes, the shops and restaurants on this very touristy street are expensive, but it’s worth it to simply walk down the street and see what there is to see. Street performers here take their task very seriously, and the typical metallic-painted mummies are kept company by people dressed in full princess, pirate or “chiquita banana” regalia.

While all of these performers were fun to watch, I have to say that my favorite thing I witnessed on La Rambla was this.

A pet store had set up a large area on La Rambla to sell, of all things, pigeons. I don’t know of any city that needs more pigeons.

This is the last of my Mallorca posts. I’m already excited to write about all of the things that we’ve been doing since we got to Paziols: the kids are great, and we’ve already taken them on tons of walks around the area.
But before I get ahead of myself: this is Ses Salines. Ses Salines is the name of both a town and a salt mine in the Colonia San Jordi, a popular location for tourists on the southern tip of Mallorca. It’s about a twenty-minute drive from where I stayed in Llombards, and the Canadian and I liked to go every other day (when we weren’t exploring new beaches.)

The beach at Colonia San Jordi is great because of its length: you can walk for several kilometers along the shore. There are bars and restaurants on the beach, and there are tons of places to sit and tan or swim. It’s not as exciting as the secret beaches, but there are lots of people, and it’s a nice, familiar place to go and sit all day.

Ses Salines is right outside the San Jordi beach, and it’s the whole reason I’m writing this entry. Ses Salines are salt mines that were used all the way back to when the Romans colonized Mallorca. I had never seen salt mines before, and even though they aren’t opened to the public or really publicized in any way, I still found them very interesting to see.

Secret beach number four (and the final secret beach) is found in the Natural Park of Mondrago.

I showed you two of these nifty little signs yesterday, but I didn’t really explain them. Basically, all beaches (even the unguarded ones) have a map like this showing you where you are and who to call in an emergency. I like them because they help me to keep track of all the beaches I’ve seen, as well as to get back to them or recommend them if I want.

The first beach you stumble on in the park isn’t actually where we stopped. It’s got a very deep shoreline, which is pretty uncommon in the Mediterranean, but it reminded me a bit of my American beaches on the Atlantic.

There is a second beach as well, which you reach by means of a path that winds around some rocks. We were aiming for the third beach, which you can reach with a path through the woods. But we decided to be difficult again and keep going on the rocks.

It was difficult, but we got to see some cool things, like these craters full of sea salt, and it made finally reaching the beach much more worth it: swimming in the cool sea after that trek was unbelievable.

The actual beach was very similar to the one from the day before, but the Canadian says there were fewer fish. I have no idea: I just relished laying in the sun for one more day before leaving the shore for the next six weeks.

Where I currently am, in Paziols, there are a lot of fun streams and rivers to see (which you’ll be hearing about soon!), but the actual beaches are quite far away. I’m a mermaid at heart, and I miss the sea already.

I am leaving Mallorca today for Paziols, where I’ll be working with an old French tutor, who has started a French immersion program for her American students. I’m really looking forward to going back to Paziols and to seeing what is new and different with the program that we started, very experimentally, last summer.

While I’m sad to be leaving Spain, I’m really looking forward to the time I will spend in France. However, I still have quite a few things about Mallorca that never appeared here, so I’m going to do my best to get you all up-to-date about my last few days in Mallorca without ignoring Paziols.

So, on to the third of a series of four secret beaches. This one isn’t so much of a secret, as it is (finally) the original beach that sent us on such a wild goose chase. I’m glad it took us so long to find, because it led us to the other two, but I was also glad to finally see it.

Remember when I told you that this beach was meant to be directly behind those houses, very close to the second secret beach? Well, it was. Right around that bend of rocks. Except that the Canadian and I decided that we would go a different way… just to see if we could get there. After climbing over some rocks and trees, we finally found this little clearing.

That’s the beach where we were supposed to be. But we scrambled over the rest of the rocks like good little monkeys and finally got there.

It was similar to the other beaches, with one exception: the caves were a lot bigger. I didn’t get any great pictures, because they were kind of far out in the water, but the Canadian and I had brought a snorkel and mask, and we spent a lot of the afternoon looking at Mediterranean fish. They were pretty big… I’d had no idea that I was swimming with fish that large before, but they kind of blended in with the sand, so they were difficult to see without the mask.

When we’d finally had our fill, it was time to go: more rock scrambling.

This is the only way to access or leave the beach.

The Canadian fared fairly well… he has long legs, but I had to be helped by some kindly German people. They were probably laughing at me and my camera. Oh well.

That sign at the bottom is the second secret beach, by the way.

Are you sick of secret beaches yet? I promise there’s only one more left… and it’s a pretty cool one.

Firstly: a map. The Canadian is indicating our approximate location, inland a few minutes. The beaches that I have been talking about today and yesterday are as close as possible to where we live, just next to that big blue thing. That’s the water.

Secondly, as I promised: the second hidden beach. With a twist. This, apparently, isn’t even the beach we were looking for in the first place.

When we first set off to find the hidden “cave” beach, we couldn’t find the access parking lot, which is how we got to this  beach .

Then, when we finally did find the parking lot, we went to the beach that I’m posting about today and spent the afternoon, swimming and exploring the caves near the small sandy area. But when we described the beach to our friends, who had sent us on this wild goose chase to begin with, they told us that this wasn’t the beach they had indicated either! Oh well. We’re going to try to find that one today… apparently it’s past those houses in the picture above, but we spent an incredible afternoon on our newfound secret beach.

The actual sandy area is small, but we were lucky enough to find a spot right near the water, which the Canadian immediately went to test while I lay in the sun. There weren’t many other people, which is a huge contrast to our regular beach at the Colonia San Jordi.

Like the beach from the day before, this one was below street-level, and was buttressed on either side by high, sloping cliffs. Although instead of picking a path through the underbrush, there was a rickety staircase to use. Yay!

The water directly in front of the beach was very narrow: there were two caves on either side, after which the water spread out to where the rest of the sea was. The caves were fun to explore.

This one had a little sandy beach of its own at the back, which was a fun place to sit and look around. I feel like it would be a fun place to sit and drink… if it weren’t for that whole drowning thing.

I don’t care how much you hate me when I say: it’s awesome when the toughest part of your life is finding new beaches to explore.