A trip through Basque Country

I had been dying to go to Basque Country for years for a few reasons:

·         The beach in San Sebastian is apparently the best in Spain and the best city beach in Europe

·         Basque food is among the best in the world

·         Basque people are some of the nicest, fun people I have ever met

So when I had a long weekend this past weekend, I decided to capitalize. Me and some of my exchange classmates took a drive up north!

The first thing you notice upon arrival is that Basque country looks quite different from most of the rest of Spain. Most of the Iberian peninsula is dry and pretty flat. Basque Country is quite mountainous and green. Also, every sign is in Basque, not Spanish. The Basque language has no linguistic relatives anywhere in Europe so the words are pretty different. If you are in Spain and see a word with “x”-es or “k”-es in it, it is probably Basque.

First stop for me was Bilbao, the capital of Basque Country on Friday night/Saturday morning,. The city is however, pretty tame, harkening back to its roots as an industrial city. Pretty chilled out crowd. Nothing wrong with that but a far cry from Madrid, for example. What was pretty cool though was visiting the Guggenheim museum. As you may know, it was designed by Frank Ghery- a Canadian!- so I felt like it was my patriotic duty to pay a visit. The architecture of that building is amazing. It is also located right on the Bilbao River. The Guggenheim was part of a city revitalization project and all along the river you can really see that at work. The view is awesome with lots of cool architecture and landscapes and there are some amazing running paths along the river. If I lived in Bilbao I’d definitely be going for runs there constantly!

Something else interesting to note is that Bilbao has a smaller population than Ottawa and is more compact of a city. However Bilbao has: a metro line, tram lines and buses. Ottawa has only buses. Ottawa really needs to get its act together! It's transit system is so behind in the times! Goodness…But anyways, I wanted to maximize my time in San Sebastian so my time in Bilbao was quite short. On to the main event!

In Basque Country their version of tapas are called “pintxos” and are considered the best in the country. So I of course ate a ton of them and they didn’t disappoint. Every meal I ate was basically perfect. What restaurants here typically do is lay out a bunch of different pintxos across the bar. You then pick the ones you want and just eat them (or the chef prepares them for you if they are out of a particular pintxo at the bar at the moment). The bill eventually comes later. Menus do exist from which you can order stuff but I don’t think that’s the “normal” way to eat in these parts. Even if you hate seafood (like I do), the food is so fresh and well-made that it doesn’t matter. I even liked the seafood that I tried here. It was great.

The main beach in San Sebastian, playa de la concha, is pretty awesome. Because San Sebastian isn’t a very big city, it is really easy to get to it from almost anywhere in town. The beach itself is what you’d expect in a solid Mediterranean beach. Although because San Sebastian is in the north, the water was pretty cold. Not a problem when it is 35 degrees and sunny outside but I prefer warm sea water to cold, personally. I’m not really sure why Playa de la Concha is so highly considered- I liked the beach in Valencia just as much, but whatever…

The weekend I arrived also happened to be the weekend of a uniquely basque event, the trainera, which is basically a rowing race. The main trainera of the year happened to be this past weekend in the ocean by playa de la concha. So there were people EVERYWHERE watching the boat racers, people decked out in their favourite rowers’ team colours, etc. It was pretty cool to experience that first-hand!

And after stuffing my face and getting tanned, it was time to get back to reality. Off to Madrid for more studies!