San Sebastian

When you live in Florida, the Atlantic Ocean is part of your life. You don’t necessarily think about it every day, but it’s always there whether you visit the beach, fret over a hurricane, or watch a rocket launch. I never thought about seeing the Atlantic from a different continent.

But there it was. Not the smooth easy waves of Daytona, but water slamming into rocks, splashing up 20 feet into the air. The water actually looked opaque white, not foamy and bubbly.

The city of San Sebastian is on the northern coast of Spain. Like so many cities we had seen, there’s a new side, where the people live, and an old side. On Tuesday we drove to the new side. It was a cleanest city I’ve ever seen and had the most peaceful vibe. Traffic moved neatly with buses weaving in and out.

The beach was yellow sand and there were actually people swimming despite the chill in the air.

On Wednesday, we went to the old city, which had the same warm atmosphere as the other and was so incredibly clean! Unlike every other place we had seen so far, they obviously clean up after their dogs and there was almost no one smoking. Huh.

I had thought that I would feel more comfortable with the language in Spain. After all, in Florida we see and hear Spanish all the time! But there is nothing familiar here, as google maps rattles out a string of incomprehensible street name. Many words here begin with the letters Tx……, which to our English-limited brains simply does not compute. You can imagine her reading these words aloud.

Mike always sets the map to aim for a hopeful public parking lot. On Tuesday, we got to a lot and it seemed like we were allowed to park there. We put money in the machine over and over, trying to get it into English, then figure out how long, how much money….it took over 10 minutes. Wednesday we were in like a downtown area, with one way streets and scary underground lots….we finally turned down into one and once again, it seemed like we could park. The spots were numbered but not much English on the machine. It took 5 cents…………wow cheap! Hmmmmmmmmmmm Ok we paid for 4 minutes lol! Then we realized in this one you pay on the way out. Duh. We tried to explain our mix up to a man who had a little English, but how do you say, SO we thought we should prepay but we paid for 4 minutes, will it still let us pay again when we return? Good grief. When we returned from our day, we paid 9 euros at the machine, phew no problem! But we congratulated ourselves too soon, because when we got to the exit there was no gate, only a winky-face emoji on the screen which would not accept our ticket ??? We drove out feeling really confused.

I stopped at a pharmacy to get some Tylenol. I couldn’t understand the price, and I thought the guy was struggling with his English when he said….”67 cents.” But when I handed him a 1 euro coin, I got change. Oh my gosh!

Mike has turned out to be quite the sheep whisperer 🙂 Now when they see him they come running down the hill for corn and hay.

For the first time yesterday, I really felt ready to figure out our final exit strategy back home. It hasn’t helped that I’ve been fighting (losing) whatever Mike had. We had to figure out where to go next and I felt so weary of it all the sudden. We were going to head to another big city in Spain, but it just felt like more than I wanted to do. Thankfully Mike agreed. I said, Maybe everything doesn’t have to be a huge adventure! Remember we still have to figure out France and getting out of there on Tuesday. Now it seems like I would be happy to know an end date. But maybe after another day of seeing Spain I’ll feel differently!