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| Maman |
Getting to Europe from California has always been a trial, but
lately the ordeal of the journey has begun to outweigh the pleasure of the
arrival for me. I’ve seen the sights I
really wanted to see, sometimes more than once, so at this stage I either return
to someplace I liked before or visit someplace new in
which I have only a middling interest. For
the first trip to Europe since our wintery sojourn in Venice last year we
decided to do both: return to Spain, a country we hadn’t visited since 2000, to go back to a little town on the Costa Brava
called Cadaqués that’s particularly dear to us, and for something new add the
Basque Country, a part of Spain that lies north of Madrid, on the Atlantic (the
Bay of Biscay), which I had only a modest interest in seeing. To get there we first had to endure a 10 hour
flight to London, a 3 and a half hour flight to Madrid, plus another hour
flight to Bilbao and all the airport residence making the connections. By the time we arrived on a gloomy, drizzly
Monday evening, we had been awake for 30 hours and were fried, but we still had
to catch a bus to the Guggenheim museum and drag our luggage through the
drizzle across the Nervion River to
our hotel on the opposite side, near the Calatrava pedestrian bridge.
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| The Matter of Time |
In the morning we walked farther down, away from the museum,
to the Casca Viejo, the old town, ducking
into a café for some Spanish ham with coffee when the drizzle turned to rain. When it let up, we headed back toward the
museum, crossing over the soaring auto bridge and climbing down the
catwalks. Fog was rolling across the
shallow pond at the rear of Frank Gehry’s fantastic building and under the high
arches of the legs of “Maman,” Louis Bourgeois’ Spider sculpture, as we
approached. We lingered in the atrium, where
Frieda wanted to savor the complex intersecting curves of the interior, before entering
the gallery containing Richard Serra’s monumental steel plate constructions
collectively referred to as “The Matter of Time,” though “The Matter of Space” felt
more appropriate as, walking through them, I felt the physical space around me pulling
and stretching and twisting like taffy. Nothing else measured up to them, although
Frieda was fond of Jeff Koons “Puppy” out front, which is certainly playful in
the mode of Dali. For convenience we had
lunch in the cafeteria upstairs. We
couldn’t pick up our rental car until 4 o’clock as Avis was closed for
siesta. When we got there we discovered
we would not get the Audi A3 we’d been promised, but instead a Fiat 500L 1.3
liter diesel. I was rather disappointed,
but half the cars on the road in Europe are
diesels now. Diesel fuel is cheaper than
gas there and they get better mileage than gas cars. Between the cost of fuel ($7/gal. for gas and
$6/gal. for diesel) and the many toll roads, it’s expensive to drive in Europe. I declined
the GPS at $15/day extra yet we somehow made it back across town to pick up our
luggage at the hotel and hit the road to San
Sebastian.
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| The front of the museum with Puppy |
San Sebastian,
Donostia in Basque, was a retreat for Spanish royalty in the 19th
century. It boasts a spectacular
crescent beach called La Concha fronted with mansions reminiscent of the
palazzos lining the Grand Canal in Venice and Atlantic waves suitable for surfing (which Spanish
royalty, alas, did not do). The waves and
the water temperature make it less suitable for swimming than the Mediterranean,
not that we were tempted, given the continuing inclement weather that closely
resembled that in Bilbao. The Basque Country is the wettest, greenest
part of Spain,
otherwise a pretty dry land. It’s also famous
for its food, and the old town of San
Sebastian is full of pintxos bars where the art of Spanish tapas is taken to the highest level. Every inch of the bar surface is covered with
plates of different snacks in colorful profusion. You order short beers called cañas, or wine poured from a height so
as to aerate it, called txakoli, and
then grab what you want, wiping your mouth with a paper napkin that
you drop on the floor. It’s all run on an
honor system where, before you leave, you tell the barkeep what you had and pay
up. You’re supposed to remember it all
so it’s best to move on before having too many different items.
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| San Sebastian from our hotel balcony |
The morning dawned still drizzly, so we took the car north,
into France, to see Biarritz, an elegant little town where French royalty used
to summer back in the 19th century, and then worked our way south
through St Jean de Luz and Hondarribia, on and off drizzle all the way. We had sandwiches from a street vendor in the
former for lunch, and then strolled the sturdy seawall that protects the heart
of the town from oceanic incursions. In
the latter we ascended to the upper town for some wine and cheese in Charles
V’s castle, now an expensive parador.
From there we took a scenic road, a narrow country lane where we first
encountered wild horses grazing alongside, then a herd of sheep meandering
across it, before emerging onto a more substantial highway. Back in San
Sebastian we returned to Parte Vieja. This time we
had a list of bars recommended by Rick Steves, but discovered they were all filled
with Americans and no better, in some cases not as good, as the bars we had
chosen by whim the night before. When we
emerged from the last it was pouring rain so we took a taxi back to the
hotel.
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| Biarritz |
Our last day in San Sebastian we explored the Gros district, meandered down to Zurriola Beach, the prime surfer hangout, and ate churros from a street vendor. In the evening we made our way back to Parte Vieja and bar hopped to the tune
of our own whims again, leaning toward the places full of locals. This time we ordered the hot pintxos from the chalkboard menus posted. As everything was listed in Basque, we had no
idea what we were eating. Frieda
suspected one dish featured bull testicles, but they all tasted great. To finish we returned to a place we’d
discovered the first night called La Viña
and had some amazing cheesecake, their specialty.
By morning the rumor that the rain in
Spain falls mainly in the plain had been dispelled: it falls mainly
along the Atlantic coast, where we were. So we headed north, into
France, and east, toward the Mediterranean. Although it was still
drizzling slightly when we set off, we gradually drove out of it. As
patches of blue began to break through the cloud cover while we blew
across southern France at 140 kph on a wonderfully open toll road,
the Black Keys’ “El Camino” blasting on the stereo, a sense of
exhilaration and freedom overtook me, the kind of feeling that
started to make the trip seem worth it.
