just in time...

for the trip home, i caught a cold. i'll be sniffling all the way across the atlantic. poo. garrett has a scratchy throat too.

back to paris today

hello folks,
garrett and i are getting one last communication in with the outside world before we shove off back to paris. actually, our train doesn´t leave for another 5 hours, so we´re going to a park here in s.s. that has a lot of chillida sculpture to stare at. chillida´s work is actually scattered all over this amazing city and the park just has a nice little collection. it is yet another gorgeous day - sunny, hot, breezy. i walked by a dude yesterday who just about summed it up. he said "san sebastián es paradiso."
but alas, today is our last day here and tomorrow, we leave europe all together. maybe we´ll be able to check out fauré's grave before we leave. i wanted to see it when we were in paris before but the cemetary was closed.
this may be our last post of this trip. never fear - more posts and pictures to come after we get back!! check back on sunday, as i will no doubt be sitting in my kitchen back in portland, wearing my tracksuit, drinking coff-ay, and posting some last thoughts about europe. garrett suggests that we write about our top 5 dining experiences here. (most of them would be in s.s. actually.)
we wish we could stay in s.s. longer... maybe next time.
see you all back state-side,
kathy + garrett

garrett's bay of biscay surf report

or more accurately, surf misadventure report, for all you surf-happy blog readers out there.

well here i am in san sebastian and i pretty much got my ass handed to me yesterday. actually let's rewind a few days. we met up with my old archi-school buddy hayden here in san seb and drove up across theborder to this tinly little town called bidart on the cote de basque. stayed the night in a SA-WEET little b&b, rented a bic-ish board (called 'surf betty' YES!) in guethary, and drove a few miles up the coast to biarritz. gorgeous little town with this cinderella cove (chateau on the point, the whole deal), and paddled out. the surf? a big frothy stormy rainy mess. huge, double-overhead sets, a mean current and very few people making it to the outside. luckily there was a decent channel. but it was one of those bigdrop-to-closeout-to prone it in, then walk down the beach and do battle again kind of days. i think i got 3 waves in an hour and a half. go surf betty. of course there were the 3 or 4 shortboarders who were absolutely tearing it up. fuckers.

now we´ve settled in san sebastian for a few days and this place is absolute paradise. amazing culture, picturesque, tons of unreal tapasbars (truly UNREAL food. even I was saying things like 'that was the best 'X' i've ever had'. steak, mussels, fish, mushrooms, etc. jeez, i just ate and i'm starting to get hungry again just thinking about it), and yes,surf. because we're without a car i'm confined to the main beach called 'zurriola' (or 'gros' if you're basque), and renting from a shop right across the street. the beach is pretty much one big closeout with about six thousand of my new spanish friends out in the lineup. actually there is a decent right at one end, but each wave has easily eight guys going for it and they're all amazingly good. like pro-good. i tried that one for about a half-hour on this rented 7-6 egg, finally got some table-scraps, then got just PINNED on the inside by the shoredump and was unable to make it back out. such defeat! the other end of the beach had this huge mysto mushy left breaking at low tide (like those really bigdays at seaside cove for the oregonians reading this) that i just about got wired until a huge herd of local longboarders just emerged from nowhere and had it all to themselves. so at first my board is too long, then it's not long enough. hm. they say the only time to avoid crowds is before 10 am, but the board rental shack doesn't open until 9:30. see how that works?

anyway, i'm not complaining, no no no. this place is truly amazing. did i say that already? we'll get some photographic evidence up here soon as proof. anyway, there's another cove in this city that is more flat-water, due to an island blocking out all the swell. the water looks a lot cleaner, so i think i'll just hang out there this afternoon and go for a long swim to the island and back, then go for a morning surf tomorrow. they say the swell's going down and the wind's turning offshore, so maybe that shorepound might be a little more, eh, simpático.

well that's your donostia surf report for tuesday, 19 september. so what do you surfers out there think about a month-long september surfari in these parts at some point in the future? not right away, of course but at some point before we die. just let me know. i'll be waiting, planning, saving my appetite.

random things i´ve noticed

i´ve been keeping a list of all the weird things i´ve noticed while over here. here are a few:

so we landed in paris what seems like forever ago, but really it has only been about 2 weeks. when we got there, i had all sorts of pre-conceived ideas of what paris and parisians would be like. garrett gave me the idea that we would be living on baguettes, cheese, and olives the whole time. while we did have an awful lot of those delectable food items, i have to say that the overwhelming food item in paris is the turkish meat cone. as we were wandering the streets of paris, i kept wondering, wtf is that meat cone thing? a quick google of "turkish meat cone" and there you have it.

also, my ideas that parisian women would be very thin and very beautiful was completely verified and then some. although? the women there didn´t seem to be thin by any healthy means as every single gaunt woman we passed on the street had the ever-present cigarette dangling from her fingers. speaking of thin beautiful parisian women, just about the STRANGEST thing i saw was these totally put-together turned-out women put on motorcycle helmets and throw their dainty right foot over the seat of a motorcycle and motor off to their destination. yes, motorcycles are riden in paris by everyone. not just a "type" of person - everyone. even women who look like they could be fashion models.

the women in barcelona are pretty different from the women in paris. they are WAY edgier. every girl younger than 25 seems to have their upper lip pierced, i think to give the appearance of having a marilyn monroe mole.

also, their hairstyles are out there. the fashion mullet is in barcelona with a VENGENCE.

spanish people really do have later hours. this is also no exaggeration. it was not at all uncommon for garrett and i to be having dinner at 11:30pm and the dining area would be filled with spaniards of all ages - yes even children - happily chattering away over their dinner and a glass (or four) of wine. the ramblas in barcelona was always so crowded that would have to dodge, weave, and manuever our way through even at 2am. men would stand around on the ramblas offering to sell a can of beer.

finally, this trip has made me realize how much all of my various anxieties are probably based on nothing real. i have anxiety about: flying, crowds, people bumping me, walking on sidewalk grates, using public restrooms. as we have been over here, i´ve had to fly over a giant ocean (i didn´t die), elbowed my way through crowds (without losing my cool), walked on sidewalk grates (without falling into a hole in the ground), used a very large number of public restrooms (without catching any discernible communicative disease).

bidart/san sebastian pics

if scott and christine are reading this...scott, this is for you. a plaque in memorium of the man you wanted to name your children after: charles mingus.


the kursaal building all lit up at night. this building is a huge deal here in san sebastian. hayden and edgar´s boss was the architect on this project.


here garrett and i are in bidart just over the border in france. we crossed the border BOTH times with absolutely no border control - we just had to pay a road toll. considering the ridiculous amount of border control happening right now in the states, this was pretty wild.

and finally, here are hayden and edgar, our fabulous companions from madrid. these guys both were incredibly charming, warm, and they easily won me over. when they dropped us off in san sebastian to head back home, i admit, i teared up a little. i loved hayden´s hybrid california-spanish-isms "it is heavy, no?"

we´re in san sebastian

after a minor snafu* at the barcelona train station, garrett and i are in san sebastian. we met up with his friend hayden and hayden´s friend edgar last night and had an awesome dinner with them in the parte vieja (the old part) quarter of s.s. we returned with them to france (yes, it is that close) and stayed the night there in a super nice brand new hotel. the guys went surfing today at some little beach town while i read a book and then took a nap in hayden´s van.
we´ll be here in s.s. until the 20th. i´ll blog more later...garrett´s waiting for me at our hotel.

* so our eurail printouts have so far been super accurate letting us know things like reservation necessary, first class, sleeping cars, etc. the train from bcn to ss didn´t have any special notation so despite garrett´s paranoia that we might need a reservation, we didn´t bother getting one. our 12:30pm train arrived at 12:20pm and we joined the crush of people rushing to the train and when we asked one of the train personnel which car was first class, she said we needed a reservation and could not purchase one on the train, as the eurail book indicated we might be able to. and? our train was leaving in 5 minutes. garrett got extremely upset. as distressed as i´ve ever seen him. he told me to wait and he would run up and try to get us tickets in time. but those lines for tickets were extremely long and i knew there was no way we were getting tickets in 5 minutes so i went upstairs, found garrett sweating and chewing on his fingernails in the ticket line, and told him we should just rent a car. so...that was the automobile portion of our planes, trains, and automobiles adventure. we drove 5 hours through the spanish countryside. the last 40 minutes from pamlona to san sebastian was BREATHTAKING. almost like the swiss alps.

did you know?

there´s a feral cat village in a park near where the olympics were held. who knew? we saw these cats and kittens littered all over the park. we think they must live off the rodents living in the underbrush.

we were are in a picture taken this morning at an open market in the heart of barcelona. they have everything you can possibly stick in your mouth and call food there. i saw some truly disgusting things that i won´t write about in sensitivity to the vegetarians reading this, but trust me...some of the food here is pretty out there.

no, i´m not posting this just to show you butts. look past the butt statues and you´ll see a panoramic view of barcelona from mont juic.