Spanish holiday part 3: San Sebastian

San Sebastian, September 2018 (photo by Mr M)

So we arrived at our apartment in San Sebastian after descending from Monte Igueldo by funicular and then taking a bus across town. The International Film Festival that provided the motive for the holiday was in full swing, with red carpets and crowd barriers galore. Our apartment was out of town at the end of Zurriola surfing beach, and it was comfortable, despite having windows in only two rooms with a view of a cement wall. That evening we dined on pintxos at three different establishments, in the Spanish fashion.

We established an interesting dietary regime of three meals: Brunch, Cake, and Supper. J put up some resistance to this routine, saying he didn't usually eat much for breakfast and wasn't really a cake person, but by the end of our stay we caught him perusing the patisserie counter in a fashion very reminiscent of any Lola.

We had booked four films for our three-day stay, and I think they were good choices. Two were on the culinary theme - the first was translated as 'A God in Every Lentil' but contained no discernible gods or lentils. It was Spanish and broadly about a chef who went home to his family to help in their restaurant, but the film started very strangely with a sequence that appeared to show the death and burial of a baby, which was never referred to again. The thought of lentils inspired us, however, and the next evening in our apartment we cooked up a wonderful home made lentil and chorizo stew (the rest of the time we simply ate pintxos and cake). The other culinary film was a documentary about female chefs in the US, Canada, France and the UK. I decided that I really wouldn't want to eat a meal where the food had been placed on the plate with tweezers, no matter how good it tasted.

The other two films were more conventional fiction - a Norwegian one called 'Blind Spot' which was filmed as if in one continuous take, always from the point of view of one of the protagonists. So if one person had a ten minute car journey (and they did, twice), you spent ten minutes with them in the car. It shouldn't have worked, but it did. The highlight of our festival, however, was a Lebanese film called 'Capernaum', at which we were also invited to cast a vote between 1 and 10 towards the 'audience choice' award at the festival. The film scored a resounding 10 from all of us - it dramatised the life of a child trying to survive among illegal immigrants without papers. The only criticism I had was that it did so by proposing that the child was suing his parents for bringing him into the world, which seemed to strike a false note within what was otherwise a tremendous film.

When not watching films we were tourists. We took a boat trip out to an island, we climbed the hill to the statue of Jesus overlooking the city and visited the museum up there, we walked along the sea front and watched the surf and the surfers and we had a look inside the cathedral. We popped paracetamol against the lurgy and dosed ourselves with regular cake and cafe descafeinado. We became obsessed with a sign on the beach that we could not interpret among the signs prohibiting various anti-social activities. [Lola II tried to follow this up with the authorities, although if it turns out to be prohibiting something that we were guilty of, I hope that we will not be saddled with any consequences. She tells me that the trail has grown cold - they have not responded.]

On the whole, we didn't interact with many strangers, whether natives or other tourists. A notable exception was one evening when at a pintxos bar we made friends with a couple from Australia at the next table. They were on a European tour culminating in a 100-year memorial of a particular battle in France in World War One during which an ancestor had been killed. Our conversation was interrupted frequently by waiters and food service, but our friendship was sealed by the foie gras pintxos (referred to by our Australian lady friend as 'foy') which was the single best item of food I ate during the week, among many great food items within a great holiday.