Day to Night in San Sebastian

This is what it looks like at night in San Sebastian. The sun was nearly set, and it was about 10:15 pm. The lights along the boardwalk shimmer and the tide is low, so the sand goes on and on into the Bay of Biscay.

It's no wonder that most nightclubs don't open until 3 am and close at 7 am. I've noticed that the beach has its own rhythm, according to the age of its visitors: early morning is when you'll see runners, walkers, ocean swimmers, kayakers and people biking to work on the path; later morning is when families arrive, with young children toting their pails and shovels; midday is when the elderly, middle-aged and families with older kids arrive -- these groups tend to stay on the beach for several hours, either renting a canopy or just doing it Cali-style, with beach towels and sandy bags; later afternoon (4 pm and onward) is when teenagers and young adults arrive via scooter and bus in packs of 5 or more kids, play soccer on the beach and dive under the waves and body surf; around 6 pm, the families and elderly pack up while ocean swimmers and kayakers arrive to complete their daily dose of exercise; after 8 pm, some young people are still milling around the sand and a few people take walks at the shore, but it really clears out because everyone is getting dressed for dinner and starting to get to their meeting places. By 10 pm, most people are eating pintxos at bars or ordering helados from ice cream joints or joining in the evening paseo (stroll) through the Parte Vieja, people-watching and enjoying the night air.

One thing I've loved is the relative quiet and lack of chaos in this little beach city. There's a sophistication here that I don't think I've seen in our own California beach towns. Teenagers aren't annoying, for example. Even large groups of kids don't seem to want to mess with the older generation or be pains in the arse; frankly, they seem too interested in having fun together and flirting to even notice other people -- and that's sort of nice. Children aren't crazy, spoiled fools, even though they are clearly doted-on (I've noticed so many well-turned-out babies and toddlers in pique shirts and sweet hair bows -- it's like a baby fashion show when you see a pram approaching; I've also seen MANY siblings dressed identically, both twins and not... although I'm not sure if I like that as much 'coz it's a little too matchy for my taste. What do I know, though? My kids have wild hair and are wearing Target shorts.).

Anyway, there is an expectation of decorum that kids -- and adults -- seem to understand and adhere to, a basic human politeness that supercedes the "Look at me! No, look at me now!" quality that pervades many American tourist spots and beach towns. I haven't seen any Botox-ed faces or fake boobs, for example, and very few tattooed/pierced faces. Many of the people I've seen are naturally beautiful, all ages, and confidence seems to override self-consciousness. The girls stand up straight, a revelation to an American mom of three girls who are used to seeing Miley Cyrus slouch.

It's no wonder that rich people used to send their children on "The Grand Tour" of Europe during the 1800s (as in A Room with a View). There's just something about Europe... it's intangible, but cultured, something that you have to experience to understand. This is why I wanted my kids to come here, to see what I mean about the night sky being different, to understand why I'm so drawn to return. It's like finishing school. As if we could ever be "finished"... but it's a great start.

Topless Sunbathing

It's a game even your grandma can play.

(Sorry, I just had to.)

Our Apartment in San Sebastian

I'm no expert on travel or traveling with kids or traveling with kids in Europe, but I can tell you that getting an apartment here in San Sebastian has been a godsend for our family. Frankly, we chose to rent an apartment in San Sebastian because our travel agent didn't think the hotels would be as comfortable for a family of five and she knows that we're babies when it comes to crappy accomodations. So she sent us a few ideas and we found this gorgeous place literally a block from the main beach, La Concha Playa (or La Kontxa, as the Basques call it) through http://www.emyrent.com/. If you are ever traveling here, look for our apartment listed as "Belle Epoque," it is where Emy (the proprietress) grew up and her family lived here for a hundred years -- the walls are lined with family photos and she's mixed modern Ikea furniture with family heirlooms, creating a comfortable and classy place for tourists to stay. She told me that it's a community landmark and all work had to be approved by an historical society.

We met Emy the day we arrived and she shared lots of insider tips about San Sebastian, like how to eat pintxos (San Sebastian's gourmet answer to tapas) and where to buy groceries for the kids. We have WiFi, a TV, microwave, fridge, dishwasher, stove, washer/dryer (it's a combo here, which is interesting) and a laundry line (pictured above). Unique to most European apartments, we also have three bedrooms and two large bathrooms with showers.

Needless to say, fixing our own meals has been incredibly helpful, both for the kids and for us -- we are loving the pintxos and sangria, but in order to eat "normally" we really needed a small kitchen so that we could wash and cut fruit, prepare eggs, store yogurt and chocolate milk, or have a cup of coffee in the morning while the kids sleep (yes, the apartment came with a French press - oh-so-Euro). Last night, I made pasta and zucchini for the kids and an arugula salad for me and Raf -- I've been feeling like we are missing out on veggies while we're away from home -- and it was so much better than ordering from a menu, not sure what you'll be getting on your plate and paying more for it than it's actually worth. Beyond that, I felt like Raf and I were so cosmopolitan, walking into a Spanish supermarket and buying fruit from a fruteria, relying only on our Spanish (because the ladies didn't speak English).

The other amazing part about the apartment is the little washer/dryer appliance under the counter, which is small compared to what I'm used to and a little unusual because it can both wash AND dry (though the dried clothes tend to smell a little moldy because of the excess moisture in the appliance). Being close to the beach means that our towels are sandy all the time, so it's been nice to wash 'em a little as we go, as well as our clothes. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a laundry fanatic. I don't really love to fold, but I love the smell of clean clothes and I tend to hang many of our clothes on a line anyway -- a holdover from my last trip to Italy. The only things I don't like hung on a line are towels -- I try to get them at least partially dry first so that they're not crispy -- but I always feel so smug and eco-conscious when I use the clothesline.

After the first day, we all felt very much at home here, where we have to use three keys to get in: one for the street-level building door, another for the outer door to our suite of two apartments, and the last for our own apartment. All of them stick and have their own quirks for opening, but we've gotten used to the formidable sound of the locks. The girls love to race up and down the worn-in marble staircase to and from our 3rd floor enclave (actually 4th floor, 'coz the lobby level doesn't count in Europe), which takes far less time than waiting for the ancient, crowded-with-a single-rider elevator.

More than those things, though, is a sense of ownership and residency. We are leaving today for Barcelona and, though we are set to stay in the "It" hotel of that city(the Hotel Neri -- our huge splurge of the trip), we're all a little sad to say goodbye to our adopted home on San Martin Kalea.

Best Day Ever

The weather was spotty when we woke up, but more sunny than cloudy so we declared it a beach day. Upon arrival onto the sand, I thought it might be too cold to stay all day, even though I knew that was Raf's plan. It was about 11 am and I figured that, since the sun doesn't really set until about 10:30 pm, maybe it was really more like 9 am, weather-wise. So I hung in there... and finally allowed the kids to convince me to go in the water, which I complained about because it felt cold when I dipped my toes in.

After a few waves, I was like a fish and found my sea legs. I convinced Serena to swim to one of the 3 diving platforms around the bay and we slid down the blue slide, jumped from the side into the inner "swimming pool" and then dove off the back so that we could swim and touch the big yellow buoy at the far end of the swim area. As we swam back to shore, Emme waved to us and convinced us to swim back to the platform, then to the buoy, then across the bay to another diving platform closer to the beach in front of the Parte Vieja (Old Town).

Emme said the diving platform reminded her of the movie Mamma Mia! Serena kept saying, As long as I'm here, on a platform in the middle of the ocean in Spain, I may as well dive/jump/slide. Even I set aside a lifelong fear of sharks to just enjoy the moment, swimming alongside my kids to the buoy so that I could truly savor their exuberance, strength and stamina. For every unruly thought about Jaws, I calmed myself down with a deep breath and a new thought that life would not always be like this. The girls may not always coax and cajole me to accompany them on their adventures toward something new, scary and thrilling -- I may not be there to accompany them or they will find new friends and lovers who will be their first choice. But I made a discovery out there as I reached out to touch the yellow buoy: once-in-a-lifetime moments come along every second, if we can be open to them and allow them to carry us in their wake.

After we left the platform, we back-floated on the water, a tradition for the women on my side of the family, toes up, head pointing out to sea. With each wave that came upon us, I'd shout, Float it! and we'd quickly get into position, the three of us lying peacefully on our backs, bobbing along. Eventually, we could touch our feet to the sand again and caught some waves into shore. As I sat down on my towel, I lost sight of the girls and panicked for a moment. Then I spotted them, two little brunette heads bobbing on the waves and swimming toward the platform again, this time with Raf next to them and Marlowe, in her hot pink rash guard, on his back. It's too far for me, Marlowe had said earlier this morning. But the allure of the swimming platform, and the desire to just do it, obviously caught her off-guard, too.

We may not be back here again. It is like a motto in my head lately, a metaphor not for this trip or the physical geography that we're traveling but for the very moments of our lives together. We may not be back again.

We may as well float.

A Raison D'Etre

I love this picture of Raf because he's standing barefoot on La Grande Plage in Biarritz, France.

When I first pleaded for us to go to Europe as a family, I begged for Italy. It's my favorite European country and the place where I tend to feel most "at home" when traveling because I lived there for a few years as a teenager and have been back twice in recent years. It is familiar and easy to get around, comfortable in its chaos, a good place for families, kids, women, romance, art and food. I knew we could find a fabulous villa for a few weeks and rent a car to make day trips. I could guarantee a good time for a trip to Italy: food, wine, gelato, shopping, culture... it's all easily accessible. No one would make fun of our attempts to speak the language. The kids could eat as much pizza, bread and pasta as they wanted. C'mon, I said, it'll be a good introduction to Europe for our kids.

But Raf was steadfast in his wishes. If we're going to Europe, I've gotta surf, he said, citing a few of the famous surf cities that he's seen on his favorite surf docu-reality show Drive-Thru Europe. Kelly Slater and his gang of American surfers set up house in Hosseger (on the southern Atlantic coastline of France) and surfed Biarritz and Anglet. They crossed the border to Spain and surfed Zurriola and San Sebastian. But when they tried to surf in Rome, it wasn't as beautiful, the waves were choppy, the water was muddy-looking. The only saving grace was the food.

Okay, okay, I finally conceded. And then we started to plan our trip. We made Biarritz and San Sebastian our first stops so that Raf could bring his board on the plane and then ship it back home; then, since we're in Spain anyway, we'd see Barcelona. Since it was so close to the South of France, we'd tour around that area next. Paris is the best place to fly home from, so we decided to tack on a few days to tour Paris and see some famous sights with the girls. And then the trip was set. Italy seemed a little too far, a little too "much" to get to this time around, so we didn't push it. Another trip, we decided.

The irony is that Raf isn't surfing this trip. He decided it would be too much of a hassle to bring his board when he didn't even know the waves and could just rent a board here (which was a whole other drama when I mentioned this to him -- it's just not the same, he said, it'll take me days to feel comfortable on someone else's board.). But the trip has taken on a different flavor while we've been here. It's become an experiment in culture, both the culture of European travel and the internal culture of our own little family. How well do we work together as a unit? Can our kids exist on a diet of bread and ice cream? Can we just enjoy the moments as they present themselves?

And so this image of Raf, enjoying the what is-ness of Biarritz, a side trip on our European journey, means a lot to me... When I took it, I wondered if he had been contemplating how Biarritz really brought us to Europe, and whether he was bittersweet about the way that the trip had changed its flavor long before he stepped onto the shell-packed shore.

Turns out he was really just thinking about the Cuban cigars he wanted to buy in San Sebastian later that evening.

The Ritz & Glitz of Biarritz

We drove up to Biarritz in France yesterday. Because it's in France, we had asked Emy (the owner of the apartment we're renting) what we needed in order to cross the border. Passports, for sure, we said, but what else? Money? Travel documents?

Emy and her friend Beatrix laughed. No, no, you just drive over.

And so it was that we found ourselves in France after about an hour. The easiest part really was crossing the border. We found it much harder to get out of San Sebastian -- we'd made a few wrong turns in the city and couldn't find the right expressway... and then realized that, because most signs are written in Basque, even our knowledge of where we were headed was tested because the cities are spelled and pronounced very differently in the Basque Country -- it's not French, it's not Spanish, and it really doesn't resemble either. For example, Bayonne in France, a main city on my map of France (which was all I had besides Raf's iPhone and Google Maps) is spelled Baiona on all the signs leading out of San Sebastian. I couldn't figure it out until I tried to say it out loud and then it clicked that we were headed in the right direction.

But Frantzia? It's not even on the map! I said, swearing as we left another gare du peage (toll booth). Say it out loud, though, and it makes sense: France. Duh.

One note about the toll booths that I love: you don't always have to drive up and talk to a toll booth worker. You can also just throw the right amount of change into a basket and then go on. I love that. Raf is not a big fan of the use of coins for 1- and 2-Euro currency -- he thinks it gets lost in your pocket. See this? he asked me yesterday, holding a big pile of coins in his hand. This is like 12 bucks! I would have thought it was like 76 cents! And so we used many of these pesky coins at the gares du peage.

Okay, I'm digressing. Finally, after several wrong turns and a genuine love of roundabouts (the civilized European answer to "flipping-a-U-ie"), we arrived in Biarritz and parked on an outlying street for free rather than fight for a parking garage space. We wandered around the town, which reminded us very much of Manhattan Beach: beautiful little boutiques and shoppers sharing sidewalk space with surfers in half-pulled-down wetsuits walking barefoot with their sandy boards. Lots of adorable sidewalk cafes and pizzerias - really, very much like Manhattan Beach or any other upscale beach town in Southern California, just French-ified. It felt very familiar, very easy to understand and jump right into. At one point during our lunch, at a cute little cafe overlooking the beach, I commented to Raf that even the servers and their attire could be mistaken for any beach city in California: tanned girls in pretty ponytails with shoulder tattoos wearing flip-flops, guys in long cargo shorts with day-old scruff. If we hadn't been eating a pizza with peppers, olives and a half-boiled egg on top, I could have believed that we had never left home.

Afterward, we walked onto the beach. The sand reminded us of Maui's shell-caked sand, full of interesting colors and textures. The color of the water is incredibly soft, the blues and greens of Monet's Giverny paintings set by the seashore. There are giant rock formations that border the bay-like beach and several surfers catching waist-high fun waves like you'd see at El Porto in Manhattan Beach (another similarity). In fact, it seemed like a perfect place to learn to surf, and we saw a few surf schools out there, paddling around. We'd heard that the Roxy Jam was there as well as a rock festival featuring Iggy and the Stooges, but we must have arrived in-between events because we didn't see anything Roxy-related.

The Grand Plage is beautiful to look at, with colorful striped umbrella/canopies and gorgeous little families collecting shells and enjoying the seaside weather, despite the gray skies. As usual, we sampled les glaces (ice cream), this time from Monsieur Lopez's stand -- I've found that my French truly shines at ice cream stands, where I can order anything with aplomb. But beyond that, the water was significantly chillier than in San Sebastian and none of us really felt like we needed to hang out there for very long. We decided to make our way back to Spain before the afternoon was over and, after getting a little lost on the way back to the expressway, we arrived an hour later to sparkling skies in sunny San Sebastian. Hola!

World Cup Revelry

World Cup revelry in San Sebastian, Spain from Erin Shachory on Vimeo.