This is a continuation of my Year full of Saturdays under the guise Reflections in a stream of consciousness which allows for me to 'catch up' and write on those places that unfortunately escaped my time and effort whilst I was away. The next write up actually steals a bit of a post that I had already part written but not completed.
San Sebastian (Spain)
25 SEP - 26 SEP 2010
The hours of credit that you obtain by trading off your reveller self against your early morning 'seize the day' self are quite often located in those sedate and sobering early afternoon moments when you kind of dare yourself to challenge the notion that time is the only thing that keeps everything from happening at once. You ask yourself whether it's possible that on this day, the afternoon actually commenced before its usual cycle of morning hours. You feel the rays off the sun hitting your face on its downward arc and contemplate time dilation, wondering how exactly the gravitational pull towards the bar actually slowed down your brain function and it's ability to realise that your eventual need for debt recovery in terms of sleep would manifest itself in a day that would eventually be misplaced on the calendar, gone from your mental recollection for all time! Ahh, San Sebastian, you have the ability to treat the Julian calendar with such contempt!
Finding the will to clear out from the apartment somewhere around mid afternoon, we made our way to one of the main squares within Parte Vieja, an area located under the enduring gaze of Monte Urgull and the 12m height statue of Jesus Christ which sits atop the monte. Kind of standing guard as keeper and protector of the Donostiarris, the statue has a an odd type of look that reminded me of those t-shirts that have 'Jesus is my homeboy' emblazoned on the front, although the San Sebastian version just looks as though it's giving the town a 'Who's da man' shout out. Considering that the statue has been around since 1950 I'm a little dismayed that someone hasn't come out with a shirt that says 'Jesus, kicking it with the San B crew for the last 60 yrs'. Regardless, under the watchful gaze of our bro we settled for a few cleansing ales which in turn had me internally recalling a more than familiar saying donated by my wonderful mother, 'You can only take out a needle with a needle' - whilst you sit and digest that one for a second just ask yourself something, what the hell does that really mean!? For years I've tried to decipher it and drew complete blanks, and in much the same manner we as a group were drawing blanks on the locals that were haphazardly performing indiscriminate acts of social etiquette bastardisation. Watching a father hold his son above the metal grate of a gutter in the middle of the square, the trousers of the little whipper snapper around his ankles as his rear end was 'masterfully' angled towards the welcoming breaches of the San Sebastian sewers just brought to me the standard question of, 'certainly this bar had a bathroom inside, doesn't it?'
When you have to go...you go public!
San Sebastian - Spain
View of Monte Urgull and monumento al Sagrado Corazon
As the sun moved west from our immediate vicinity and chased it's own piece of the Atlantic, we settled in for a few hours of watching Basque Jai Lai ( or is it pelota?) before Jay and I decided to head out into the welcoming arms of Parte Vieja for additional 'Dutch courage', because God knew that's exactly what we required. Dina on the other hand decided to stay at home and I'm sure decided to partake in some XXX skyping, but that's neither here nor there within the context of this particular story.
With tapas, cerveza's and senoritas thrown into the mix, Jay and I managed to make our way back to the Bee-Bop for round two in our Donastiarri fantasy land. Not a bad idea on most nights I'm sure but on this evening, the one prior to a massive U2 concert which was going to take place about 5kms down the road, you could kind of figure out who the guest of honour on the play list was going to be. Is there anyway therefore that you thought that I'd be off the dance floor whilst Bono and the boys were being blasted into the porous stone slabs that were keeping the roof on the joint? Just to let you know,he only dancing shoes that I dare hire these days are dependant on if I'm going to be getting my salsa moves on or if U2 are being spun on the discs, and by some sense of divine intervention it happened to be the latter. I think my U2 inspired idiocy also got quite a bit of attention as Jay and I somehow got roped into a Spanish crew that were visiting from Bilbao and the night once again was flung into orbit on an alcohol inspired Spanglish frenzy of natural chemistry. Great fun by the way! Great times and many Spanish lessons were had during the course of those hours.
With Jay at the Bee-Bop - San Sebastian - Spain
Love this shot - @ the Bee-Bop - San Sebastian - Spain
....which therefore leads to our last day and last evening, the final act of our San Sebastian production. In a somewhat offhanded, kind of flippant manner we decided on our penultimate morning to make our way to the top of Mount Urgull in order to obtain 'the' view of the town. I'm not sure why this happens to me, I often recall undertaking moderately challenging feats when I should be at home in bed recovering from a hang over! Please see, climbing Mt.Kosciuszko, New Year's Day 2000 for a respectable reference. Needless to say, the walk was inspiring, my sensei Dina convinced me that I would obtain 'best seats' at the U2 concert that evening if I 'believed' in my very own destiny and Jay...well, he gave the 'big man' that owned the Mont his very own 'peace out and peace down' shout out. I mean, I don't even know what that actually means but I'm happy that Jay got a little satisfaction out of it.
San Sebastian - Spain
Coastline from Mont Urgull - San Sebastian - Spain
San Sebastian harbour
San Sebastian from Monte Urgull
Now the rest of the San Sebastian story, the part that I remember, takes place post the U2 concert at the Anoeta, which you can check out here - http://hdbc2.blogspot.com/2010/09/u2-anoeta-stadium-san-sebastian-spain.html.
Monumento al Sagrado Corazon - Monte Urgull - San Sebastian
'No, you 'da man'
As you can imagine, post U2 I was a little pumped and more than in need of a little company to assist in my Bono comedown. I ran most of the distance back from the Anoeta stadium to our sweet digs on Avenida Zurriola to find the apartment empty! Those little fockers had flown the coop before I had even had the chance of providing them a blow by blow encounter with His Eminence, how dare they!? My only form of retribution was to play the Joshua Tree at a volume that tread the fine line of insanity and wait for my fellow party people to make it back home...and so I waited...as 'Where the Streets Have No Name' played out, followed by ' I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For', then 'With or Without You, 'then 'Bullet the Blue Sky'...I started to realise that these bastards were probably knee deep in sangria and weren't making their way home anytime soon. My neighbourhood walks also proved fruitless and I only ran into post U2 affected drunken Donastiarri's or post U2 affected drunken Irish - (how the hell was it that so many Irish had actually made it down to San Sebastian in any case?). Hours literally went by and somewhere close to 3:30am I dropped of in a Vertigo induced haze, my U2 high would just need to be relived on another day...and then.....and then it happened. Dina and Jay stumbled through the door at sometime close to 4am, on a scale of 1-10 Jay was probably clocking in at a respectable 8.5 in terms of being off his face and Dina was probably at a 7. Jay, not knowing exactly what country he was in at that point decided to crash out whilst D felt the overwhelming urge to 'make food', you know that urge where you just need to damn make something, not matter what it is...you do the maths on that one. Now, as the story goes, just try and follow this, nearly six university degrees between us, IQ's that allow us to tie our shoelaces in the dark....and then comes this, an inability to figure out how to boil four eggs on this modern stove top. It took us, without a word of a lie, nearly two hours to work out the technicalities of this damn blight on society! Somehow Dina managed to put together a breakfast of eggs, toast, excessive pepper and excessive dried herbs in somewhere close to 120 minutes! Thankfully Gordan Ramsay was nowhere to be seen. Sleep soon came to us all after that little sojourn.
At 8am IT happened! The alarm on my mobile went off on this God awful Monday morning. It could only mean one thing, that I now had the job of trying to wake the other two from their self induced coma's in order to get them 1) Out of the apartment before 9am and 2) To get them wherever the hell it was that they needed to be at that point. For D that meant jumping on a bus with me at 9:30am in order to get back to Madrid and for Jay it meant being sober enough to jump a plane to 'somewhere' where he would be able to catch a connecting flight which would take him on to Thailand. So I started with Dina, already knowing at this point in the game that it would take me 7-8 goes just to get her to acknowledge that it was morning. My first few attempts I thought were quite ingenious in their simplicity, I just turned on and left the light in her until such time that she got out of bed and turned it off, where in turn I would react I and would switch it back off again. Jay on the other hand was much more of a struggle. When you have a 35 yr old man, fully clothed, stand up and then fall over the edge of their bed cracking their head against the wall, you kind of figure out rather quickly that you're going to be in for a torrid time. Somehow however my persistence with Jay paid off and he was able to accompany me to the lounge room in what could only be regarded as a sweet piece of serendipity as the apartment owner also deduced it was now his prime time to check on the apartment and to obtain his keys. The conversation that ensued between Jay and this elderly, refined Basque man was the stuff of legends. I sat back and enjoyed the discourse between this drunken boy from Oz and this Spanish gentleman almost to the point where I had tears in my eyes when Jay, with all the dignity and sincerity that he could compose at that stage of proceedings actually put it to this man that he should 'come to the Sunshine Coast, pop in and say hello' ...now if you could imagine the absolute randomness of the situation and the dynamic of the conversation, all you could really do was laugh at that request and suggestion...'Yeah my man, if you ever turn up to Oz and remember little 'ole Jay, just pop in and say hello'...the concept was just hilarious. Well, if you had of been in my mind for those few minutes it would have been a riot.
Several coffee's later and with a moderately disturbed Basque gentleman left in our wake, Dina and I made it to the bus station where we left a still unsteady Jay to find his way to the local airport.....ahhh San Sebastian, not only do you treat the Julian calendar with contempt but man, you were a hell of a lot of fun!
