No One Has Ever Aerated My Txakoli Before

Ok, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night due to street noise – San Sebastián has to work damn hard to impress us.

First stop, coffee.

Great little coffee stop and great coffee – ok that’s some points towards San Sebastian.

People were getting on to the beach – looks like a nice beach. Another point awarded.

It was getting close to lunch time and as we have learned it’s good to go to places a little early to beat the mad rush of people buying and eating food like they have been on a series of Alone for 40 nights.

We went to a place called Casa Urola, and look, we did choose it because it was one of Anthony Bourdain’s favourite places in San Sebastián. There are so many places to choose from here, that it’s nice to have a reason to choose one place over another.

We managed to get an order in and even found a table – miraculous! Steve had a glass of Txakoli – the local wine here – and he was impressed with their pouring technique which aerates the wine as they pour it.

While we were waiting for our food to arrive, a lady sat at the table behind us, she was only there for a minute before one of the staff said she couldn’t sit there – but no one knew why. We said she could come and sit with us at our table, so her and her husband joined us. They were from Rochester, New York and we had the best time talking to them – they were both so lovely. We ending up staying there for ages as we couldn’t stop talking! Interestingly enough, they had just come from Bilbao also and had a similar first impression of San Sebastián as us.

After parting ways with our new pintxo pals – with plans to one day meet up in Rochester, (another point there for San Sebastián) we decided to trek up the nearby hill/mountain to get a good view of the town and a closer look at the giant Jesus statue that’s up there.

After we made it down from the hill, we went and explored the other side of town over the bridge. The area is called Gros and it’s much less touristy, but there is still a load of cafes and pintxo bars there. It was Sunday today so it was pretty quiet and quite a few places were closed.

We went and checked out the beach on this side which was also quite a bit more quiet – we put our feet in the water and lamented not bringing our bathers down.

For dinner we headed back to old town and tried to give Bar Sport a go which was recommended to us by the hotel. It’s super busy there – but I saw people eating sea urchin there and I wanted that sea urchin.