My Paris Diet (i.e., Brad promised me I can eat as many pastries as I want and not get fat).

My cousin Karen, who traveled to Paris in December, sent me an email and mentioned that she was excited to see Paris through my eyes. As she probably could have predicted, my view of Paris is directed towards the patisseries, boulangeries, and creperies. (Specializing in pastries, bread, and crepes, respectively). Did you know that in France, a patisserie is a legally controlled title that may only be used by bakeries that employ a licensed maître pâtissier (master pastry chef)? I didn’t either, until I learned this fact on Wikipedia. Wikipedia teaches me a lot these days.

I don’t really pay attention to the names, other than to notice that in Spain I liked anything that ended in -eria and in France I like anything that ends in -erie. I mostly follow the delightful smells. Seriously, there is nothing more aromatic and calming that the smell of French baguette wafting down the street. It is rare that one of our meals these days do not chiefly consist of baguettes. Not so great on carbs, but nice on the wallet. Fortunately, we’ve happily been adding vegetables to our baguette-based meals, because we have found that all of the vegetables taste fresher and have more flavor than most of the veggies at home.

I have been eating Nutella crepes, madeline cookies, palmiers, macaroons, lemon tarts, and chocolate eclairs with abandon. On our first night in Paris, Brad, a friend of Sean’s who works for Sean’s former employer, and who is here in Paris working for about a month, mentioned that when he first came to Paris, he promptly dropped a ton of weight because of all of the walking that he did. He assured me that he had been sampling everything Paris had to offer, and that he dropped the weight despite the Parisian treats.

While I am sure that I would have promptly commenced eating crepes and such regardless, this was the go-ahead I needed to eat them guilt-free. Luckily, we have been walking a ton. Paris is very flat, making it easy to traverse from one area of town to the other. I am not sure that I am losing any weight, but I can fairly say that I have not yet gained any weight, so the Parisian diet must be working on some level. I mean, the treats are so delicious here, and I am eating so many of them, that I don’t even find the need to make sure that each treat is chocolate filled or covered.

I promise that I will write about more than just food, but the way I see it, food is the best way to experience the cultural differences between countries and even regions. Sean is a slightly alarmed in my increase in sweets in particular, but I seem him enjoying quite a few baguettes, paprika-flavored pringles, and comte cheese himself. Besides, I am taking advantage of sweets now in Europe, where they are abundant. You never know when I’ll suddenly find myself cut off.

Bonjour!

Hello, all. Just a quick post to let everyone know that the comments are fixed. We are enjoying Paris and will be posting more soon!

Our San Sebastian to-do list.

One would think that when all you are doing is travelling, and you are not working, you would have endless hours to spend as you please.  But it turns out that eliminating work still does not leave you with that many hours in the day.  (Not complaining, just observing).  Simple tasks take a long time.  For example, all we wanted to do was mail some postcards back home.  We had already purchased the postcards and successfully bought international stamps back in Barcelona, so all that was left to do was send them on their way.  This simple task involved recalling that there didn’t seem to be any mailboxes around town, determining that we should go to an actual post office, trying to find a post office on the map, failing to find a post office on the map, attempting to look up where the post office was on the internet, realizing we had no idea where as post office was, inquiring about how to mail the postcards with the pension owner in rudimentary English and Spanish (okay, mostly he made efforts to use English and we gestured and said si to fill in the gaps), successfully finding the post office, standing around confused for at least five minutes, realizing there is no mail box to dump the cards in, determining we needed to get a number and wait in line, staring bewilderingly at the number machine because there are options and none of the options made sense, guessing which type of number we needed, waiting for our number to be called, and finally, successfully handing the postcards to the clerk with a “gracias.”

So far, tasks like these are still part of the adventure, part of the experience, and often shape our days.  One day, after unsuccessfully purchasing train tickets to Paris on the internet, we realized we actually had to go to the train station across the border in France to buy the tickets.  Me to Sean: Huh.  Guess we’re going to France this afternoon.

Another “adventure” was shopping for replacement sandals for Sean.  In a rush to find suitable sandals before we left, Sean bought sandals that turned out to be too big and caused blistering.  While most of the stores in San Sebastian were ones we never heard of, there just happened to be a Clarks store that just happened to have the same exact sandals.  Sean debated for a while, and decided while it did seem ridiculous to buy the exact same pair of sandals in a smaller size, and it was annoying to spend more money on something he already bought, it was necessary for his comfort for the next year.  And what are the odds that there would be a Clarks store with the exact same sandals?

Making the decision to buy the sandals and actually purchasing the sandals were two different matters, however.  First, the sizes were UK sizes, and neither Sean nor me nor the salesperson had any idea how to convert the sizes to US ones.  It didn’t help matters that she couldn’t understand, and we didn’t know the Spanish to explain, why in the world we wanted to buy the same exact sandals.  We first tried randomly asking for sizes, and then tried saying more grande, or more picante, but it was obvious we were getting nowhere.  We returned the next day after looking up conversion charts online (each one saying something different than the next, by the way).  We asked for nueve y mitad as well as nueve.  The salesperson – the same one from the day before – smiled and said si.  She handed Sean plastico to try them on (apparently a plastic bag is Spain’s version of American footies) and he found ones that fit.  Finally, success.

We also took advantage of the abundant shopping to look for wallets.  From essentially day one, we wanted to ditch our dorky, cumbersome travel wallets we had bought for the trip.  Mine clipped to my pants and Sean’s clipped to his belt.  Perhaps we are being too complacent after experiencing no problems in Barcelona, a city supposedly notorious for pickpocketers, but we decided to keep good habits instead.  Sean found a small simple wallet that he is loving already.  I’m still on the hunt for a wallet, but I did take the opportunity to buy a super cute cross-body purse.  Yes, I spent more that I should have, and yes, I could probably have found something fun and cheap in, say, Morocco, but it was hard to restrain the shopping urge in San Sebastian.  Even with Sean’s unexpected sandal purchase, and the addition of my new purse, our budget in San Sebastian fell below our planned $200/day budget for Europe.  (I knew roughing would come in handy somehow).  I fell in love with the super soft leather, the fun blue adds another pop of color into my blah travel wardrobe, and it is practical.  I thought I had wanted to forgo a purse, but realized we don’t want to tote around our smaller backpack (i.e., our “day bag”) all of the time.  We are quickly learning what “gear” works and what doesn’t.  It seems like everyone advocates buying certain things for a RTW trip, but we should have trusted our instincts with certain items that seemed unnecessary.  Now, if there was only room in my backpack for the rest of the outfit:

From San Sebastian

Random observations from San Sebastian

Random observation #1: On on a walk one day, we watched a car screech to a halt inches from a woman who crossed the street without a walk sign.  Nine times out of ten in the United States, both the woman who walked on red and the man in the car who took the bend too quickly would have started “mfing” each other, no matter whose fault it was.  Here, the man looked horrified, the woman looked ashamed, and they proceeded to have, in the middle of the road, what appeared to be a heartfelt conversation expressing gratitude that no one was hurt.

Observation #2: Babies in strollers and unleashed dogs are EVERYWHERE in San Sebastian.  The unleashed pooches amused me.  Big dogs, little dogs, no matter, they come with you to the store, the bar, the market, the restaurant, the museum.  This would never fly in America, and my cynical lawyer side guesses it is because leash laws and dog bite laws make people fear liability.

From San Sebastian

One afternoon, I was waiting for Sean outside a museum.  A very large fluffy dog sat at the entrance, unleashed, waiting for his owners to emerge.  Every time the door would open, he picked up his head hopefully.  Then a poodle, unleashed, walked by with a couple.  Oh, no, I thought.  There is going to be trouble.  But the big dog just calmly got up and walked over to the little dog.  They do that thing that dogs do upon greeting (you know, circle each other for a minute and sniff each others’ butts).  Upon deciding that the others’ butt smelled satisfactory, or whatever it is that dogs decide, the big dog just laid back down.  When his owners finally came out, he silently trotted alongside them down the hill and out of sight.  I was impressed.

Land of Peen-chos.

Deciding it was time to head out of Barcelona and make headway towards Paris, where we would be visiting our friend Matt, we planned our next destination: San Sebastian, Spain.

From San Sebastian

From San Sebastian

San Sebastian, or Donostia as it is called in Basque, is a town on the ocean in northeastern Spain, close to the border of France. It is in the heart of Basque country, which is a region spanning northern Spain and southern France, where the Basque ethnic group lives. In San Sebastian, people spoke noticeably less English than in Barcelona, with the added of challenge of frequently speaking Basque, a language with a lot of x’s and t’s, in addition to Spanish. San Sebastian is a cute little getaway where the pace was a little slower than Barcelona. It is nestled between the ocean and the mountains, with tons of shops, flowers, and quaint old architecture in between. The people in San Sebastian seemed to be very dedicated to their siesta time, even though shops and restaurants did not open early or stay open particularly late.

From San Sebastian

The 6 hour bus ride from Barcelona to San Sebastian was pretty uneventful, save for the loud Spanish lite FM blasting from the speakers (Spanish songs frequently interspersed with Lady Gaga and Owl City’s song Fireflies) and me trying to retrieve my tres-dropped Ipod while accidentally pouring half of my water bottle on Sean’s pants as Sean and the Spanish man next to him stared in horror. (No worries, the quick dry fabric works as advertised!) We arrived in the heart of siesta time, without a reservation or a map. We eventually ran across Pension Santa Clara, one of the accommodations advertised in Lonely Planet Spain ( www.pensionsantaclara.com ). Although I was suspicious of its simple rooms, thinking it did not seem to raise the bar in our lodging as much as I would have liked, it didn’t smell like fumar (smoke) like another pension we tried (hate that fumar!), it was in the heart of the Old Vieja (Old Town), it was only 38 euros per night, and our backpacks seem to triple in weight after carrying them around town. It turns out that we loved the Pension Santa Clara. The linens were great (nice and clean and white!), the internet was super fast, and the shower in the en suite bano was full of pressure and hot. We even got to watch some TV (some gameshows in Spanish and lots of the Teledeportes channel).

From San Sebastian

All over San Sebastian, you will be surrounded by bars and restaurants with pinxtos (pronounced peen-chos) sitting on their counters. Similar to tapas, and essentially little appetizers that can be eaten as a snack or combined to make a meal, it was fun to try all of the different combinations.

From San Sebastian

One has to wonder how fresh all of these pintxos are, because save for our favorite pintxos restaurant (Casa Senra on San Francisco street in Gros), we never saw the pinxtos being replaced. No matter. The little sandwiches and seafood or jamon (ham) topped pieces of bread were so cute, it was easy to ignore the fact that seafood was sitting out unrefrigerated or that everyone’s fumar constantly wafted over the pinxtos. Plus, because there were a million different places right in walking distance, it made bar hopping very conducive. Although we stuck to the Old Vieja section the first night, we frequently found ourselves wandering about a mile down the road past the surfer’s beach to the Gros district, which is noticeably less touristy.

In San Sebastian, we quickly fell into the routine of eating pastries from the pasteleria around the corner, drinking fresh squeezed orange juice for breakfast or lunch, eating pinxtos for essentially all meals, taking walks or running by the beach, and browsing the shops. On our last day, we decided to “summit” Mount Igueldo, a small mountain overlooking the beach on one side and the town on the other, with a fort and a statute of Jesus on top. Even the cloudy, overcast day couldn’t hide the beauty and sereneness of the sight of the ocean through the trees on the mountain. The water alternates between azul and aquamarine. It has been about five years since we have visited a beach. It had been way too long, I decided.