Planes, Trains & Automobiles

For the third time in the past three weeks I am nearing my destination thanks to a wide variety of transports. I think the only method I didn’t use was a boat.

This particular arrival isn’t especially different from the others technically. Although it is the end of my travels and I have a much better idea what I am doing than the last few times.

I’m also pretty excited to get to my apartment, meet my new roommates and settle in a bit. The past few days I have been really tired and unable to figure out why. I’ve been eating well (maybe a little too well), sleeping enough, taking time to hang out. Sure, being around new languages and cultures is tiring, as is physically moving oneself and one’s belongings across large regions of Earth. But I have been more tired than that. It finally dawned on me that I have been wandering around for more than a month. Although the first week and a half was in the states, it still definitely counts as both travel and adventure. Cumulatively, I am allowed to be tired.

So here I am, on my way to Zurich and then St Gallen. My new roommate is picking me up at the station (if we can find each other without cell phones) and I will finally set down all this stuff. I didn’t bring much for this auxiliary trip but I did pick up a few necessities in Amsterdam…all of my bags are bursting at the seams. I am not sure if I will have a bed, but I sure will be using the washing machine and kitchen immediately. Wouldn’t mind a shower without wearing flip flops too.

I’m still thinking I will travel a bit next week, maybe to the east to buy some stuff for my room. I will ask around and see what everyone says is the place to shop. In the meantime, I will be catching up on mail, phone calls, finally getting a cell phone, bank account and train pass. Moving in!

Amsterdammit

Actually, it wasn't so bad. I guess its just comparatively kind of lame when I think of the other cities I've been too lately. If I had been in party mode it probably would have been way fun, but I was in shopping and hanging out mode, so it was just alright. As if I had went to visit, I don't know, Sacramento or something. I know, I know, I just compared Amsterdam to Sacramento. Not a one-to-one, for sure, but if you've ever been to Sacramento, it's memory probably evokes in you something similar to what I feel for Amsterdam.

I am also pissed cuz my main goal of going to Amsterdam (other than shopping, which is only a self-indulgent and therefore mostly guilt-laden goal) was to ride a boat in the canals, which I didn't do. But....


There was a guy sleeping in my 10-bed dorm room when I arrived, around 6pm. He was Russian, but had been living in the states for eight years and was going into his second year at one of the Boston-area universities. He told me all about his day, flying in from Moscow, not sleeping the night before, passing out from sunstroke while getting off the bus and waking up with a killer headache. Channeling my mother, I asked if he had drinken enough water and he held up a bottle of coke. Well, she wouldn't say drinken, but I like the word. I cringed and told him that it didn't count. We chatted for a bit and in walked an Argentine guy who (said he) spoke no English. Perfect! The one thing I feel my trip has been missing is a good solid dose of Espanol. He was pretty shocked that the front desk guy, the Russian guy and myself all spoke Spanish. "Spoke" is more like it in my case. I was nearly unable to communicate. It's sad. I need a refresher course.

I did understand enough to hear that the guy's passing out was preceded by a huge joint which was preceded by a month of not smoking, and I made fun of him (as much as I could in my poor, broken Spanish, which pretty much meant pointing, laughing and saying, 'sunstroke, siiiiii') for the sunstroke crap.

Anyways, I am bored with writing about Amsterdam. I went shopping and got some shirts for school, some shampoo, a pair of sneakers and the crown jewel, the main reason I came here, a pair of jeans! They are Carhartt, go figured, and were only like 30$. Long enough too. Wow.

Well, I should mention that those guys convinced me to go on a silly pubcrawl. It was surprisingly much more terrible than I could have ever imagined. But luckily there were forty minutes between each stop, so I left to check out a whisky bar

and grab a cheese crack. (Yes, they call those things cheese cracks.)


They also got me to go to the redlight district the next night, but that wasn't hard. I was pretty curious and happy to have a couple guys to go with. Would have been a little too shady for a solo trip. It was way, well, nicer than I imagined. Some of the girls were really pretty and normal-looking. Crazy right? Most of the time I couldn't bring myself to really look at them, I felt guilty as a girl because they knew I was just checking them out and wasn't there to actually buy for anything. Seemed kind of wrong. But when they weren't looking I would take a peek. Some seemed really sad, some were more into it and flirting with the guys walking by, lots were talking on their cell phones. Given how useful cell phones are for alleviating social tension, they must have been the perfect addition to the ladies' little booths. So much better than just standing there, almost naked, and alone. I couldn't take pictures of course, but this sink was in a bar nearby.

You can't read it, but the sign says 'Work harder or get fired'.

Oh, and I went to the Van Gough museum by accident, rather than the main museum. The Dutch Masters are my favorite favorite favorite and I went to the silly Van Gough museum! It was great, but in typically European style, they didn't even go into his juicy personal history. Great stuff, of course, but I like a little background info. You could see his rather amazing progression as an artist (he started painting only ten years before he died) and it would have been great to have a little personal bent to the exhibit. He seemed to be a very interesting guy. Well, obviously....

There were as many bikes as people. The Dutch & Belgian have the coolest bikes I've seen.

I also did a little grocery shopping and much to my delight, they sold tortillas and fajita mix at the store near my hostel! I somehow managed to squeeze all this new stuff in my small little bags and headed to the airport. So I guess I did do a lot of stuff. And I had a great time wandering around with my headphones on. Having a soundtrack is a crazy-good way to make strange surroundings feel very comfortable. Off to my new home...which I have been getting quite excited about. Laundry! Kitchen! Bed!

Antwerpen, jaaa

Local, fresh-baked, organic, 5-grain bread

Just getting off the train in Antwerp both Kelly and I were sure it would be an amazing place. I should preface this with the fact that we both had gotten extremely enthusiastic reports of the city from people whose opinions we regard as similar to our own, so our expectations were set correspondingly high. So high, I was worried I might have overshot. But Antwerp did not disappoint.

The train station is breathtaking, so much so is called the Train Cathedral

Kelly's recommendation had come from Nathan, who she met in Urchect and in the two weeks since, he had all but stopped his year-long around-the-world backpacking trip for an opportunity to take over a hostel in Antwerp. That is the kind of thing this city does to people.


We gave up on public transportation and took a cab to the aforementioned hostel, The Boomerang. Nathan answered the door and showed us his (possibly) new home. It was a huge old house, all dark and curtained like an opium den. I would come to see that it stayed that way 24 hours a day, one of the small things that made the place a beautiful fixer-upper for the right person. It was also filled with weird trinkets and dust, but underneath it all you could see the house’s past glory. The ceilings were probably 25 feet tall on the ground level, 20 on the second. The rooms were absolutely massive, with beautiful crown molding and hardwood floors. After we dropped off our bags we went out to grab a bite.

After the not-quite-but-almost traumatic excess of meat in my past few stops, I was thrilled to find a falafel place right down the street. I immediatly ordered a hummus & falafel pita, complete with a short monologue about how exited I was to eat it. The guy shook his head and said they stopped serving them ten minutes before (it was close to eleven). I ended up with turkey shwarma with two kinds of sauerkraut, pickles, onions and tons of green sauce. Kelly got the same and a lamb version for Nathan and on the way back I stopped for a Belgian beer and bottle of water at the nightshop next door. Turns out Nathan doesn’t like hot sauce, so I traded him halfway through and got to try the lamb too. Both were great, and honestly it was just nice to have that cabbage in there. Having more than two or three ingredients isn’t really common in Portuguese-style grilled meats, so this pile of sauces and salads was a refreshing shift.

I spent a few hours catching up on work while a guy from California played an acoustic set in the living room. It was classic hosteling, complete with the dirty, rickety beds and friendly international crowd.


The next morning Nathan took us to his favorite coffee shop and us ladies headed out to wander and he went back to the hostel to cover the day shift. Since it was sunny we headed to a little point on the tourist map with a description including ‘fairy castles’ and ‘pink unicorns.’ We weren’t really sure what to expect, but just walking there took us twice as long as normal, we wanted to stop and take pictures of nearly every house we saw.


The attention to detail is amazing. And inside the houses! They all had the tall ceilings and like the exterior, legendary style. We eventually made it to the neighborhood of fairy castles and although we saw no pink unicorns, the buildings were more than enough to keep us entertained and practically gushing over each one.




We stopped at a big park surrounded by what we were calling ‘patio culture,’ one of the big pluses to Europe in general. We stopped at a table and sat down for a beer. I’ll admit that I’m not a huge Belgian beer person, I really like my hops, and same with Kelly. The server asked what we wanted and Kelly says 'something bitter,' trying to explain what she wanted (basically an IPA). I said, something not Belgian…can we get Budweiser? Luckily he got the joke and picked out two surprisingly delicious brews for us.


We crossed town into the main center. It was completely filled to the brim with clothing stores of every type. Well, every type that is cool. This seriously is the most stylin city there is. And don’t tell anyone, but I think it is more beautiful than Paris.

Stopping for lunch at another café, we ended up doing a random pick for a sandwich. Let me back up just a bit before I explain why. Kelly is just maybe an inch shorter than me and has super blonde hair. The two of us stuck out like sore thumbs in Portugal, but here? Everyone spoke to us in Dutch, which I consider a complement to the point that I have to remind myself it’s ok and not get offended when they speak to me in English. So everyone speaks to us in Dutch and although they all speak English once we protest, it puts you in a mood not to be too demanding and ask for translations of menus and such. So I ordered a random sandwich that ended up being chicken and was covered in mixed nuts and seeds and baby greens. Oh, and mayonnaise. It’s no joke, they love their mayonnaise.

View from the lunch restaurant. This is the middle of the shopping district, a picture of what lies above the stores.

All filled up, we went back to the hostel so I could work for a while and once Nathan was finished with his shift we went out on the town. We ate at an Italian place near the main square, then wandered around a bit and got some pictures of the classic tourist sights at night (when there are less people, so it is less embarrassing to be taking photographs).

This huge arch was totally filled with these carvings

We had a few drinks at a bar next to an old cathedral and went back to the hostel, where we found a few Dutch guys hanging out. A few of us decided to play some poker and dug up some chips and an ancient deck of cards that seemed to melt in your hands when you shuffled them. I ended up beating all of them pretty quickly, much to all of our surprise, but unfortunately we hadn’t bet anything. I had lost so badly last time I played I didn’t think it wise to try while on such a tight traveling budget. But I won some points for women and Americans, that's worth a lot round these parts...

The main square

The next morning was a repeat – we went to the same café and out wandering. This time we were looking, kinda, for a bike bag for Kelly. We just perused the streets of stores, back and forth and around in circles, til we couldn’t handle any more walking. We got an ice cream & espresso and Kelly went back. I stopped at a bar for a beer and wrote out some postcards (which you may someday receive, if I have your address – if not, send it to me). It was actually too hot and I had forgotten my sunglasses so I went back to the dark dingy hostel/opium den to get some work done before dinner. We had planned to meet up with Michel, a local who I know through Manhattan, a friend in LA. Well, 'know' is a bit strong. It was actually pretty random, I just had Michel’s phone number, but had never met, emailed or spoken to him. I verified his existance on facebook then called him. Rather than just telling me good places to go, he actually took the three of us (Kelly, Nathan and I) out to dinner, drinks and on a little tour. I finally got my falafel at dinner and it was deeelicious. We had a drink at a really cool, hip kinda bar outside of the tourist area. It reminded me of every LA bar I had been to and we departed fairly quickly for a whisky bar down the street. (I had nothing to do with that.) Nathan was thrilled to see a whole new side of Antwerp that wasn’t on his tourist map (since he will be spending some time here) and I was just happy to go to places that weren’t total guesses. Having someone who had actually been to the restaurants before we arrived at them and who could tell us what not only good but actually on the menu is a real big plus.

Antwerp's name comes from a fable depicted in this statue and literally means 'Hand Throwing'

Then Michel showed us the port – one of the busiest in the world (Singapore is #1, which I will tell you about in a few months….) – and it was pretty creepy. Almost like a-whole-nother city, just lights and steam and metal, no people. Definitely could be a set for 1984 or something. We stopped by the building where Europeans left for the US during WWII and I thought of my grandma Hopkins who came over from Poland when she was 12. We were all strangely very tired (it was almost 3 so I guess that could be why, although I slept til nearly noon, so it's not a very good excuse) and we went home to bed.

I don't even like waffles very much, but holy shit, this thing was good. I had coconut ice cream on top, and the thing was like a fresh donut with carmalized sugar on the edges. Picture does it no justice...

After wandering through the park and grabbing a Belguin waffle, I left for Amsterdam the next morning, hesitantly to say the least. I have a flight from there to Basel (on the French-Swiss border) on Monday and I wanted to see a few things & do a bit of shopping so I forced myself to go. Maybe it won’t be that bad, it is Amsterdam after all.

Fall on one of four street corners. Kinda looks like me, no?

Winter

Spring

Summer

Tiles & Fish

It was Astrology Month in Lisbon

I woke up around seven am and we were in the countryside. The ground was golden with dozens of different kinds of big, green leaved trees. There were dirt paths and little one story stone houses in various states of dilapidation, all abandoned, every few miles. I stayed awake long enough to get to a town with signs to see that we were, in fact, in Portugal.


I got up a few hours later, right before we were due to arrive. I brushed my teeth and splashed some water on my face. After two nights on trains there isn’t much you can do to improve your appearance, but I did the basics. It was a vast improvement. We sat by the door waiting for the train to stop, but we didn’t seem anywhere city-like. As the time passed we started to worry we wouldn’t make it to our hostel in time for check in. In Paris I had taken the spot of someone who didn’t make their check in time, so I knew it was possible to lose your beds. When we finally arrived we rushed off the train to find a payphone. On the way Kelly saw a clock on the wall, telling an hour before our clocks. Turns out there is a time difference between France and Portugal. We took a more leasurely trip on the subway to the hostel, and found it with no difficulties.

Turns out Portugal is known for tiles and fish. Everything is tiled. The streets have tiny little tile-like cobblestones. I hesitate to even call them cobblestones because they are flat on top and square and only two or three inches wide. They are beautiful and often in patterns and worn smooth and shiny over the centuries. The houses are tiled with bright colored glass bricks or painted blue and white tiles or any other number of patterns. Even the subway, from ceiling to floor, was tiled in big white squares.






The streets are narrow with tall buildings, but not like Paris. The map of Lisbon made it look like a huge city, but in reality the streets were just substantially closer together than we are used to. Population-wise its about the same as San Francisco, and I felt a number of other similarities, including a fully-functional Golden Gate Bridge replica.

This used to be a Virgin Megastore

Our room wasn’t ready yet, so we dropped off our bags and went for a snack. It was reeeeeally tough to be around a bathroom and not shower, but we resisted. We were in a great area with lots of pedestrian streets and cafes. We picked one based on the tablecloth color and I got a tuna melt and salad. We shared a pitcher of sangria. We stopped at the bank and finally returned to clean ourselves.


It was a brand new hostel (just opened that week) so things were nearly pristine. In conjunction with a lowish price and stellar location, that was the major selling point for me. I have had enough of the old rundown hostels...The shower was really nice too, overhead & rainlike. Stark comparison to some I’ve been in that are chest level or on timers, requiring constant re-turning-on.

Once presentable, Kelly went to meet her friend Mariana and I did some computing in the lobby. The in-room wifi wasn’t hooked up yet (which is why there weren’t a lot of phone calls this week). When Kelly got back we wandered around the city a bit, through the winding little streets and around a huge castle. We got dinner in Biarra Alta, the local hot spot, and discovered Portuguese table cheese. The put little plates of pate, butter and cheese on the table as soon as you sit down, along with a basket of bread. I thought it was awefully generous of them….turns out it happens in every single sit-down restaurant and you have to pay for them. They aren’t much though, and it was so delicious it was totally worth it. The cheese is a rather tall round maybe three inches across and when you break through the rind it is almost like half melted butter inside. Yes please. I got monkfish with pasta for dinner, which turned out to be a huge pot of tomato stew with all kinds of seafood. They don’t joke around with the sea creatures. Actually, the only things they have to eat are meat, seafood, omelettes or pastries. Seriously, I have lived off three of those four things since I arrived.




We went out later for a beer with a few Australians from the hostel (I’m telling you, the Australians are fueling the hostel industry world-wide). The bar fit about four people in it, everyone else just stood in the street. It was cool.

The next day we took the train to meet Mariana at her friend Bruno’s beach house in Praia Grande for a pool party. Sounds simple enough. Well, with the help of an off-duty cell phone store employee, homeless guy, newspaper stand owner, police man, bus driver, tourist shop checkout girl and train ticket salesmen we finally made it. Kelly speaks Brazilian Portuguese, which is practically a different language from Portuguese Portuguese, and would get about 60% of each of these people’s directions before we had to stop and ask someone else again.


We took a stop off in Sintra, an old town with a Moorish castle and bizarre microclimate. We finally made it to the pool party as the sun set, so there wasn’t much pooling involved anymore. We did have a big spaghetti dinner and a few drinks though. At first everyone was shy and just spoke to themselves in Portuguese. At dinner someone broke the ice asking for another English word for boobs. That got everyone laughing as we rattled off a dozen or so of them, and we all got along swimmingly from then on.

View from the balcony at Bruno's house

We had planned to head south the next morning to a beach city with Mariana, but she ended up not being able to leave til the next day. This was good as we need some more time to wander around Lisbon. That evening we realized we didn't book a place to stay, but we scrambled and found a new hostel last minute. It was Sunday so everything was closed and the city seemed all but dead. We found some good snacks though, little pastries and cakes and cookies. At first, I thought that each shop had their own pastry menu, but after a few days I realized every shop has the exact same offerings. I tried nearly all of them: egg custard cups, fried fish balls, chicken pies, cream donuts, shrimp turnovers, ham and cheese croissants. And my newly beloved quiche. Although French quiche is way better than Portuguese, which is understandable I think.


We made it to the little town of Porto Covo the next morning around noon. It had very traditional Portugues houses. All one story, painted white with either bright blue or yellow along the bottoms and the windows. We had an espresso, I sent out a few emails and we spent the rest of the day on the beach. It was a great beach and thankfully Mariana brought an umbrella, stating her concern for our white, American skin. Within a few hours I was huddled under it, even after numerous coats of sunscreen.


We came back to town and got a Portuguese delicacy, tiny snails cooked in a delicious olive-oil dressing. They tasted quite good, but something about the adorable little antennae being obliterated by my molars totally freaked me out. I did my best and ate a dozen or two, Kelly and Mariana finishing the other couple hundred...


We hung out until 8 or so because the hostel had told us they were out surfing and to call them later to get our rooms….ok….well we called and asked for the address as we couldn’t find it anywhere online or in our receipts. They said just wait where you are, we will be there in seven minutes….ok….they eventually showed up, asked us to wait while they got beer in the market and finally led us and a caravan of other cars filled with girls to a house just outside town. We were extremely skeptical, not just because they were kind of weirdos, but totally disorganized. We stood in the living room for ten minutes before they figured out where to put us. We literally dropped our bags and ran. We drove back into town to Mariana’s favorite grill for dinner. I got shrimp and fries (not what I was expecting, but delicious) and loved Mariana’s dish, a bean stew with rice (mmmriceandbeans).

After dinner we walked to the town’s best ice cream, which was packed, and I got a double scoop with honeysuckle and strawberry flower flavors. Sooo delicious. We grabbed a beer at a coor bar and sat outside on a fountain talking to a crew of Portuguese, Spanish and Italians. They were a bunch of really interesting people and we ended up hanging out with them the next night too. When we said goodbye we were all surprised how kinda sad we were. Actually it wasn’t just that group of new friends. Portugal is by far the most comfortable country I have ever been to. The people are so friendly and somehow either really similar to Californians or just really accommodating. There are some big cultural differences, like they don’t really hug except to really hug, versus our hello & goodbye hugs. They do two little cheek kisses as hello & goodbye, starting on the person’s right cheek. They hated that when we hugged we patted their backs. They said it made them feel like babies. But in general, compared to Switzerland or France, where the people seem critical of not following rules or visitors’ lack of awareness of local culture (respectively), in Portugal I felt totally at home.


I came home and computed again (damn time difference, 3am is prime work time). We got pastries in the morning and spent the whole day at the beach again. This one had a cave, where I sat for a decent amount of time and read 1776. The book is amazing – goes through the first year of the Revolutionary War in great detail. It is a suspenseful and fascinating story, even though I know the outcome…

We went to the same place for dinner and I got swordfish and boiled potatoes this time. At this point I was getting reeeeeally tired of grilled meat and pastries. Somewhat like in Argentina, which I loved as a place, but had a hard time with the endless meat eating. We drove back to Lisbon in the morning and flew up to Paris to catch a train to Antwerp, Brussels. I hope they have vegetables there. Crossing fingers.

Love and Baguettes 2

Seeing Notre Dame at night was waaaay cooler than daytime

Meeting up with Kelly was great, not just to have a home to stay in and friends to hang out with, but locals to show me the good stuff. It really makes for a totally different kind of trip. We ate at home a lot and there was wifi so I could stay up-to-date on work and my hellos. Thomas had a long-haired white and black cat who, by some grace of god, I wasn't allergic to. Which was good because I was pretty much sleeping on the floor and the cat liked to hang out with me a lot. Thomas is moving to the Bay Area in a few weeks to teach French at Standford, so he is looking for a place for Hoshi the cat to live while he is gone. Since I found an apartment (woohoo!) I said I'd talk to my new roomates (PhD students in Economics at HSG - my school but not my program - ideal) to see if maybe we could cat-sit while I am in Switzerland.

Anyways, on Tuesday Kelly made a traditional Brazilian stew for lunch (which we ate with not-so-Brazilian baguettes) and went to Musée de l'Orangerie, a modern art museum. Turns out it was closed on Tuesdays, so we went to Pompidou, which also has the best view of the city at dusk. It's closed on Tuesdays too. So we went to Shakespear & Co, a classic English bookstore where all the greats hung out while in Paris.


We did some more wandering around the city, looking for jazz (all the clubs closed...on Tuesdays) and eventually ended up with a group of 2 French, 3 Californians, 1 German and 1 Trinidadian in a cool little underground bar. Thomas and Elaina had decided we needed to arm wrestle since we were having a hard time figuring out our next step on the trip, and that this was the place to do it.




I only had 55% plus one person who was forced on my side, which I think was actually more motivation. We biked home on these cool public rent-a-bikes and stayed up til the wee hours of the night booking trains, planes and automobiles for a 2 day journey to Portugal and 5 day stay there in the southland. Since we wanted to leave the next day and it is high tourist season, everything was either ridiculously expensive or booked...we eventually found reasonable plane tickets for our return trip to Paris and gave up on actually getting there until we could go to the train station to talk to the travel agents there.

We got up in the morning and walked to the train ticket place, waited for an hour only to be told they were totally sold out. The guy said he had one leg of our desired trip available, but that's it. We decided to buy it and take the risk of being stuck in the south of France (could be worse, right?).

We took our bags and went to meet up with Sebastien's friend Edouard for 'a glass.' (the beautiful, smart and funny Sebastien is from France and lives with my friend Lindsay in NYC for those who don't know him.) Edouard, an incredibly talented photographer, had two friends visiting from Nantes and wanted to show them some classic Paris, so we went to the store for an 'aperitif' to take to the grass under the Eiffel tower. It was literally the perfect end to Paris (except Sebastien wasn’t there) as we had bread, cheese and wine while we watched the sun set.




We were having such a nice time we barely made it to the train at 11. We jumped on and settled into the worst seats ever. Behind us was a guy screaming threats and obsinities (in Spanish) on his cell phone and to my left was a 2.5 year old little boy who's father didn't buy a seat so he was wandering around and leaving the boy who would then wake up scared to death, alone on a dark train in the middle of the night. I managed to get a bit of sleep with the help of ear plugs and a face mask and was just settled down when we arrive in Bayonne a little before 7.

We immediately got a snack and for some reason I felt a drawn towards the quiche. I had been eating a lot of raw tomatoes, something I had been trying to learn to like for years, so I thought maybe I could branch out to another non-favorite, quiche. It was absolutely AMAZING. Best. Quiche. Ever. Very little egg, lots of tomato, bacon and cheese. Mmmm.

After our Chernobyl-prevention we went to plead for tickets out of Bayonne on the night train. To our surprise we could get the exact train we wanted and with beds so we could actually sleep. It was about 7 by that time and the train left at 830 that night. We went exploring.

It was an amazing little Basque town. I later found out it is a hub of metaphysical activity, which totally makes sense. It was founded in the 3rd century! When we got there it was so early, the whole place was totally empty, but still full of energy. We had quite a bit of time, so we got some coffee, found some wifi, got more coffee, got a croissant, etc. until the town opened up a bit. Then...we went on a bit of a shopping spree. I got all of the toiletries I had forgotten/lost, a sundress (since we were heading south) and a purple fake leather jacket (I can't say I have much of an excuse for that...but it was cheap and the sleeves were long enough). Doesn't every backpacker need a purple fake leather jacket? Yeah, I thought so.


We got typical French food for lunch and then headed to Bairritz, a very close and very famous beach. We were carrying all our bags with us, but that meant we had our bathing suits and towels close. And I had a pillow (aka duffel bag) to lay on and read in the sun. It was amazing and really crowded, although you can't tell from this picture, they had just cleared the sand because of an approaching storm. They even had to do a helicopter rescue of a few surfers because the waves got so big so quickly.


We took the bus back to Bayonne, got another typical French meal. This time there wasn't a translation on the menu and when it got time to order I just pointed to something. It was a buckwheat pancake-crepe kind of thing with pan-fried potatos and some sort of bird sausage stuff. I'm pretty sure it was a bird part I wouldn't have eaten had I known the name, but it was pretty delicious and very exotic. We hopped on the train and planned to wake up in Portugal.