In San Sebastian we found a small restaurant where we ordered from the menu del dia. We had a really nice meal and the price included a whole bottle of wine. The town of San Sebastian is beautiful and we were happy just to walk around having a look.
At the waterfront we visited a naval history museum which depicted the involvement of various basques in the conquests associated with Spain in Central and South America, the Philipines and the far east. We also found an interesting collection of artwork made from rubbish collected from the sea. The exhibition was attached to the aquarium but was separate and free to get in.
We bought some really expensive chocolate in a small patisserie and then found ourselves in the middle of the fiesta. There were really large figures dressed in traditional basque costumes. Some had balloons on sticks which they were using to hit people. At exactly 7pm a cannon was fired (extremely loudly and surprisingly startling as we had watched it being made ready). Then there were rounds of gun fire, equally startling and loud. We very much made the most of being able to walk around at our own pace.
On the way back we decided to drive along the coast road rather than the motorway. The roads were really winding and I spent most of the journey feeling quite sick. During the day, Brian had been sorting out repairs to our immersion heating system as the family in our house had spent at least two or three days without hot water due to the immersion controller giving up. On our way back from San Sebastian we needed to stop so that Brian could phone home to check that everything was fixed and OK. We stopped in Ondarroa. We parked by the river and walked into town where we found another fiesta. There were children marching, throwing sweets and banging drums. There was music and people everywhere wearing neck scarves.
The drive back after this visit was less winding and we got back tired and ready for bed.
On Sunday we needed to get to the airport to meet Ben and Jeni who were arriving at 5.45pm. We decided to have lunch and then drive to Santander so that we could have a look around before going to the airport. We arrived at around 2pm but didn't really find much worth looking at. The sea front was interesting enough to walk along and there was a park on the front where we found a stray cat which was stalking birds but this was the most interesting part of the walk. We headed for the airport arriving in time to see the plane land and the passengers and bags leave. When Ben and Jeni came through we drove to Santoni and had a walk along the beach before we went back to the apartment for dinner and an ice cream from El Chef Garosse.
On the 16th, my birthday, we had a slow start and eventually arrived at Plentzia by 1pm after I had opened presents from Ben (a book called Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese,which I subsequently couldn't put down) and from Jeni (a hand-made lavender scented heart to hang in the wardrobe). There were emails from Beccy and, later, Dan, Helen and Alexander. We relaxed on the beach, read books, swam in the sea and Ben and Jeni went for a walk and explored rock pools.
We took the metro again to Casco Viejo where we had a quick walk around while looking for a restaurant. We eventually found a restaurant which served menu de noche. We had mushroom and scrambled egg with red pepper sauce and carpaccio of beef with greek salad. The we had roasted red peppers with crab and prawns, duck with orange sauce and sea bass with young eels. This was followed by chocolate and orange cakes and was accompanied by rose wine, water and bread. It was a really enjoyable meal.
The next plan was to see the Guggenheim Museum from the outside at night and then get the metro home. We learned this evening that on weekdays when there isn't a festival in the main part of Bilbao, the metro stops before 11pm. We tried to get a train after midnight and found the stations closed. We weren't sure how to get home so looked at the bus as a possibility (this had stopped for the night as well) then managed (after walking quite a long way from the centre of town on the road towards Urduliz) to hail a taxi, ask for where we wanted to go and get a reasonable price. It seems that people here don't get up very early, stop for a good long lunch and then have quite an active time during the early part of the evening. Everything then stops and closes up by 11pm. Short days!
On Tuesday we hired sea kayaks for two hours from 10am to 12 noon and we paddled up the river from Plentzia. We paddled against the tide for the first part then back with the tide. On the way we saw some egrets and many fish. On the way back, Brian and I were quite a way behind Ben and Jeni (they didn't paddle up as far as we did). We heard a screeching noise which sounded like a pterodactyl, then saw a bird not dissimilar to a pteradactyl at a glimpse. We paddled closer to get a better look and saw it take to the air again, screeching and being chased by a bird of prey.
Wednesday was another sunny day. Brian and I went out to find stuff to repair things we had damaged (a bottle shelf in the fridge was quite cracked when we got there but Brian managed to completely destroy it when he tried to force a bottle in in - we tried to order a new shelf but couldn't get it delivered to our house before the Spanish family left or to the apartment before we left, so we decided to repair it with tape. On the same day he managed to rip a curtain hook out of the curtain in our bedroom and I had to sew it back in, but the most major accident was when we scraped the car on a pillar in the garage - we found a local garage that repaired paintwork and organised for a partial respray so that the part we damaged was as good as new). One of the things about home exchange that I really like is the need to deal with everyday things such as this, especially when you need to get your head around another language in order to do this. I managed to ask for the right sort of tape in a hardware store, and we sorted out what we wanted for the car, how much it would be and when it would be done, mostly in Spanish.
On Thursday we took the car to the garage and then got the metro to Moyua station in Bilbao and walked to the Guggenheim. We had booked our tickets online and so just had to collect our audioguides and check the bag with the lunch into the baggage store (it was deemed to big to be allowed into the galleries). We saw the Richard Serra exhibition, stunning large sculptures of steel that you could walk through. Most were spirals which encouraged you to walk to the middle which was invariable elliptical in shape. Others were waves but all were amazing to walk through as the structures would lean over you or away from you to affect your sense of balance and space. We saw the Anish Kapoor exhibition, largely the same as the one we saw in London but with some different exhibits and a changed exhibit (the wax moulding was circular at the Guggenheim whereas it had been linear and stretched through three galleries at the Royal Academy). There was also an exhibition of Henri Rousseau's work and the work of Robert Rauschenberg, neither of which impressed us.
From the Guggenheim we took the tram to San Mames metro station. We, disgracefully, managed to ride the tram without paying as we weren't sure what to do and didn't work it out until we had reached our stop. Our consciences were eased by the fact that we should have used our Creditrans tickets but, as we didn't, we would leave the Bilbao area with credit left (probably just about matching the tram fare) so, inadvertently, we had actually paid it.From San Mames we travelled on the metro to Neguri from where we walked to Artea, the shopping mall, where the bowling alley was. We had four vouchers for a free game from the last visit and so we paid for the shoe hire and had one game and a couple of rounds of drinks. I managed to win the bowling, a feat that I haven't managed for a long time, beating Brian by 3 points! A long walk back to the metro allowed us to travel back for the last time and to walk right past the swimming pool that we hadn't been able to find the week before!
We arrived back in time to have a quick rest before Brian and I went to collect the car. We had been offered a courtesy car but, as we already knew we would be travelling on the metro, it didn't seem worth it. The garage had done a good job (we cleaned the car before taking it in so that we wouldn't need to clean the new paintwork) and the car looked really good.
When we got back to the apartment we convinced Ben to look up his AS results online. He could only find out three of the four results, his Biology was with a different board and he didn't have a pin for that one. He got B in PE and in Physics and D in History. He was surprised that he didn't get an A in PE as some of his marks seemed to have been changed (the school decided to make an inquiry as others were affected by this as well). He was also very disappointed with his History grade as he had been predicted an A. It may be that the school had misunderstood the criteria or that he just performed really badly on the day of the exam. He hadn't thought that the exam went badly so either he misinterpreted the questions or his style wasn't what was needed. When we got home, his other result had been posted and he had a B in Biology as well (just as predicted). His grades were certainly good enough to continue to A2 and he is starting to realise that much more hard work is required to get the higher grades.
Our final day in Urduliz was, as usual for home exchanges a cleaning up day. It was quite an easy job as we had cleaned up as we went along and the apartment was very easy to clean. We tried to eat up all the food we had left and made up some lunch to take with us to the airport.
We arrived at the airport just before they closed the check in and only queued for a short while at the gate before boarding. The flight back was OK until we got to Stansted when the pilot announced that the runway was blocked and that we may have to land at Luton instead! We circled around one more time and then were told that the runway had been cleared and we could land at Stansted, still on time. It wasn't just us who had problems getting into Stansted. Jeni's dad was stuck in heavy traffic at Dartford Tunnel and then again at the exit from the M11 to the airport, where there had been an accident.
He eventually arrived to pick up Jeni and Ben and was shortly followed by Dan and Alexander who had come to pick Brian and me up.
We had a nice dinner of stuff marrow and potatoes followed by home made pecan tart and some proper tea to drink. Dan and Helen gave me my birthday presents, a book "The Time Traveller's Wife", which coincidentally Ben had considered and, luckily, not chosen, and some home made chocolate cookies. Dan had made me a nice card as well. I read a story to Alexander before he went to bed, the one I had given him when he was born, "Grandma calls me beautiful".
We slept on their sofa bed and in the morning we had home made crumpets and went for a walk to a local nature reserve where we got covered with fluffy seeds from rose bay will herb plants that were abundant. Alexander chatted away while we walked.
Brian and I got the train from Stansted Mountfitchet to the airport and met up with Carolina, Kepa, Jon, Itxaso and Gaitxo to swap keys and discuss how we had got on. We told them about the car and the fridge shelf so that they weren't surprised when they got home. Apparently a previous exchange family had scratched the car before and hadn't got it repaired and so we were really glad that we had made the effort (especially as it had done wonders for my confidence in using Spanish).
We found the car, paid £8 for just over an hour in the car park and drove home to find a nice clean tidy house and to unpack our things. We picked Ben up from the tennis club on the way home after he had done his coaching and squad and had played a match. After picking his things up from Mum's and getting him to give her a box of chocolates to say 'thank you' for letting him stay at her house, feeding him and sometimes driving him to tennis, he went out for dinner with Jeni and here family to celebrate Jeni's A level results.
Brian and I had salmon fishcakes and curried vegetables in which the main ingredient was courgette (or marrow of about two feet in length) that we had picked from the garden. The family had obviously picked some but had left a lot behind. We had our first night's sleep back in our own bed which, I think was no more or less comfortable than the memory foam mattress we were sleeping on in Urduliz (at least we know that the cost of the memory foam may not be worth it for us).
23rd August, we went to Gatwick to meet Beccy as she returned from her stay in Salon. Her plane was delayed by an hour and a half but she, apparently, found enough to do to occupy herself as she waited. She eventually emerged from arrivals at around 1am. This was the end of our holiday journey, which started when we waved Ben off at the scout hut for the Norjam camp on 31st July, continued when we picked Antoine up from Gatwick on the 5th August, then when we met the Spanish family and stayed at Dan and Helen's on the 7th August, flew to Santander on 8th August, drove Beccy and Antoine to Biarritz on 14th August, met Ben and Jeni at Santander on 15th August, flew back to Stansted on 20th August and stayed with Dan and Helen, met the Spanish family again and drove home on 21st August, then met Beccy on 23rd August. A total of 24 days! It's as complicated to write about as it was to organise but everything went really well and we had a really relaxing and interesting time.
26th August, we picked up Midge, a 7 week old kitten. Her owners said she was born on July 3rd but she was very small. However, she was eating plenty of solid food, using the litter tray and wasn't fretting for her mother. She is Beccy's cat and she will need to take full responsibility for her care. It could take the other two cats a while to accept her and they will need to be kept separate.
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