After we left Naples, we were in Spain (San Sebastian) for 4 days. Flights are pretty cheap booked ahead of time. And, though the original point was to do a side trip to a 3 Michelin star restaurant Matt was interested in (Mugaritz, #6 best in the world), San Sebastián is also a very nice beach town in Basque country with lots of tapas/pintxos (ie finger food) bars. Our airbnb host spoke no English, but we got by by typing and pointing at google translate on our phones. Most of our time in San Sebastián was spent walking around, and looking out on the water. There are 2 long stretches of sandy beach on the town (no real port, just small fishing boats), one where people swim, and one where they surf. We didn't swim unfortunately, since the weather was cool and rainy, more like England than I was expecting. We did spend a lot of time watching surfers, enjoying seeing both the long rides in on the waves and the wipeouts.

The pintxos also drew our attention. At first we were a bit confused, since in a bar the entire counter top is full of plates with little bites on them - sausage, cheese, fish, seafood, many on bread or on sticks. The system seemed to vary from place to place, but the idea is to graze on the food while you have a drink (and then pay for it - some even just asked how many you ate). Another fun part of that experience is when you've finished with a napkin or stick, it's totally cool to just chuck it on the ground under the bar. Anyway, not a lot of vegetables were consumed on that trip.

I think my highlight of San Sebastián was our trip to the town's aquarium. It was pretty cool, with a maritime history and some small tanks of fish. Those were great, but we spent almost all our time at the main tank, where numerous different fish swam around, including 2 bull sharks, a turtle, eels, rays, and other fish. The tank also had a tube built into it that you could walk through, and be surrounded on all sides. I spent some time trying to get good photos of the sharks, which rather alarmingly appeared over our heads seemingly out of nowhere. We were also there during feeding time, when 2 divers went into the tank with fish and to also clean the outer part of the tube. To help them, a guard actually walked through the tube as they worked, and pointed out the sharks as they came near. I didn't realize she was doing that until after I pointed at a ray swimming behind the diver and she whipped around to look. The sharks behaved though, and actually the turtle ended up being the jackass of the tank, trying to bite their equipment several times. Pretty interesting.

Of course, Matt's highlight was our trip to Mugaritz. It was in a nice house in the hills outside the town, with a big garden full of herbs and other edibles that you could walk through. Dinner was something like 25 courses of small (2-5 bites) dishes, presented on very unique and customised  dishes/vessels (where some of those $$s on the bill went I guess). Though it's a top restaurant in the world, it wasn't very stiff/formal, but I had to roll my eyes when one dish was presented with a quote written beside it. The author was Samuel Johnson, which Matt misread as Samuel L. Jackson.  We agreed that would have been a better choice. Besides uncertainty in a couple courses (did that cake taste like fish?) and why the toilet paper was black, we both really enjoyed the meal. I'll also summarize Matt's favourite, which were the final bites, a set of chocolates representing the 7 deadly sins. It came in a beehive shaped vessel, with each layer containing a sin. The first was pride - 2 cherry flavoured chocolates. Don't ask what that one means. Next was envy - just one chocolate, lemon flavour. After that, wrath - spicy chocolate shards. Gluttony was a whole bunch of chocolate covered corn nuts. Next was greed, which was an empty one. Matt's "favourite". After was lust - 2 rose flavoured chocolates that looked a little like breasts. Finally, sloth was a big slab of plain chocolate which took me forever to eat my share. All in all dinner took us 3 hours and we were full to the point that stomach aches were in order.

Well that brings us to our arrival in Tuscany a week ago. So, soon we will be caught up on posts!