Barcelona Study Abroad: San Sebastian

The weekend after London, Hannah came to see me from Germany and we road tripped with Jared, Karen, and Angie to San Sebastian, Spain which is in the Basque region. It's crazy how they let you rent cars here when you're only 18. Jared assumed the role of all-time driver since none of the rest of us knew how to drive stick, and after signing our lives away, we were off to San Sebastian.

Now imagine packing 5 20/21 year olds in this

Start of a 6 hour drive on the Autovia

After driving 6 hours through the mountains in the dark, 95 roundabouts, and a very confused GPS, we finally arrived in San Sebastian and checked into our hostel, a cozy little hostel near the beach. I'm pretty sure it was actually just a couple extra rooms in the owner's house, but that's still up for debate.

3 deep at La Casa hostel

We spent all day Saturday at the beach sipping San Miguels and people watching. The beach was really pretty. We had a lunch of different tapas (or pintxos as they're called in the Basque region) and then at night went out to dinner at a restaurant recommended to us by our hostel. It wasn't very good so we ended up going to a few more tapas restaurants afterwards sampling the famous pintxos of the Old Town. Here's some pictures from the day.


Pintxos in Constitution Square

Basque Jamon Serrano

Squid

My Dad's dream

Well hey there, Princess

Playa de La Concha

Ski jump competition on the beach (ramp on the far left)

Pintxos in the Old Town

Parsley and garlic mushroom pintxos

Sunday we got up bright and early in the morning to hike to the top of Monte Urgell. We stopped on the way to get coffee and chocolate pastries and then proceeded to climb the 45 minute hike. The hike was not hard at all and offered unbeatable views of San Sebastian.

Concha from Monte Urgell

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After our hike, it was time to start the drive back which turned out to be just as gorgeous as San Sebastian. Since it was daylight, we could actually see what we were driving through and stopped to take a lot of pictures. Jared wasn't a very happy camper for that part. Here's pictures from the drive back.