On Saturday morning I caught the 7am bus with 4 friends, Michael, Nikko, Maura, and Marisol, to San Sebastián, which is another northern coastal town about 3 hours away, but is in país vasco, where catalan is spoken, instead of castellano Spanish - which is what I speak here is Santander :) it's still fairly easy to understand each other though. Our trip to San Sebastián was a quick overnighter, but I got to stay in my first hostel, so that was exciting! Especially because it wasn't at all like the movie "Hostel"...
the name of the hostel!
Hector/Mauricio and I in the common room
Maura y Miguelito in the common room
We went out into the city all day Saturday, and proceeded to eat the best food I've had while on this trip, over the period of 48 hours...it was delightful. It started of with these:
Pancakes with berry and dark chocolate syrup and whipped cream!
And it was followed up by this:
Sushiiii
And then for dinner we embraced the authentic Basque culture of "pintxos", or "tapas" as we call them in Santander...which really both just mean phenomenal, bite sized appetizers. There are pintxo bars around the city where all the pintxos are set along the entire bar, and you just walk up and grab what you like with a napkin, eat it, then throw the napkin on the ground! The throwing the napkin on the ground part is very exciting haha. You can also order "raciones"(an order) of things like patatas fritas (french fries), calamari, etc. And there's drinks - wine, beer, spirits...whatever you please. And it's all delicious! And kind of expensive if you don't know what you're getting yourself into, as my 4 friends and I quickly found out haha. Yikes! But nonetheless, it was so much fun to eat them, and I'm glad I did it :)
Maura and Nikko
Kobe beef mini burgers (yes I ate one..."when in Rome" and all that jazz)
Hector/Mauricio was not forgotten in all of this. He had a good time bar hopping for pintxos.
Merluza (amazing!)
red pepper stuffed with tuna on a crispy piece of bread, and seasoned onions on top...enough said
Marisol and Nikko at our last stop for the night!
Us girls did some shopping in San Sebastián during the day on Saturday in between all of the eating we did, and we also went and visited the cathedral there too. It was gorgeous, and they had an exhibit cataloguing the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, which was fun for me to read facts in Spanish and then cheat and look at the English translation when I had to.
On Sunday we spent the morning and afternoon walking around town and seeing the beach/ocean. It was FREEZING, but still really fun to see it all. It hailed at least twice while we were in San Sebastián...as in torrential downpour of hail. I was lucky enough to be outside on both occasions, with no umbrella, and one of the times with only a cardigan on! In any case, I still had a great time exploring a gorgeous city :)
In other news: I need to write about my week in my next blog post, as it was somewhat eventful with one of my good friends, Paige, turning 21!!! Back to the other news - in class today two of my classmates were giving a presentation on Burgos, Spain and part of that was the food culture there. They were showing a powerpoint complete with photos of each item, and then describing what is was. One of those items was brown, looked similar to a sausage, but was not sausage, and contained rice and a dark brownish gloppy substance holding it together. I immediately recognized it because my host mom had me try it a couple of weeks ago. I asked her repeatedly what it was and in turn told me each time, "rice, and I don't know what else, but it's good for people who need more iron in their diet". I was hesitant, but never wanting to be rude, sawed off a piece and gave it a go. It was very strange tasting and not particularly pleasant. I explained to them that the flavor reminded me of when I was a kid and would find coins and put them in my mouth (gross, but all kids do it) and it would taste coppery. I also mentioned that I didn't really care for it, but thanks for letting me try it.
Today I found out just what it was that I ate....
The gloppy brownish substance holding the rice is "sangre de vaca", or for those of you English speakers, cows blood....
I don't even know what to say.
I was horrified, enough so to call out in class during the presentation, so my class could share in my pain of knowing I accidently ate rice with cow's blood. Yummmmmy.
I'm trying very hard to see the humor in it at this point, because it is just so disgusting! It makes me ill just thinking about it. Haha on that note, ya es hora de que me vaya a la cama. ¡Volveré a escribir pronto! Besos :) xo
estas de puta madre!!
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