Chapter 13teen: Biarritz and San Sebastian

Biarritz and San Sebastian

Grande Plage

Biarritz is beach, Biarritz is Basque, Biarritz is beautiful, and on and so much more. This seaside city, established in the latter half of the 1800's, lies at the foot of the Pyrenees on the Bay of Biscay.

We have never been here before. Biarritz has not been on our list of places to visit in France, perhaps because of the wrap it has had: you know, a retreat for the royalty, the wealthy, the elite. But that is its early history, and while it remains a magnet for the monied, this is a place for people with many interests, especially lovers of the sea, the warmth, the food and wine.

We finally came here for a look. 

Anne Sophie, the lady of the house, greeted us at the door of our accommodation with such an infectious smile, from head to toe, that my road weariness disappeared at once. We were welcomed to Biarritz with open arms.



The second of our three days here, we went to Spain - just a very short drive down the coast to San Sebastian for some tapas. More on that below.

the blue, the red, and the green

Lucky for us, Anne Sophie had a day off work and was a willing and knowledgeable guide. 

This is the Basque country of France, in language, food and drink, and architecture. The ancient Basque language, that bears little relationship to either French or Spanish, is taught in some schools here. Street and road signs, and business signs are bilingual, just as they are back home in Canada; and as we will find them to be in parts of Brittany with the Breton language.

Basque traditional colours are blue, green and red. These we see throughout Biarritz and the surrounding countryside.

Blue represents the sea - the fishermen
Red represents the blood of animals - the farmers of warm blooded creatures
Green, for the farmers of non-animal agricultural products.

The buildings in the photo above are typical for the area.

Hôtel de Palais

Napolean  lll built this palatial "summer home" for his wife, Eugénie. It has become the signature hotel for Biarritz. We walked freely through the lobby and dining room. We'll get a room next time.

The sculpture at the entrance to the Hôtel de Palais. (the big white house in the centre is many blocks away. My long lens just happened to place it there).

Plage de la Côtés des Basques

The guys on the right jogged, we walked - for about ten kilometres, starting from our room at the south end of town, down into the city, on to the north beach, then all the way back, UP hills and stairs. It was T-shirt and shorts weather. 

Pointe Datalaye

The shoreline includes everything from rocky outcrops and shipwreck  rocks, through old marinas, to beautiful sandy beaches, with surfing waves and calm swimming coves.

The local marine rescue team put on a show for passersby with a training exercise.




We watched the simulation of a man stranded way offshore, in danger of drowning. A rescue team paddled out to him at speed, dragging a long tether out with them from the shore. 

They secured the injured man on a floating stretcher and brought him to the beach where he was treated with medical intervention.  

...ooo0ooo...

San Sebastian, is a very sizeable city just across the border to the south. For some reason we expected a small fishing town, and were quite surprised at the size of the city. 

We parked in the usual Euro-city centre underground parking garage - challenging to find, to pay for, to exit - then we walked around the streets of the old town like all the other tourists. April 19 is definitely a bank/school holiday week. It was almost like family day at Disneyland (well, not quite).

See the church? 




Now see the closeup of the centre apex (below). I call this the crown, the ship and the ogre. But the student of Christian architecture will have a much less touristic name for it, and a volume of very interesting facts that go way beyond the scope of this blog.

A good friend and fellow traveller (Bill McGowan, I think) once told me that you can always pick out the tourist on the street in New York because he is always looking up, gazing in wonder at the skyscrapers, a perfect target for the pickpocket. 

Well, that's me, I guess, but it is the photographer in me that is always looking up. Actually, I am a bit of a bobble-head, always looking for the next great shot, wherever it might be. 

For example, check out the next picture that I call fishing for love.

I wonder how many people saw these guys up on the third floor balcony in a very narrow street. I have not yet been pick-pocketed, by the way.

We are really here for the tapas and we were not disappointed. Tapas bars are everywhere in the old city. The second tapas bar we went to was far more colourful than the one in the photo, but I had packed my camera away and missed that shot. Sorry about that.

Typically, one enters the crowded bar, standing room only, bellies up to the counter, not rudely, but not casually either or you will never be served. The objective is to make eye contact with one of the busy Basque servers who will hand you a large plate that you fill up with your own personal selection of tasty food samples. This is a smorgasbord with colourful concoctions of seafood, meats, egg, vegetables, sauces and spices - culinary inventions without limit.

This was like eye candy for me. The challenge is to be patient for your turn, not to drool on the platters, not to take too much time with your selection to piss off the Basque guy behind you who actually knows what he is doing and knows that you do not. And, of course, balancing your full plate on one hand, while fumbling with your wallet (trying not to get pick-pocketed for the first time in the elbow-to-elbow crowd), not having a clue how much the server is asking for. One of your four eyes is seeking out a place to stand and eat this stuff, the other is on your partner, so as not to finally lose her in Spain, your third eye is on the small stubby manzana wine glass, marvelling at how the server is able to pour a generous serving of local white from a metre above the glass as is the local custom, without wasting a splashed drop anywhere; and your fourth eye, and so on ... 

A riot of colours and an anarchy of tastes. What a trip, as we would say in the sixties.

The next day, back in Biarritz, Anne Sophie introduced me to her friend, Mark, who together with his brother, run the oyster bar in the covered market downtown. Needless to say, I bought the taster package: 6 huitres + 1 verre de vin for nine euros. And we traded stories too.

les Halles

Place Jean Baptiste Lasalle (below) is one of the most people friendly places we have ever experienced. Why? This is a place where people of all ages, from great grandparents to toddlers, from  jocks to the disabled, can hang out with a drink in their hand, bought at the bar or brought from home. 

Kids are swinging on tree branches, a game of pétanques is being played on the hard packed dirt, bicycles are permitted, as are courteous smokers.

We walked here from our room, five minutes away. I was drinking a cold beer from my backpack, Jo, a glass of Aperol spritzer from the bar at the promenade. This was the magic hour, in the fading light of day when the shadows are long and the colours become saturated.

We gazed out at the perfect Atlantic horizon until well after the sun set.

Dinner Recommendation: La Tantina de Burgos

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Chapter 6ix: The Parking Angel

The Parking Angel

We always have a car in France because of the kinds of places we travel to, often small towns and villages, off the beaten path, away from hordes of tourists, if we can.

This is not to say we do not also use trains, buses and the Metro in the larger cities.

We do use all manner of public transportation when having a car is impractical, as in Paris, of course, and, for example, during our recent stay in Menton for a week.

The intrepid traveller uses local trains and buses, and the metro, to richen the experience of being in the country that he or she is visiting.

The challenges of buying tickets, navigating the schedules and routes, rubbing shoulders with the locals, avoiding getting pick-pocketed, using a smaller ecological footprint, etc. - all these means of moving from one place to another, (including taxis) are adventures too.

Transportation in France also means a lot of walking, whether you really want to or not, actually.

Good for the health too.

Okay, so much for the preamble and free advice, now to the story.

1. Credit Card Stress

or VISA, We Hate You

It is currently early April and we need to book some flights between Paris and Norway in June. Despite all that is available to us - free wifi, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, high level of computer literacy, tons of experience with online transactions, passwords, and patience - the system keeps spitting us out and pissing us off. 

We try again the next day, but to no avail, so we drive into Antibes in search of a Travel Agency to buy the airline tickets in the old fashioned way: face-to-face.

2. The Parking Job
or A Just Possible “In”, And An Impossible “Out”

Our fifteen minute drive into Antibes is easy enough, and miraculously, we find a parking spot at the curb in the centre of town.

We are driving a small Peugeot 308, and with it, I have become proficient at parallel parking in very tight spaces, almost as skilled as the locals.

The space available is about a metre (say, 3 ft) longer than our car. I am happy about this, until I hear the young plane tree (a French tree popularized by Napoleon) that is planted in my space. It screams out at me like a banshee when I am just centimetres from backing into it. (This is one of the twelve different multi-frequency alarms our 2017 high-tech Peugeot car is equipped with).

It takes me five or six maneuvers to inch my way into a parking spot that is really only meant for the growing room of Napolean’s tree.

When we are finally out of the car, a guy on a scooter zips right into the non parking spot beside the tree with his front wheel tucked in, a thumb’s width from my bumper.

He is running off, with both helmet and baguette, into a building before I can yell, “MERDE/SHIT!”

I know there is no way I will be able to extricate my car when it is time to leave.

3. The Parking Angel, 
or The Little Old Lady on the 3rd Floor Balcony

Just up the street we find the payment kiosk, the robot,  where you buy your ticket. Another adventure.

With less than a clear head, because we are very unrelaxed from the way things have been going, we find that this French machine is yet another variation from all the others we have figured out how to use.

Our fumbling, fidgeting, and fighting with each other is interrupted from a voice on high. We are both looking up now, and there, leaning out of her third floor window, is a little old lady speaking to us in her Provençal French about how to use the robot ticket machine. 

She has not a word of English, but her body language, gesticulations, facial expressions, and tone of voice are encouraging, and enlightening. But then we came to an impasse, regarding which final buttons to press. 

I ask her, “Un peu plus lentement?” 

She speaks slower, and we get it.

Then there is clapping. Two people are sitting on a bench just a couple of metres away, waiting for a bus. We have not noticed them watching our exchange with the parking angel. But they have been attentive to how the translation is going, assessing the foreigners’ progress on the learning curve of life in France. The sound of the coins clinking and the ticket printing, brings them to their feet, clapping as if for an encore. The parking angel up above claps. Joanne and I are clapping our hands too.

Three euros for three hours, but because our time will span the standard 2-hour lunch period in France, we get a total of five hours on the ticket, more than enough for our mission for the day, some lunch and exploring the city - or so we think.

4. Agence Voyagers
or The Travel Agency

We soon find an Agence Voyager.  There is a client ahead of us, an elderly woman (the parking angel’s sister, maybe) taking forever to arrange a holiday somewhere exotic. After a very long wait in a very short office, well read now in copious amounts of travel brochures, we sit across the desk from lovely, friendly Christianne, whose “just a leetle Eenglish” is at least as good as my petit peu de français. 

After about an hour, we are good to go:

for lunch that is, because it will take two hours for the tickets to be ready. Hmmm, why will a Travel Agent’s online transaction take two hours longer than a non Travel Agent’s online transaction? Because we are charged $30 more for the tickets?

5. Maxi-Bazar
or Entrée et Sortie Can Really Mess With Your Mind

After a nice lunch in the old town, time to write a couple of postcards for mom and sister back home who don’t use the Internet, buy stamps at a Tabac, and mail the cards, we have fifteen minutes to spare (parking is soon timing out) to stop at a mini department store - the Maxi Bazar - on my endless search for a yoga mat. (See Ch 2 Menton).

The Maxi Bazar is on the unlikely corner of Hope and Smiles, two doors down from our Agence Voyager. 




Mais Non, never heard of a yoga mat or any suggestible facsimile, of course, but Joanne buys a box of mouchoirs/tissue - you know, like Kleenex.

The exit to the store is at the end of a maze. We accept that this is something to do with security. We think the French are obsessed with Sécurité. 

Now we are on an entirely different street, on the corner of Brain-Dead and Tears. 

After much head-scratching, jay-walking, horn-honking, and spousal-abuse we find the Travel Agency, exactly where it always is, two doors from the entrance to the Bizarre Mart,

"Or whatever the F it’s called."

6. Ending with Good News, Bad News, 
Good News … Good News

The good news is that we have one minute left on the ticket and baguette-man has buggered off on his mock-motorcycle, giving me the extra few inches I desperately need to extricate our car from the wee box I’m parked in. The bad news is that there are now two Renault delivery vans double parked beside me. But good news overcomes that bad because I am now really pissed off-determined, and I squeeze through.






The really good news is that, now, back in our apartment we restore the loss of body fluids from all the sweat of the day with beaucoup de vin.

Dinner Recommendation: L'Auberge Fleurie, Villeneuve Loubet Village 

For more travel and other photography visit my website 
at

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