August Musings

 

How is August almost over? The end of August means we’ve been back in Spain for six months. We’ve got a rhythm, a routine, new friends, and summer traditions to keep us busy. We are settled into and  satisfied with our new place, especially after experiencing our 7th (!) Semana Grande.

A main highlight of summer in San Sebastian is Semana Grande, with fireworks every night, numerous concerts (big and small) throughout the city, traditional Basque events, among many other fun happenings. There’s always a special energy and vibe. We thought we would be able to see the fireworks from our balcony since we our on the 5th floor, but had no idea that the view would be spectacular:

Having this view meant we didn’t have to go out to see the fireworks, but could watch (or not) and then head to sleep directly after. Jeff confirmed that you cannot sleep through them – it’s just too darn loud.

In addition, we could enjoy the roving bands that entertain throughout the city. The pedestrian street below us with several cafes, bars, and restaurants is a popular zone. So we had music too.

I danced with that same band during our first Semana Grande in 2017.

We especially enjoy traditional Basque activities. One afternoon we watched dancing at the central kiosk. The number of participants was incredible. We learned the hora and other Israeli dances as children; the locals learned their dances and truly love this communal act.

We also went to see a Bertsolari performance. Bertsolaris are individuals who improvise verse and sing their compositions in Basque. It is done competitively. This year I invited my friend Maje to join us, so she could translate. Maje was a wealth of information, explaining how the Bertsolaris were always men in the past and the type of rhythms that are required. The topics we saw ranged from disability awareness to retail sales. It takes real talent and a lot of work to be a Bertsolari. You can check it out on YouTube if you’re curious.

This year we had the opportunity to host friends of friends who visited during all the excitement. We really enjoyed meeting Amanda, Tom, Amelia, and Helena and showing them around. Next month we’ll have more “friend of friend” visitors.

We visited the city’s San Telmo Museum this past weekend for two special exhibits. The first was focused on vintage summer travel posters, which we enjoyed more than we thought we would. After living here for six years, we could relate to the locale, cultural events, and lifestyle that was being advertised – something a tourist would not feel.

The second exhibit was about Joaquin Sorolla’s special relationship with San Sebastian. He visited many times over the years – the exhibition was titled “Travel to Paint” – and like the posters, his paintings captured the essence of the city.

The second poster photo features our next favorite event – the San Sebastian International Film Festival, which arrives the last week of September.  

Hasta pronto,

Shana & Jeff

A Musical July

One of the highlights of summer in many places is music festivals. And we are fortunate to have access to two fantastic festivals back-to-back in July:  San Sebastian hosted its 58th Jazzaldia, and Bilbao hosted its 2nd Blues Festival.

Jazzaldia has numerous free outdoor concerts as well as ticketed concerts in various venues. The kickoff concert this year was – we kid you not – The Village People. While they don’t fit the definition of jazz, they do meet the definition of fun. And what self-respecting American wouldn’t go seem for free on the beach? We met up with a group of friends, two of whom are also American, together with some Spaniards and joined many thousands of others waiting to hear YMCA. Of course, they saved that for last, after Macho Man (a song that did not age well), Go West, and In the Navy, among others that all sounded the same. Only one member is original (the policeman), and honestly, they were, well … not good. Still, the crowd had a great time singing along and it was a beautiful night.

I won tickets from the local newspaper to see Enrico Rava with his band, Fearless Five. He is the best-known Italian jazz musician in the world. He was quite good. We also paid to see Joss Stone, the British singer, who is touring in commemoration of the 20^th anniversary of her first album. The performances were on consecutive nights at a very special venue, the Trinitate Plaza, an outdoor multi-purpose venue in the old city area. The stage is covered; the seats are not. Both nights we got rained on, and not just a little bit. Thankfully we were prepared, and they even provided ponchos (a clear way of saying the show will go on, so don’t expect a refund). Joss is a terrific performer, and we’d highly recommend seeing her – she ventured out into the audience multiple times, even in the rain.

The following weekend we headed to Bilbao where all the concerts were free and outdoors. This year we enjoyed the afternoon concerts even more than the evening events. These concerts took place at a smaller kiosk in a park. We found a bench, enjoyed the music, and watched the dogs, kids and people go by. It was incredibly relaxing. The second afternoon, between concerts, a small band paraded by, accompanied by Blues Brothers Jake and Elwood.

The night before we had seen The Original Blues Brothers Band play (2 original members), which was good, other than it rained before their show. We stayed on our bench, where we had watched the previous concert, under an umbrella and waited, not wanting to give up our seats.

On Sunday morning, before the music started, we stopped in at the Guggenheim to catch the Yayoi Kusuma exhibition. She’s a Japanese artist and some of her work has a Seussical style to it. Her use of color is fantastic.

It’s been a pleasant summer so far, albeit overly humid and a bit rainy. We’ve been lucky to only have had a few very hot days while the rest of Spain has seen terrible heatwaves. In addition to music, we’ve also been out paddle boarding in the bay – thankfully on a day without any jellyfish, which have been responsible for several beach closures so far this year.

Semana Grande is this week, so there will be plenty more music and other festivities. We also will start to see a steady stream of guests coming our way.

That’s all for now,

Shana & Jeff

Mainz, the Mosel Valley, and Trier

We continued our German adventures in Mainz, a relatively small city (population around 220,000) at the confluence of the Main and Rhine rivers, which has been an important location since Roman times. In the middle ages (around 1400), Mainz was the birthplace of Johannes Guttenberg, the inventor of the printing press. We visited the Guttenberg Museum, which contains many interesting exhibits of old books and printing presses. We even saw a demonstration of how the original printing press worked -- in German, so we didn't get much, but it was cool to see the page that was printed as a result.

The cathedral in Mainz is quite impressive.

Even more impressive is the Church of St. Stephan, not for the modest church itself, but rather for the spectacular stain-glassed windows designed by Marc Chagall near the end of his life. The windows, which depict scenes from the Old Testament, and were intended as a contribution to German-Jewish reconcilliation, ended up in St. Stephan as a result of Chagall's friendship with the church's senior priest.

Our next stop was the Mosel Valley. The Mosel River arises in the Vosges Mountains, and runs east-west through western Germany before emptying into the Rhine. The Mosel Valley region is even more beauitiful than the Rhine -- more vines, more little towns, and more ruined castles. But near the Mosel we were able to visit a fully-intact castle: Burg Eltz.

Burg Eltz, which sits in a forest, has been around for over 700 years, and has remained unchanged for about the last 500. Built and owned by three branches of a single family, the castle is fairy-tale-like when you first see it.

The approach to the castle feels like going back in time as well.

The tour of the castle interior is very cool, but no pictures are allowed, so you will have to go yourselves to experience it. We recommend it.

After Burg Eltz, we went for lunch in the lovely little town of Beilstein on the Mosel River. The vines run directly up a steep hill from the road along the river to the city's ruined castle.

Our view from lunch was spectacular. The river in the foreground, and another small town (almost village) in the background.

After lunch, we walked through the town and saw the site of the former synagogue, which dates from 1310. In the 1300's the leaders of Beilstein invited several Jewish families who had been persecuted and expelled from towns along the Rhine to settle there. By 1840, a quarter of the town was Jewish, but after the 1871 constitution provided political and civil rights to German Jews, most of them moved to larger cities looking for better economic opportunities. By 1933, only one Jewish family remained in Beilstein, and they were deported and killed in the Treblinka death camp. Amazingly, there is an intact Jewish cemetary above the town's castle.

While in the Mosel Valley, we stayed in a literal castle, now converted to a hotel, in the small town of Schloss-Lieser.

One of the best things about the Mosel Valley was the wine, which we prefered to the wine we tried along the Rhine. On our last day in the Mosel Valley, we biked along the river, which is very easy to do in this area. We ended up riding over 60 km, while stopping for two wine tastings. But first, we found the world's best vending machine.

Yes, that is a vending machine selling bottles of wine. You can see the RVs behind me, and it is clear that this machine serves the immediate needs of the campers who presumably have their own corkscrews and glasses.

We stopped for lunch at a winery in Trabben-Trarbach, a slightly larger town along the river.

The winery was on the hill you see in the picture above, so we had a good view of the surrounding hills and their ubiquitous vines.

Shana found the information for the area's Riesling Route, but as we were on bikes, we could not try all of the listed wineries ;)/.

Our final stop in Germany was the country's oldest city, and once a capital of part of the Roman Empire (we had no idea), Trier (rhymes with clear). Even before the Romans, the area is believed to have been inhabited by the Celts for 1,300 years. Under the Romans, Trier was the capital of the western empire (roughtly modern-day England, Spain, France and Germany) in the 4th century, and during that time was a favorite residence of the emperors.

In Trier we saw the ruins of the Roman baths, as well as the Cathedral, which is the oldest church in Germany. After Emporer Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, he began the construction of two great cathedrals: St. Peter's in Vatican City, and this cathedral in Trier.

However, the most impressive building we saw during our day in Trier was the Basilica, which was the Emporer's throne room during the 4th century. It is considered the largest intact Roman building outside of Rome itself, although it had to be rebuilt after being servely damaged during WWII.

The building has been a Lutheran Church since 1856, but it retains the same shape/form that it had when it was a throne room. The picture does not do a great job showing how huge its single room is. To give you a better idea, note that each of the wooden squares that make up the ceiling is about 10 feet by 10 feet!

Well, that was the end of our adventures in France and Germany. We returned to San Sebastian by train from Luxembourg through Paris. We don't have much to say about Luxembourg City, where we stayed for one night, but we did have a very nice Vietnamese dinner there.

More to come soon on our summer back in San Sebastian.

Hasta luego,

Jeff and Shana

The Romantic Rhine

After Heidleberg, we dropped Corinne and David at their hotel near the Frankfurt airport so they could fly home the next morning, and Shana and I continued north to the part of the Rhine river known as the "Romantic Rhine". The Rhine itself is one of the longest rivers in Europe running from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea, and is a major means of transportation for goods and people. The part of the river we visited (between Mainz and Koblenz) is an area of small German towns, old castles and no bridges, which means there are ferries every few miles that will take you (and your car) across the river.

On our first day, we drove to a small town named Rudesheim where we had really good coffee and pastry for breakfast before boarding a cruise that would take us upriver where we could view the small towns and castles from the river while providing a bit of information about the various sites. The cross-river ferry in the photo above was just north of Rudesheim on its way to Bingen, the next town on the other side. You can see the many vines on the hillside above (they were everwhere), and on the left side of the picture is the Niederwald Monument to the German Empire.

Around the first bend in the river north of Bingen is a castle, but because the castle did not have visibility of possible threats coming from the south, they built a little tower on an island in the middle of the river where a sentry could signal the castle if there was danger. Unlike many of the castles along the way, the tower is in good shape.

Our time on the river was filled with beautiful scenery, charming towns, and many castles in various states of disrepair.

We got off the ferry in Bacharach, one of the cute towns along the river and did a wine tasting of Rhine wines along with lunch there. The wines of the Rhine are mostly white, but we learned at our tasting that some pinot noir grapes are grown there (called spatburgunder in German). Our tasting included 11 (!) wines, which we shared -- best use of a lazy Susan ever.

We got back on the next ferry in Bacharach, and rode up to St. Goarshausen where we left the boat and took the train back to Rudesheim. But, not before grabbing a photo of the river and the town of St. Goar on the other side.

The next day, we retraced our steps back up the Rhine, but this time by car, which was definitely less scenic than the cruise. Arriving in St. Goar, we found yet another yummy bakery for our coffee and pastry breakfast before walking up to Rheinfels Castle, which sits above the town (you can see it accross the river in the picture above).

Rheinfels was originally built in the 13th century, and for five centuries it was the largest castle on the Rhine, the strongest castle in the Holy Roman Empire, as well as a center of culture. It was involved in many wars including the 30 years war (1618-1648), but eventually surrendered (without a fight) to the French Revolutionary Army (1797) who eventually razed it. Note that this was a common theme among the castles along the Rhine.

For years, the ruined castle was used as a source of building stones, so it is much smaller today than at its peak, but it is still impressive with great views of the river.

Perhaps most impressive of the remaining parts of the castle was the giant cellar, which was used as a large pantry. The door at the back of the cellar led to a smaller wine cellar where the good wine was kept (the more things change...).

Those were our adventures on the Romantic Rhine, which is absolutely beautiful and well worth a visit, especially by boat. In fact, one thing we did not do here, but did in the Mosel Valley, was bike between the little towns along the Rhine, which you can do on either side of the river. Oh, well, maybe next time.

Hasta pronto,

Jeff and Shana