Beach Blanket Bozo

From San Sebastian

I´m not too happy this morning, folks.

My camera is dead. Again.

But before I get into that, let me give you the lay of the land here in San Sebastian. It´s a nice little beach resort where the Euskadi culture reigns supreme. The town itself doesn´t have a lot of tourist attractions to check out...maybe a gothic cathedral or two. Other than that, it´s all beach...when they actually have beach here. During the morning hours, there´s quite a bit of beach along the city walls. Playa de la Concha is the most popular of their three beaches, where all the beautiful people strut their stuff amongst the not-so-beautiful people washed up on shore like beached whales. As the afternoon hours wear on, though, the tide rises, and the beach starts disappearing, until everyone is crowded on a thin strip of sand. I´ve never seen so many people crammed into such a tiny sandbox before. It´s quite amusing.

Nearby the beach is a small mountain called Monte Urgull, or as I like to call it, Mt. Jesus. The reason I call it that is due to the giant statue of Jesus up on top, overlooking the town below. It´s similar to those big statues of Jesus that you´ll see up in the mountains of many South American countries. On Saturday, Eric and I hiked up Mt. Jesus to go pay our respect to the big guy. Eric didn´t seem too thrilled. After a few steep climbs, we finally made it to the base of Jesus...and lo and behold, they had a museum about the history of San Sebastian underneath Jesus. I was really impressed with this museum. It was multilingual and done up incredibly with great multimedia presentations. And all for free, too!

But then we both had to use the bathroom in a hurry. We had to climb up into the base of Jesus to get to the bathrooms. Who would have thunk that Jesus would have a bathroom at his feet? I came up with a great marketing slogan for this town: "Come to San Sebastian, and you, too, can sit on the throne with Jesus!" Well, now that I think about it, maybe that won´t go over so well. Scratch that idea. When you get to the top of Mt. Jesus, you´ll notice that Jesus is actually very happy looking. He´s smiling wide with his hand up, like he´s waving hello. You don´t see too many happy Jesus statues. But after I trekked down Mt. Jesus and hung out on the beach, I could see why Jesus was so happy. He´s got the best view in town, looking down upon a topless beach. Oh, that Jesus! You sly devil, you!!!

San Sebastian does things a little differently than the Spanish. Instead of tapas, they have something called pintxos, where they make up all these plates of tiny sandwiches and food and place them all out on the bar counters for people to come up to and buy. It´s basically the fast-food version of tapas, where instead of waiting for your tiny plates of food to show up, you can just grab your food and pay for it there. All the floors at the pintxo places are littered with wadded napkins and papers. During pintxo hour in the evenings, people all huddle into the bars, drink, chat, eat, then throw their stuff on the ground. Maybe it would help if the Basques actually invested in some garbage cans for their patrons.

And then you have the Euskabi (Basque) language here, which is nothing like all the Latin-based languages you find throughout Europe. It has a lot of consonants, especially C´s, K´s, and X´s, and it makes no utter sense to people not from this region. They all use the same font for anything spelled in Euskabi. It´s a wacky circus-like font, where the A´s look similar to that on the title of a MAD Magazine. It´s not a font that´s easy on the eyes, but I guess it´s their font dating back thousands of years ago. Gotta stick with tradition around here. This area is also very political, with banners and posters plastered around town, speaking of Basque independence and stuff to do with the ETA that I don´t want to even know about.

But it seems to be a very friendly, happy, well-to-do beach town. They have great dining here...San Sebastian has more Michelin-ranked restaurants than any other city in Spain, and it´s right below Paris in the number of rankings. They have goofy celebrations here as well. On Saturday, we watched an event where kids would try to see how far out they could walk on a pole before they slipped and fell into the harbor. This was big stuff here in San Sebastian.

Alright. Back to the camera saga. So after a nice day of hanging out on the beach, relaxing, and swimming out into the Bay of Biscay to some floating docks, then swimming back, it was time for us to head out. So I put my shorts back on, which held my new camera in my pocket. Up ahead by the staircase to get out, the tide had strangely come in, so people now had to walk through a foot of water to get to the stairs. I stood there, analyzing the situation, and didn´t see a problem with walking through it. So I´m midway through it, when suddenly a slight wave comes up, knocks into the wall beside me, comes back at me in a tidal wave and just soaks me to the bone.

Eric is pointing and laughing at me, but I pull out my camera in horror. Eric wasn´t laughing too much after that. I´m now freaking, because I think my camera is ruined. Eric takes the camera, turns it on, and it appears to be fine. I take it from him, turn in on...and it´s dead.

You know, there are moments in my life that I´m not too proud of. This was one of them. I try to take good care of my stuff. But crap happens every now and then, and then you hate yourself for being such an idiot for not taking even better care of your stuff. I´m really surprised, though, that my camera couldn´t handle a light splashing. When I took it out of my pocket, it wasn´t dripping in water. It was actually quite dry. But this Fujifilm camera was made cheaply and not like the battle tank Canons that I´m used to. From here on out, I´m sticking with the Canons. Even though mine crapped out after two years, that thing was pretty rock-solid tough.

So I´m back to the drawing board, looking around town for a camera...again. Hopefully there´s an El Corte Ingles around somewhere. My backpack is now turning into a dead digital camera graveyard. Like I said, I´m not too proud of myself for this. Chalk this one up in the "life´s little lessons learned" category.