Hola from San Sebastian

I love love love this place - it's my favourite so far out of everywhere we've visited. The town surrounds a big bay cove thingy with beautiful beaches and is surrounded by mountain peaks. Yesterday we climbed up one big hill, Monte Urgull (about 250 thousand steep steps), to this big fort type building with a gigantic statue of Jesus on top. The views from there were absolutely amazing. And the best bit was when we were starting on the way down we discovered this tiny bar on the hillside where you could order a beer and look over the sea and the island in the harbour. Very cool.

The hotel we're staying in is awesome - it's 4 star because that was all we could get and it's two streets back from the beach and has a fantastic view of the sea. It's so good, in fact, that last night before going out we drank our leftover French booze in our room looking over the ocean.

Hardly anyone here speaks English so we've been communicating in a mixture of poorly pronounced Spanish and hand gestures, but it's been good for very quickly learning the basics of the language. George stressed out reserving our seats on the train to Zaragoza tomorrow in Spanish, but it was surprisingly easy in the end.

We´re now really regretting that we´re not staying here for longer. We´ve just had our first experience of tapas for lunch and have been getting stuck into the zurritos (small beers - the only reason we've been ordering small ones is because we couldn´t immediately work out how to order big ones).

This morning we went up the other massive mountain on this crazy cable car that goes up the hill on a 70 degree angle, and the views from the top of that one were even better - alas, no bar, but the weather was not so good this morning anyway. Plus, the main thing up there was a crappy children's amusement park, so not very exciting for us. We had grand plans of walking back down the hill, but couldn't find a path that wasn't a very narrow road with no verge on either side, so we had to get the crazy cable car back down again.

For the rest of the day we're going to hit the turps (how unusual) in the streets of San Sebastian preparing for a big night of more tapas and a jug or two of sangria.

Did I mention I love it here?