Inside Pamplona

Jeff and his Spanish brother
in old Pamplona

There's no better way to see a city than in the company of a local.  Hence our perfect day in Pamplona, spent with Jeff's childhood friend, his wife, their children, and his parents - three generations of Pamplon-ites, so warm and welcoming that I forgot at times they were speaking in Spanish (which, I should point out, I do not understand).

I'm not sure, outside the San Fermin festival (aka, the running of the bulls), that there's that much to "see" in Pamplona - Bilbao and San Sebastian are much more interesting places to spend time as a tourist.  But after walking us around the old town, our friend/inside guide shared with us three favorite spots that are worthy of note:

Bilbao: Vastly Underrated

When I was planning our trip to northern Spain, allotting one evening to Bilbao seemed more than adequate to accomplish the only thing I was told made Bilbao worthwhile (the Guggenheim).  But that one evening passed too quickly, and when midnight found us at Claudio's in the old town working our way through a plate of local jamon and chistorras, I regretted our rash decision to book tickets on a bus out of town at 9 the next morning.

My new-found love affair with Bilbao took root in the fertile ground of low expectations.  With everyone from the New York Times to our Spanish friends in Pamplona telling us Bilbao is nothing special (save, of course, for Frank Gehry's massive monument to modern art), we were free to discover the city for ourselves. 

Jeff Koons' giant puppy welcomes the city to the museum

Of course, the museum is all that and a bag of chips.  Its shape both inside and out is fluid and mysterious; it spills over into public spaces filled with public art, along the riverfront in one direction and into the city on the other.  The cavernous and curving galleries are best suited for modern art of the giant installation variety, some of which we really liked and some of which was beyond us.  Of our eight precious hours in Bilbao, we spent three on the museum - but the other five were equally memorable. 

Mapping Pintxos in San Sebastian

San Sebastian being in Basque country, there are two names for everything.  San Sebastian, for example, also goes by Donostia, and what I would normally call tapas are correctly referred to as pintxos. In our one day in San Sebastian/Donostia, Jeff and I managed to squeeze in not one, but two pintxos crawls.

Blue footed Booby
(photo by Scott Ableman)

This was the perfect excuse to break out Jeff's newly revamped Android app, SpotPad. SpotPad allows you to take notes tagged to your location, so you can later remember where that really cool store was, or where you finally spotted that rare blue-footed booby.  

Objectively speaking, SpotPad is awesome.

At every bar we stopped by, we grabbed a couple pintxos while I wrote an insta-review as a new SpotPad note.  When we got home, I sent myself an email with all my notes attached as an KML file (this is a one-step process within SpotPad).  I uploaded that KML file to a new Google map, and ta-daaa, my very own Donostia pintxos crawl map (see below).

I think we've already established that I am not technologically adept, particularly when it comes to smartphones, but this was pretty easy (I added the pictures later, when editing it on my computer).  I feel like I have a new toy - I'm going to start embedding Google maps in all my posts.  Consider yourself warned.

View Pintxos in Donostia (San Sebastian) in a larger map


ps - As this is a trial run for me, you might have to click through to the whole map in order to see the photos and descriptions.