Puente - Spanish for "bridge," a puente is the word used to describe a regular weekend made longer by connecting it to a bank holiday on, for example, a Tuesday. In this case, my weekend was connected to Tuesday, the first of November, or All Saints Day, giving me and my friend Jessie four days to head up north and discover San Sebastián and Bilbao.

Stop #1 was San Sebastián, or in the local language, Donostia. This small beach town was super charming and full of history. When we climbed to the top of Monte Urgull, between the Bahía de La Concha and playa Zurriola (closest to our hostel) we got to visit a small exhibition within a giant statue dedicated to el Sagrado Corazón de Jesús full of history about País Vasco and Donostia.

Our hostel experience here was...odd. We arrived to find the owners of the hostel (a married couple) welcoming us with mini croissants and a chocolate bar, and the guy, Jaime, dressed in a stage turban, winter coat, sweatpants, black socks, and white jelly shoes. He referred to himself as the Sultan of Karpukala (apparently he'd recently been in some sort of play or something) and eventually posed for a photo in the middle of the tiny room with us. The "hostel" was nothing more than a room in the couple's house where they'd installed three-story bunkbeds. We chose this place because it was the cheapest hostel with availability, and though it was really strange, we were lucky to be sharing the room with a group of really nice people who made the stay that much better.

While in Donostia, we basically walked all over the entire town, stopping only for the occasional coffee or ice cream. We took a lot of photos on Monte Urgull and in the old town on our first day out, but unfortunately it was really overcast until our tourism day came to an end. On our last day in Donostia it was warm and sunny, so we just sat on some giant wavebreaker rocks in Zurriola, soaking up the sun before we had to catch a bus to our next stop.

Bilbao (Bilbo) is probably most well known for the Guggenheim museum. One of the travel books I read said that one could refer to history in Bilbao as BG and AG - Before & After Guggenheim. Apparently the construction of the museum really changed everything there, transforming it from an industrial district to a modern and diverse riverside city.

On our last morning in Bilbao, we took the funicular de Artxanda and got to see some incredible views of the city, the river, and the surrounding landscape. The old town in Bilbao was cute, and the Guggenheim was impressive, but this was my favorite part of the trip. Seeing a city in a valley surrounded by cloud-covered mountains reminded me so much of Boone. Of course, in Boone they don't speak Euskera... I only learned hello and goodbye (kaixo/agur) and thank you (eskerrik). Even though the signs were all in Euskera, they were also in Castellano, and everyone in Donostia and Bilbo speaks Castellano as well, so I didn't have any trouble getting around... just didn't get to learn any cool new words or phrases. Bummer.

In writing about Euskadi (Basque Country), pintxos must be mentioned. Pintxos are similar to tapas in that they are a small delicious snack to accompany your drinks, but pintxos differ from tapas in that they include a pincho - Spanish for spike - that is usually a toothpick holding the toppings together on a slice of bread, while tapas could be almost anything. You could look at it this way: pintxos can always be considered tapas, but tapas can't always be pintxos. Squares and rectangles.

We ate lots and lots of pintxos at every possible opportunity. I'll let the pictures do the talking: