San Sebastián

This was an encouragingly fair morning to wake up to ... so off I went for a long walk, exploring ...

... lots of sailing boats leaving the harbor;

blocks of roughly cut marble on the breakwater that would have been quite at home in the Guggenheim yesterday;

fin-de-siècle facades;

... and since I actually spent the first part of the morning rehearsing my paper for next week's conference and finalizing and sending off the Power Point, it seemed the right thing to do was to find a dandelion.

Then the cathedral - C19th Baroque - the trouble with the Old Town here is that it isn't actually very old, having been burned to the ground by Anglo-Portuguese forces in 1813.

It does, all the same, have a rather fine square.  See all those numbers over the balconies/windows?  That's because it used to be used for bullfighting, and these were like numbered boxes for spectators.

The main, and magnificent beach had some rather splendid sand art being created -

- this seems to be a plea to today's French voters - which thank goodness was heeded.

 I really liked the buildings that spoke to its faded late C19th/early C20th glory.

For some reason, the carousel (dated to 1901 - decorated ... when?) has a whole lot of Impressionist Greatest Hits on it.

Of course - 

"One day I wrote her name upon the strand, 

But came the waves and washéd it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey."

and here's the absurdly pretty view from my window this evening.  I'm not, though, giving you the soundtrack of the busker on the quay, whose repertoire added up to the soundtrack of my travels over 40 years ... "Have You Ever Seen The Rain?" - northern Thailand; "Wish You Were Here" (Kalibukbuk, Bali), and so on ...