San Sebastian, Spain
I had almost three weeks at home before departing on July 24th for our show in San Sebastian. I employed some of that time to do a little research on this Spanish coastal city, discovering that it is a vacation destination for Europeans.
In discussing travel arrangements with management, it was determined that I would arrive a day ahead of show in order to both save a little money and have time to decompress from a brutal travel day. I’d been warned. The payoff will be the northern coast of Spain in July. That can’t be a bad thing, right? …except you have to get there.
Here is the breakdown. Imagine getting up at 7am, arriving at your local airport by 9:45am. The plane leaves at 11am, traveling nine sleepless hours forward across time zones, depositing you in Barcelona at 9am, Spanish time. Then… you layover for SIX HOURS until boarding a plane for Bilbao, which is on the opposite coast of Spain from Barcelona. I remember staring at a bus schedule, thinking I might go into Barcelona and walk the Rambla, have a snack and a beer at noon but there was nowhere to leave my bags so I nixed that idea and just wandered in and out of the airport, whimpering. Eventually I had a tiny Spanish sandwich and drank a liter of water in between head-bobbing naps, forced to cross the entire airport repeatedly to relieve myself.
Never mind, after finally surviving six hours at the airport, you almost missed your plane because, after waiting for over an hour in one seemingly endless line to check in, your reservationist pleasantly directed you to another line on the other end of the airport because your plane had been mysteriously dumped onto another carrier. Of course, you must wait in that line as well. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Patience must be duly employed together with a decided lack of freaking out.
Miraculously, I made the plane to Bilbao with minutes to spare and upon arriving there, soon realized my driver was nowhere to be found. The weather was beautiful but I was far from the ocean I coveted, sitting on a concrete bench trying to reach our local organizer. He was not answering his phone. 45 minutes passed. I kept watching this dood with dark curly hair circling around and around, appearing to be looking for someone. I finally snapped out of it and approached him.
“Are you Rafa?”
“No… but I am looking for a Wendy…?….”
“That’s me!”
Off we went, zipping through the mountainous Basque region, talking crazy politics. His parents were revolutionaries. He was shuffled off to schools in London when he was a kid, just in case his parents were arrested. Larik eschewed all that for becoming a musician in the wake of the political intensities he was raised with, not that he doesn’t align himself with what they were fighting for. He just needed to find his own way to say something. He was as serious as he was handsome and the ride was educational.
I hope all the American Inquisition didn’t drive him crazy.
More to come…
