Ten Days in Northern Spain, Slowly

I went to northern Spain with a rough plan and not much else — San Sebastián, then a slow drift along the coast, with no itinerary beyond 'see what happens after lunch.' It turned out to be exactly the right amount of planning.

What struck me first was how little urgency there was around eating. Lunch wasn't something you fit in between things; it was the thing, stretched out over two or three hours without anyone at the next table checking their watch. I found myself relaxing into it by the third day, which felt like its own small achievement.

I spent an afternoon in a hill town whose name I'd never heard before arriving, mostly because the road happened to go that way. There was a bar with four tables, a woman who'd clearly run it for decades, and a plate of anchovies that I still think about. Nothing about it was designed to be memorable, which is probably why it was.

The coast itself did what coasts do — but it was the rhythm of the days that changed something in me. Everything closed in the early afternoon and nobody apologised for it. I stopped fighting the pace around day four and started building my day around it instead.

I came home with no souvenirs and a slightly different sense of what a good day looks like. Ten days wasn't long, but it was long enough to notice how much of my usual hurry is just habit, not necessity.