Days in the Basque Country

Sitting upon Zurriola Beach the evening before I departed back home in the deserts of Nevada for the summer, a new sense of sadness seeped into my heart, and made me feel sick. In five months, I had made this new place, of foreign people and strange culture, my home.

I'd become a person, an adult, I never thought I'd discover. The first few weeks, struggling to speak the language, I began to feel frustrated and disliked the world I'd--for what I thought was some dumb reason--engaged myself in. But, as I continued to engage, the culture immersed itself around me. Strangers became companions. San Sebastián became as comfortable as the hard soil, bitter sage, and my mother's voice was several thousands of miles away.

Growing up in the desert, I never quite understood what it meant to relax at the beach. By that spring, the beach was as close to my favorite past time as was years of playing baseball back in the US. Days after classes were spent on the playa, challenging locals in volleyball, conversing in a newly discovered tongue. We surfed the soothing waters of the Atlantic's Bay of Biscay. Sips of Sangria were as silk and sweet as pollen on a rose's pedal.

The days I lived were days of eternal love. And not another passes that I still don't feel the lust for the land of experience that forever changed my life.