Happy brithday to me

Many thanks for the cards. To celebrate we've booked a table at a very serious Japanese restaurant for Friday night. The patron was very insistent that he had only raw fish to offer - maybe some people come in and insist on having their sashimi cooked? strange

Sidra

A couple of weeks ago we made an expedition to San Sebastian for the weekend to visit a cider brewery. This is a traditional thing to do in the mountains of the basque country in the spring. The idea is to taste the cider made from last autumn's apples. The brewhouse consists of a huge open hall a bit like a German beer cellar, and they give you a pint glass when you arrive. Then all the cider is in a special room to the side, dug into the mountain, with the cider in huge barrels. The staff walk up to the barrels and open the taps and the cider gushes out onto the floor, and you put your glass in the stream to take some. There were hunderds of people there, some had arrived on coaches, so every cider stream had a good crowd around it and you have to push a bit to get your glass into the queue. You're supposed to remember which barrel you like most so that when they tap it again you can go back, but this gets a bit difficult after the 6th or 7th barrel. In the meantime, you go back to your table and eat the set menu of omellete, salt cod and t-bone steak (all excellent) and wait until someone shouts Txotx, which means you all have to stand up and go back to the cider room again.. it's lots of fun, and I've been delaying writing about it hoping that Ignacio would put his photos up on flickr, which he just has. To understand these (a bit) you have to know that we were celebrating Eduardo passing his viva exam and getting his PhD. He has also put up the photos from the rest of the night (we went to the cider place at lunchtime) crawling the Tapas bars in Donostia, which are pretty good too.

We took the IDTGV to get to Hendaye on the border, and then the 'mole train' through the mountains to Donostia. It was very cool to go to another country for the weekend without getting a plane. The IDTGV is some kind of internet-only cut price TGV - we're now big fans.