We spotted the new Cité de l'Océan (below) the other day when we were down on the sea front at Ilbarritz.. I've always thought that architects here in France are capable of creating the most stunning buildings or structures. They are equally capable of erecting the most monumental eyesores - like the one below.. (is that a building or the box it came in?)
The Basque country (on both sides of the border) would have been vastly different in those days with few concessions to tourism and it must have been a real pleasure to travel around it. While the coast has changed beyond all recognition, the inland regions remain more or less intact as they were - even in the height of summer few of the legions of tourists that throng the coastal resorts explore the hinterland. There, it's not difficult to understand the attraction the country had for the author. Here's an extract from "The Sun Also Rises" that describes the moment Hemingway and his friend arrived in Bayonne.
In the morning it was bright, and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café. Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river. Already, so early in the morning, it was very hot on the bridge across the river. We walked out on the bridge and then took a walk through the town.
I was not at all sure Mike's rods would come from Scotland in time, so we hunted a tackle store and finally bought a rod for Bill up-stairs over a drygoods store. The man who sold the tackle was out, and we had to wait for him to come back. Finally he came in, and we bought a pretty good rod cheap, and two landing-nets.
We went out into the street again and took a look at the cathedral. Cohn made some remark about it being a very good example of something or other, I forget what. It seemed like a nice cathedral, nice and dim, like Spanish churches. Then we went up past the old fort and out to the local Syndicat d'Initiative office, where the bus was supposed to start from. There they told us the bus service did not start until the 1st of July. We found out at the tourist office what we ought to pay for a motor-car to Pamplona and hired one at a big garage just around the corner from the Municipal Theatre for four hundred francs. The car was to pick us up at the hotel in forty minutes, and we stopped at the café on the square where we had eaten breakfast, and had a beer. It was hot, but the town had a cool, fresh, early-morning smell and it was pleasant sitting in the café. A breeze started to blow, and you could feel that the air came from the sea. There were pigeons out in the square, and the houses were a yellow, sun-baked color, and I did not want to leave the café. But we had to go to the hotel to get our bags packed and pay the bill. We paid for the beers, we matched and I think Cohn paid, and went up to the hotel. It was only sixteen francs apiece for Bill and me, with ten per cent added for the service, and we had the bags sent down and waited for Robert Cohn. While we were waiting I saw a cockroach on the parquet floor that must have been at least three inches long. I pointed him out to Bill and then put my shoe on him. We agreed he must have just come in from the garden. It was really an awfully clean hotel.
Cohn came down, finally, and we all went out to the car. It was a big, closed car, with a driver in a white duster with blue collar and cuffs, and we had him put the back of the car down. He piled in the bags and we started off up the street and out of the town. We passed some lovely gardens and had a good look back at the town, and then we were out in the country, green and rolling, and the road climbing all the time. We passed lots of Basques with oxen, or cattle, hauling carts along the road, and nice farmhouses, low roofs, and all white-plastered. In the Basque country the land all looks very rich and green and the houses and villages look well-off and clean. Every village had a pelota court and on some of them kids were playing in the hot sun. There were signs on the walls of the churches saying it was forbidden to play pelota against them, and the houses in the villages had red tiled roofs, and then the road turned off and commenced to climb and we were going way up close along a hillside, with a valley below and hills stretched off back toward the sea. You couldn't see the sea. It was too far away. You could see only hills and more hills, and you knew where the sea was.
Before making the decision to move here from England, for example, I remember making a list of the pros & cons for making the move and another list of all the risks. The first list proved pretty conclusive in terms of whether or not a move was the correct decision. As for the second list, all the risks I identified could be managed - except one: the currency exchange rate. As most of our income was in £ sterling, and we were moving to the euro-zone, this had my full attention. I thought the worst that could happen would be that the £ would gradually decline in value against the euro over the years. We were prepared for that eventuality and so we moved across.
Soon after we moved however, the exchange rate turned out to be the very risk that bit us and it bit us hard. In Britain, Gordon Brown (an unelected nobody who was doing Prime Minister impressions at the time) let the pound slump in value - an unprecedented 30% drop - against the euro in a few short months. He didn't declare it a devaluation - he simply didn't call it anything. He just carried on sleepwalking as though nothing had happened. Fortunately, we'd done our planning and we had sufficient flex to be able to live through it - but the importance of planning wasn't lost on us.
If anyone reading this is thinking of making a similar move, I'd say the hardest part is not the move itself, but taking the decision to move. Once you've decided, the rest should happen according to your plan.
Meanwhile: