Anyone for Pitxos?

Hola from San Sebastian on the northern coast of Spain.
After Rachel's many years of anticipation of being in Spain and with her learning plenty of the language it was pretty bloody funny to get here and see her forget almost everything and start talking to the locals in French.
This is Basque country and they don't particularly like the Castillian version(which we have learnt) being used anyway. In actual fact English is preferred.
Sobering thing was that last night when we were out on the town some English folk told us they had been out to some of the more remote villages and were met with hostility from the Basque separatists because they were speaking Spanish!

We went out on a Tapa crawl last night, although here they are called Pitxos (Pen-chos) and the crawl is called a "poteo-ir-de-pitxos" which is certainly a new experience. Basically all the bars have platters of all this finger food loaded up on the bar and you help yourself, as you would at a 21st at home. Then you order some drinks and go back and forward to the bar for more food as you like. Each piece of food is held together with a tooth pick and you keep these in your pocket.
At the end of the night you count the tooth picks and tell them how many you have and the number of drinks and they add it up and charge you. Then you go onto the next bar and so on and so on. The food is bloody awesome, lots of fish, crab and prawns which we have loved after all the meat and bread in Germany and France.

Then we went to a local dance bar and the first guys we see are bloody Kiwis!
After that we foolishly went on to the Casino where Rach lost her money on Black Jack and me at Poker. It was very interesting to play cards having no idea at all what anyone else at the table was saying!
While we like it here, it is bloody cold.
San Sebastian is where all of Spain comes in the middle of Summer, so now in Autumn there's no-one here and for the first time on this trip our off-season timing sucks!
We are staying here one more night, then heading across country and south, way south, to find some sunshine and to speak some proper Spanish!