There is a certain romance to the idea of spending your Erasmus experience in Madrid, Paris, Rome, Skopje, or any other European capital. The museums, the nightlife, the sheer scale of it all. I get it, a month ago I was in Madrid myself, and I loved it. But stepping off a bus in San Sebastián on a drizzly Wednesday afternoon, backpack digging into my shoulders and three flights already behind me, I felt something I had not quite felt in the capital. I felt like I had actually arrived somewhere where people enjoyed living.
And hey, Madrid is easy, you get on in Skopje, you get off in Madrid.
Here? Here, I had to get off in Vienna, then again in Frankfurt, then again in Bilbao. Grab a bus, get to San Sebastián, and get another bus to get to Hondarribia. (Cue the typical airplane pic here!)
When you land in a capital, you land in a place built for tourists and visitors, a place supposed to attract people. And with that, you arrive in a place full of tourist traps. Everything is signposted, translated, and optimised for people passing through. You can spend three months in a capital city and never truly need to engage with it. The city absorbs you without demanding anything back. Google tells you what you must see, where is the best place to eat, what is the best time to visit what thing. A smaller city like San Sebastián, or the even more intimate Hondarribia just down the road, is different. It asks you to pay attention, it requires local, and more importantly human, connections so that you get into it deeply.
Walking through San Sebastián for the first time, backpack on and light drizzle overhead, you notice things. The wrought-iron balconies overflowing with flowers (snapping pictures for my mom, who is really going to appreciate this!). The cohesive Neoclassical architecture that tells you a specific historical story, a city that burned down in 1813 and rebuilt itself with intention. (thank God for Google!) The Urumea river cutting through it. La Concha beach opening up onto the Bay of Biscay (that’s an ocean over there!) None of this gets lost in the noise, because there is no noise! The city is walkable, human in scale, and legible in a way that a capital simply is not.
Then there is the question of culture. Arriving in the Basque Country, you quickly realise you are not just in Spain – you are somewhere with its own language, its own identity, its own way of naming things (most places carry both a Basque and a Spanish name, a small daily reminder that you are on layered ground). You can call it Donostia (the Basque name), or you can call it San Sebastián (the Spanish one).
Basque, I learned as I was trying to grasp at least a couple of phrases in it, is a language isolate, unrelated to any other language family on earth. No amount of Spanish or Italian prepares you for it. But, hey, I know how to say “thank you” (Eskerrik asko!) That kind of humbling discovery, the realisation that the world is stranger (in a good way!) and richer than you assumed, is exactly what international experience is supposed to deliver. You are far less likely to stumble into it in a capital city, where globalisation has already sanded down the edges.
And perhaps most importantly: in a smaller city, you find each other faster. A message in a group chat, a coffee shared with a colleague from Moldova in a quiet square, a bus ride together to a spot close to the French border, these connections happen more naturally when the setting is intimate. In Madrid, you can disappear. In Hondarribia, standing on a balcony with the Bidasoa river on one side and the Atlantic on the other, you are simply present. In Hondarribia, standing on that balcony with new friends from Spain, Moldova and Italy, the Bidasoa river on one side and the ocean on the other, there was nowhere to disappear to — and I was glad for it. These moments happen more naturally when the setting is intimate. In a capital, you can disappear into the crowd.
In Hondarribia, there was nowhere to disappear to, and I was glad for it. A few hours after meeting as complete strangers, we were sharing a house, making coffee in the same kitchen, sitting down at the same breakfast and dinner table. Around that table you could hear different languages all at once, and everyone understanding each other with no major problems, hands reaching for baklava mid-sentence, work somehow getting done in between. And after dinner, nobody rushed off. We sat and talked about our countries, our cities, our lives, the causes that matter to us, the kind of conversation that does not happen on a schedule and cannot be planned into an itinerary. And, as we’re sitting, I come to the realization of just how similar we all are – we all appreciate a good meal, we all appreciate a good joke, all of our eyes shone brighter as soon as the baklava came on the table, and we all like people! That is what a smaller city gives you: the conditions for something real.
Being present, it turns out, is the whole point. A happy ESL teacher from Pegasus, Tetovo, Macedonia
