The more time I'm here, the more I realize that I'm living in a small town. I don't actually mean this in the same sense as growing up in a small town, which I did. In fact, if you look at the numbers San Sebastián isn't really all that small. According to Wikipedia, there are 183,090 people in San Sebastián itself, and 405,098 people in the "metropolitan" area - and if it's on Wikipedia, it must be true, right? [Side note: I am not sure what constitutes our "metropolitan area" unless they're counting all of Basque Country besides Bilbao. There aren't really suburbs here, just villages every few dozen kilometers ...]
I've spent the past 10 years living in cities, first Boston and then Chicago where I knew a lot of people, but didn't often see them when I was out and about in the city. It was pretty rare to run into people on the bus or train, even if we were coming from or going to the same location. If I went out with one group of friends, we wouldn't often run into another group of friends.
Here, everyone is everywhere. I haven't gotten on a bus since I got back where I haven't known at least one person by name. I run into people on the street or when I'm out with friends. Our Spanish teacher showed up at our music night last night. It turns out that she knows a bunch of our English teacher friends through the language teaching world and that she taught a bunch of other people that we know who were also there last night. It's not just me either. A guy who I always see got on the bus today, and knew another woman on the bus. At the next stop, someone else got on who knew them, and another person on the bus. It's a very tight, tiny, weird web here. But I'm starting to sort of like it.
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