"You'll struggle down south – their accent is really difficult to understand." This from a San Sebastian local a few months ago when we told him about our impending move to Jerez, at the opposite end of the country.

When you come to San Sebastian, you should avoid the places you've read about and seen on TV. Not because they're no good, but that they're full of tourists who've all seen the same lazy YouTube clip.

If you've read my post on how to eat out in San Sebastian, you'll know to avoid any place that has a queue outside – because within five minutes' walk there are 50 places as good or better.

When you read up on the food scene before you visit a new town you’ll inevitably find dozens of articles with titles like ‘The 10 best places to eat in …’ In San Sebastian, such a notion doesn’t make much sense. There are around 200 eateries within 15 minutes walk

A common sight in this neck of the woods is tourists with mildly shocked and confused expressions on their faces as they enter a pintxo bar for the first time. It can be a little overwhelming, particularly when it's busy, so here's a brief guide to ordering food like a local.

Google Translate often won't help you identify menu items. While lots of bars in Basque Country have an English menu, they've often been written by someone local who himself has used Google Translate.

Back to our second day in Spain nearly two years ago. We're stocking up on groceries. We've unloaded our cart onto the conveyor belt and everything is going dandy. Then the checkout lady picked up our bag of potatoes an ran off with them, leaving us and a growing queue of people behinds us baffled and angry, respectively.

I've always been tempted to try to make some money on the side as a street artist. I can't draw, but I can write. I imagine sitting down with a couple of tourists and carefully composing an elegant word-portrait along the lines of “You are a fat balding German man with expensive but ill-fitting clothes and a wife who's obviously only with you for your money.”

I remember a few years ago in a busy shopping centre Jess announced that she really needed a toilet, could I see any signs? I answered that no, she looked perfectly comfortable to me.

This is the view from my face most mornings from about 6am. It's blurry because I don't have my glasses on yet. It's effectively my daily friendly reminder that the cat is empty. Somewhere along Ted's six-day odyssey to Spain the evil shipmasters chopped off some of his mane, presumably because it was covered in poop.

It's been a rough few weeks for the cat and also for the toilet officer in our house but thankfully the fluffy little bastard is his old self again. The cat, I mean. So now when we go out we can be reasonably sure that we won't be returning home to any cat-related floor schmeers.

This is one of the plazas in which the annual winter festival culminates in the ceremonial 'burial of the sardine'. According to the government website we were right on time – 7.31pm – yet, as you can see, there's not one sardine in sight nor are there sufficient personnel on hand to bury it even though the hole required presumably could be quite small.

I'd rather have my scrotum caught in a revolving door than go to a supermarket on a Saturday morning. In Spain they do have equivalent supermarkets – many with revolving doors, so there are some intriguing possibilities opening up – but reliance by locals on these corporate behemoths is a lot lower than it is in Australia.

"That fat woman over there eats too much food," she said, rather more loudly than I had anticipated.

We're sitting on the hard floor in an apartment with no furniture watching our cat Ted, heavily burdened with diarrhoea, scrooching his arse along the otherwise pristine vinyl in an attempt to clean himself after a particularly nasty litter box event.