Bilbao Baggins

8 Apr - Day 24

When you go travelling, you realise how much of your everyday life you take for granted: the familiarity of your own toilet seat, understanding what people are saying on TV and not having to sleep in the same room as your snoring father. The Artetxe Hotel has none of these comforts but is a very nice hotel nonetheless, probably the best we have stayed in so far. Our room is very roomy (in the sense that there is a lot of space, not that it has a room-like nature [which it does]) and is very modern with a great view of Bilbao.

The only drawback is that it is quite far from the city (hence the great view) so we take a half hour bus ride into town.

I didn't actually know Bilbao was a place that existed until a few days before we arrived so I was surprised to find that it is a very modern city and very spacious as well, a nice change from the cramped sidewalks of Paris and Bordeaux. Big wide boulevards stretch on for ages, especially along the riverside, and there are playgrounds everywhere. If I wasn't three times the weight of the kind of person who should be playing in them, I would spend all day jumping from playground to playground.

The first place we visited was the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, the city's fine arts museum. This featured a large collection of works from over the centuries and was very impressive, with lots of well painted paintings and masterfully sculpted sculptures. But no matter skillfuly they are done, I always end up finding that the plain old fruit bowls and the portraits of people who I don't even know get a bit repetitive and boring. If it were my gallery, I would hang up epic tapestries of Hercules throwing mythical creatures halfway across a room in the fiery pits of Hades or a Tyrannosauros locked in fierce battle with a axe-wielding cave man riding a Triceratops, but I guess that's why I'm not a museum curator.

Having done this, we found a restaurant in which to have lunch. After selecting our meals from an incomprehensible menu and giving our orders to a waitress who we couldn't understand, we sat back and hoped we hadn't asked for something horrifying like a horse's large intestine stuffed with its own brain. I did at least, dad played it safe by ordering steak. Fortunately, it only turned out to be ox tail, which is at least not part of any animal's digestive tract.

The Guggenheim Museum was up next on our list of things to go see. The Guggenheim is the hilariously named, hilarious looking building that sits on the edge of whatever river it is that runs through Bilbao.

We managed to walk its entire perimeter before finding the entrance but that was okay since it is a very interesting building to look at, with a big puppy made of flowers at the front door.

We had bought a museum pass at the Fine Arts museum so that we wouldn't have to queue for tickets when we got to the Guggenheim. As it turned out, there weren't any queues that needed skipping and we got sent back to the front desk anyway to exchange our pass for actual tickets.

There are only three floors in the Guggenheim and they were smaller than I expected. I suppose being a completely insane piece of architecture takes up a lot of interior space.

The first exhibition we saw was by Richard Serra, which was pretty cool if you like gigantic sheets of metal embedded in the floor. One of his works was a tall spiral structure and if you walk through to the middle, you are rewarded with absolutely nothing except another big wall of metal. One of my highlights of the visit was watching this particular work from the floor above. One guy made the longish trek through the spiral and finally, when he got to the end, made the most unimpressed face I have ever seen.

Another exhibit we visited was called the Inverted Mirror. I was expecting some crazy optical illusion but in fact it was just a few regular mirrors and some canvases.

The Guggenheim is by no means a bad museum. I thoroughly enjoyed walking through the building but I don't get art at all and modern art in particular goes way over my head. My sentiments were succintly summarised by a seven year old French boy who walked into one of the galleries and loudly proclaimed "wow, c'est bizzare!". That pretty much sums up my comprehension of contemporary art.

After leaving the Guggenheim, we embarked on a long and utlimately futile search for the bus stop from which to catch our bus. Failing this, we decided to walk back up the hill to the hotel for a highly nutritious dinner of apples and potato chips.

9 Apr - Day 25

Today being a Monday and having significantly better weather, we expected the city to be bustling with excitement. But when we hopped off the bus, we were greeted with a scene that would not be out of place in a zombie apocalypse movie, though admittedly with less decomposing corpses stumbling around on the streets. No one was about and all the shops were closed.

Regardless, we had a very pleasant stroll along the waterfront and I decided that Bilbao is probably the nicest city we have visited so far.

Due to the deserted state of the city, we assumed that because Monday sounds so similar to Sunday, the Spanish just combined the two together to add an extra 24 hours onto the weekend. We only realised about halfway through the day that it was Easter Monday and everyone was on holiday.

 

Consequently, the day mainly consisted of us walking around looking for something that was open except for the few times when we sat down to decide which direction we should walk in. We passed through a few open air market places, walked in a few circles and went to a very cool mediatheque that would have been even cooler if I knew how to read Spanish. However, they did have free wifi which usually makes everything ok. And toilets. Those are pretty cool too.