Hello faithful readers! This is the delayed second half of my trip to Basque country. After the resort town of San Sebantián I moved on to Bilbao. At first I didn’t particularly like Bilbao. It was dirtier, noisier and harder to get around. The architecture was at times ugly and industrial. Public transportation left much to be desired without a fixed schedule. I’m sorry, but a bus simply “coming every 30 minutes” can mean anything from a 1 to 29 minute wait, at which point I probably should just walk. But after the first day or so I began to appreciate the mix of architecture, the fact that people actually lived there rather than it being a vacation city, the huge variety of museums, its colourful history and the revitalization it has undergone in the last two decades, transforming itself from a broke former-shipyard town into a modern happening city.
By far the top tourist attraction is the Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry which helped put Bilbao on the map. One is hard pressed to find any straight lines on the building at all except for the floor. I have a lot of respect for the engineers who realized Frank Gehry’s vision. The less-than-a-mm-thick titanium has a soft gleam. It’s supposed to be reminiscent of fish scales, but after walking around it from different perspectives, silver boats, waves and toppling wedding cakes all come to mind as well. Thanks to random fellow-traveller Bruno for some of these Guggenheim pics.
View at night:
Lots of art on the outside to welcome visitors:
And on the inside are lots of modern art goodies as well. Since photos aren’t allowed the only one I have is off of Wikipedia from Richard Serra called “the matter of time”. Visitors wander around following the curves of geometric shapes on the inside. I didn’t reach the enlightenment described on the audioguide and actually just felt a little dizzy.
All in all I think the Guggenheim lived up to its hype both inside and out. The collection itself inside was striking. The first piece one sees upon entering the atrium is called “Inopportune Stage One” by Cai Guo-Quiang, eight sedans arranged in a circle with pulsating wands of light coming out of each representing the volatile and explosive nature of the American dream. The same artist also uses gunpowder as his preferred medium. He usually carefully lays out the gunpowder in various forms, lights it and displays the charred paper where certain areas have been carefully covered to create forms from the light and dark.
Other things I saw at the Guggenheim included a pack of 99 wolves leaping in an arc through the air and crashing against an invisible wall, then re-starting the cycle (meant to symbolize humanity’s destructive pack mentality) and a video which followed only Zidane (now unfortunately famous because of his head butt during the World Cup) during an entire soccer match with 17 cameras in order to gain “psychological insight on one of the most amazing athletes of our time”. There was also a special exhibit on Murakami, a tongue-in-cheek master of anime and manga (Japanese comic book style). He is a little like the Andy Warhol of Japan, not really my style, but interesting nonetheless.
But there is more to Bilbao than simply the Guggenheim. They have revitalized the waterfront estuary where the shipyards once were with a tree-lined path for pedestrians. Bilbao has a "spandex path" just like Calgary ;)
Dense inner-city
My very knowledgeable and pink-loving walking tour guide:
Funky ceiling art in the old town.
I also visited a nearby town with a famous “Puente Colgante” (hanging bridge) joining the town of Gexto to its neighbour across the river. For a century it was almost the only spot to cross the river. It was designed in 1893 by a student of Eiffel. Looks similar eh?
There were great views from the top:
Nearby beach where I took advantage of a sunny Easter Monday.
