Bilbo

I suppose I should have known that a city who shares its name (in its native language) with a Tolkien character would be good, I suppose.

I arrived on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday I visited the tourist office and the theater box office (where I purchased 2 Euro tickets to the symphony at noon on Sunday, which is in a nice old theatre.) My last day in Sevilla, my only pair of jeans developed a hole in the butt, and I happened to run across a thrift store so I replaced them with a pair of blue-green corduroy jeans from Mango, a popular chain in Europe. And I visted the market where I bought strawberries, clementines, a red pepper, some carrots, and some manchego for snack dinners. In the afternoon I visited the museum of Basque history, which was all in Spanish and Basque, so I don´t feel I really absorbed all that much. I think I learned more from the guide book, but at least I´m supporting the local institutions, eh? The basque do have an interesting and very long history - they´ve been here so long they have no migration story which is rare even in Europe. On wednesday I visited the Museum of Fine arts, which has some nice impressionist paintings by locals, along with the requisite religious art from the 1400s-1800s. They also had a temporary exhibit of portraits of famous Spanish people throughout history, but I didn´t spend that much time in it because once again, I couldn´t really read the captions, and I don´t like portraits that much.

Yesterday I took the commuter train to Guernica, which has titled itself ¨city of peace¨although it is famous for being the Nazi´s practice run for the bombing of cities during WWII. I visited the peace museum which documents the bombings but also has a lot of stuff about peace and human rights in general, which is probably quite interesting if you can read it (once again captions in Spanish and Basque.) (I´m not trying to whine about how the whole world hasn´t yet been translated into English yet, I´m just saying I would have gotten more out of the museum if I was fluent in one of the languages the displays, quotes, etc were in.) But all in all I think the peace museum is a really cool idea and I´m glad I got to visit it. I went on to the Basque history museum, which also didn´t have much in the way of english descriptions, but had nice visuals of traditional costumes, games, dances, food etc. And then I saw the remains of the oak tree where the basques have been practicing a form of democratic government for hundreds of years (when they were alowed to by various conquering kings etc.) I thought that was pretty cool. Too bad I didn´t learn about it earlier when I spent a year in High School studying democratic forms of government - maybe ETA prevents Americans from teaching about the Basque, or maybe there just aren´t enough of them? Anyway, a visit to the tile relpica of Picasso´s ¨Guernica¨and a late lunch at a local restaruant rounded out my visit to Guernika.

On my return to Bilbao, I felt inspired to do some shoe shopping in the old town. (I want a pair of traditionally spanish looking dance shoes) But instead what I found was the Mango outlet store, where I bought another pair of corduroys for 2 euros (New!) two more pink skirts, one corduroy (2 euros) and one velvet (4 euros), a pair of capris/long dress shorts which are really popular here (4 euros) and a fake fur collar (3 euros, why not?) I think I can now say that I have a well rounded, and possibly complete, selection of pink skirts, having also bought a pink corduroy skirt in Budapest. I didn´t find the perfect shoes but I´ll keep looking.

Today I moved hotel rooms - after some confusion in booking I ended up on the 1st floor of the building in the Hostal Begonia for the first 3 nights and will be in the Pension Bilbao on the 5th floor for the last three. Then I headed to the Gugenheim museum which is one of Frank Gehry´s masterpieces. It rained off and off, often quite hard, all day, but I tried to see it from as many angles as practical despite the rain. It is a really beautiful building, from the outside particularly, but also inside. I also had a delicious lunch in the cafe which is known for basque neuvo cuisine and does a fixed price lunch. I had leek soup with some sort of fish cream concentrate the texture of tofu in it (sounds gross but it grows on you) and bulls tail cannelloni with some sort of squash puree, and delicious arroz con leche (rice pudding, which I have been craving.)

Tomorrow I´ll check out San Sebastian / Donostia. No pictures because this comute doesn´t appear to have USB capabilities.