Adventures off the bottom of the map

Today's post title is stolen from M, fellow traveler extraordinaire who won my everlasting admiration for trekking through northern Spain with me while pulling her own weight and battling a nasty head cold. We parted ways at Madrid's Atocha train station on the 22nd, she to Malaga and I to Paris.

Oh, god, Bilbao was so much walking. Entirely too much walking and standing still and walking some more. The youth hostel is in the suburbs on the southwestern end of town, and the Guggenheim is on the northwestern end. So. Much. Walking and getting lost and walking some more ... and it didn't help that we started out on the southern edge of the map, then took a wrong turn (damn highway construction!) and fell off the map for a while. Whoops.

We did eventually make it to the Guggenheim though, and seriously, this place is mind-bogglingly (or bloggingly? heh) awesome. We spent a total of about six hours wandering in and around the museum, taking in all the installation pieces and admiring Frank Gehry´s architectural genius. Although the building is mostly made of limestone, titanium, and glass, inside I felt lightness and movement rather than heavy industrial building materials.

There was a special exhibit on Cy Twombly and his work at various stages of his life, which showed the influence of different artistic trends on his style. I really liked his latest Pop Art-inspired pieces, big red flowers on a bright yellow field. There was also a selection of items from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, organized by Portraits, Landscapes, Coins/Medals, the Nude, etc. I can't wait to visit the KHM itself, later this trip!

Lunch was sitting outside on the museum terrace and dodging bemused waiter´s glances. Baguette, carrots, chorizo, clementines, and taking pictures for other tourists. A group of children on a field trip stopped by the terrace to get out of the rain while their chaperones negotiated tickets downstairs.

The festival the next day was delicious, and so much fun! There were far more people than I thought lived in Bilbao, and the women and children all dressed up in traditional clothes. Of course, this being Spain there were also living statues performing, including this cowboy who was spray-painted silver all over. He had a really good act going on and interacted with his audience using whirrs and clicks and whistles, and had candy for the children who were brave enough to go near and give him money.

The smells of grilled meat and roasted chestnuts was pervasive, and oh so enticing. Lamb in tortilla is seriously tasty, and I really want to try murcillo (blood sausage) someday. We sat on a bench in the middle of the fair to eat lunch, and all around us were people eating, chatting, and (in typical Spanish fashion) boozing it up at 2pm. (The food stalls cut a channel into the corks of the wine bottles to making pouring easier for their customers.) We happened to be next to a foursome of loud and tipsy women, who liked the fair so much they started singing and dancing sevillanas. This was only slightly hampered by the half-eaten tortillas in their hands, which they ended up waving around like fans ... I love Spain.

We spent most of the day at the fair, poking around the craft booths hosted by local artisans and sampling award-winning cheeses. There's a turrón shop in the old part of town that's been in existence since the 1800's, that sells excellent turrón and marzipan candies - their marzipan puppies are almost too cute to eat! I also tried pastel vasco for the first time, and good lord it is tasty. It has a cookie-like outer covering, and the inside tastes kind of like vanilla pudding but the texture is a bit firmer. Delicious!

This is Basque country though, and the festival was a celebration of entirely un-Spanish identity. So considering the steadily rising BAC of the general populace, perhaps it wasn't surprising that the fair went BOOM periodically. We never could figure out where it came from, but my guess was that readily available alcohol + (also readily available) cigarette lighters = charred and gently smoking garbage bins.

The next day we headed to Portugalete and Getxo, two small, lovely towns separated by the Nervión River in the suburbs of Bilbao. Their main claim on the guidebooks is the Vizcaya commuter bridge, which was the first of its kind at the end of the 19th century and costs five euros to walk across but 0.30 cents to ride the ferry (wtf?!). The architect was a disciple of Gustav Eiffel, and you can really see the influence of the Tower on the bridge. While looking for the tourist information booth, we stumbled onto the Sunday afternoon promenade crowd along the beach, with grannies and prams in tow. The Spanish (or is it European?) penchant for dressing their offspring in identical outfits is ridiculously cute, and gave an early 20th century air to the whole afternoon.

My host mother in Cordoba had likened going to Bilbao to visiting a different country, and after those three too-short days I have to agree. The architecture of the old town is more reminiscent of Swiss townhouses than the traditional Spanish houses with central patios, and the feeling of the city is different from any other Spanish city I've been in. Also, the near-constant rain coats everything in GREEN, the only other place I've seen that much green is in Ireland. We were lucky though - in our three days we caught the first two days of sunshine they'd had in two months!