Rachel immediately forgot to turn the parking break off, revved the car, and took off at great speed, hitting a trash can. We didn't stop because no one was yelling at us and waving their arms. We then circled the garage twice because Rachel missed the exit. I was, at this point, anxious.
She got much better once we were on the highway, minus a few stalls at gas stations and toll booths, but Bilbao was another thing altogether. We were doing okay, except for almost getting hit by a bus (their fault, actually), until the road finally went past our hostel - and within a hundred feet turned into a tunnel which took us several hundred feet up and at least half a mile away. Figuring out where we were was difficult, because the language of the hard-to-find road signs (Euskara) was often different from the language of the map (Spanish).
For those who do not know, Euskara is the language of the Basques, a mysterious language which has nothing to do with Spanish or, indeed, any other known language in the world. Linguists are puzzled. So were we.
Actually, Euskara and the entire history of the Basque country is fascinating, and I hope to find a good book on it when I return to the States. But for the half hour we were trying to find a parking spot, it was pretty annoying.
Anyway, we finally found our way back to the hostel and found a parking spot, and went out for our first pintxos, detailed in Rachel's last post.
Yesterday morning, we woke up after a long sleep, ate breakfast in the hostel, and headed to the Guggenheim.
This is the approach to the Guggeheim, which looks pretty fantastically weird.
This is Pupy, a Jeff Koons sculpture that was supposed to be a temporary installation. The people of Bilbao loved it, so they bought it. A gardener was adding flowers as we walked by.
The museum was fantastic, of course. There were two main exhibits: one was called The Luminous Interval and featured work from the past few decades that explores ideas of violence, mortality, etc. There were incredibly moving, immersive installations such as the one by Wangechi Mutu, which was a room with a bullet-riddled wall, a long table with fur-wrapped wine bottles suspended overhead and leaking slowly down onto it, and a large 'quilt' of different animal pelts hung at one end. It's hard to describe, but it evoked incredibly well the sense of excess and its corresponding violence present in the modern capitalist world. There were also very funny pieces, like the one by Mike Kelley which involved a port-a-potty with microphones in the toilet bowl connected to a loudspeaker on top, parodying the excess of overshare in our culture, and the surveillance this brings with it.
The other exhibit covered the two postwar decades of abstraction; the American abstract expressionists, action painters and color field painters; and the Europeans movements of art informel and CoBrA (for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, the home cities of the artists). That was a wonderful exhibit. The Bilbao Guggeheim is a great space to view these paintings, because the galleries are wide, expansive spaces, allowing the paintings to be viewed from a multitude of angles and distances, which is handy with the large canvases of Rothko and Louis, one of our favorite painters.
After the Guggenheim, we walked around the Casco Viejo, or Old Town. It was a pedestrian-only area, and full of restaurants, bars, and families on paseo. Rachel and I went to the recommended-by-the-smart-hostel-woman bar, Irrintxi, but they didn't start serving pintxos for another hour or so. We decided to walk around and with unnerring instinct found ourselves in the health/organic food store. We bought some spelt cookies and tofu-mushroom dip (mmm) and sat down next to the river to write some journal entries. Eventually we got into the bar and got some awesome pintxos and wine, and got back to our hotel without incident, unless you county Rachel sprinting down the river so she could get a video of some people rowing a boat.
Today we go to Pamplona.
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