Hotel High Tech was right next to the theater in Bilbao and about a 30 minute walk away from the Guggenheim! It just celebrated its 100 year anniversary last year and it had wooden floors and a spiral staircase. It was SO cute. The rooms were awesome. There were two twin beds with CLEAN SHEETS, a ballin’ shower complete with water jets and 2 shower heads, and cable TV. I felt extremely pampered. Once we got settled in our rooms, we met Marcel for lunch at a tiny little restaurant by our hotel. Another beautiful thing about this excursion was that most of our meals were paid for. So basically everyone completely pigged out at these meals and didn’t eat any other time. After gorging ourselves, we had a little time in the hotel to nap and get ready for our walk and prepare our notes for the things we had been assigned to talk about. Well, it started raining…hard. And since Marcel wasn’t feeling too good he postponed the walk until later in the evening. After more napping and more relaxing, we tried again and went regardless of the rain. It wasn’t going to stop so it was pointless to not go. Everyone wanted to see the city anyway. We ended up going to a brand new public space by a cool architect and saw a comic book exhibit. Again, I was shocked by the nudity and the lack of discretion when it came to these comics. There were some pretty graphic ones, haha. (Pun intended.) When we left there, it had finally stopped raining so we were able to see the part of the city we were supposed to see Friday. It’s all very different from Barcelona. Bilbao is MUCH cleaner, smells better, the people seem nicer and take better care of themselves and generally are better looking, and it seems to have more greenery, which feels more comfortable to me.
On our walk we visited one of the plazas and had a quick photography lesson on shutter speed. We had to take a picture of the fountain with moving water and still water. It was frustrating at first but once I got it, I was so excited! We made it back to the hotel and after showering and reading for a little bit, I passed out. It was SO nice to be in air conditioning again.
The next morning we got free breakfast from the hotel, so everyone had at least 3 plates from the breakfast buffet. I had 4, I’m not even going to lie. Nutella croissants, potato and egg quiche, scrambled eggs, and coffeecoffeecoffee. Mmm. Best breakfast on the trip so far. We were on our own for lunch on Thursday, hence the gluttony. The Guggenheim was the only thing on the agenda, so after breakfast we walked across the bridge and saw the other side of the city and visited the Gugger. It started raining almost as soon as we got there but I was so glad it held off as long as it did. That was the only time we were outside that it wasn’t pouring on us. We had from 12:30 to 5 to explore the Guggenheim, which was the perfect amount of time.
The first exhibit we went to were these HUGE, tree sized metal shapes that you could walk through. It’s hard to explain. They were very ominous, I thought, but someone I was with said they thought they were peaceful.
There was also a room of paintings and sculptures. My favorite painting was one that the artist, Yves Klein, had painted naked women and had them roll around on a canvas. So it was just blue paint smeared on a huge white canvas. That artist died at 34 from a heart attack. I’m sure that wasn’t drug related.
Next, the entire second floor was dedicated to Anish Kapoor, who designed The Bean in Chicago, which pretty much everyone knows about. His big thing is art that doesn’t require the artist’s hand. So there was an entire room filled with what looked like concrete poop that he had designed a machine specifically to make these weird concrete designs. They were interesting but literally…he almost titled the exhibit something to do with poop according to the commentary. There was also an entire room of mirrors, which was a lot of fun. Some of them were on the walls, some were rectangular, some were huge. It was really cool to see what would happen to you the closer you got and stuff. One of them made you look upside down until a certain point, then when you got closer you looked right side up. It was odd. My favorite thing though was one that had to do with pregnancy. It was on a wall and when you looked directly at it, you saw absolutely nothing, but when you stood perpendicular to it, there was a HUGE bump on the wall. It was nuts. Also, one of the bigger rooms had cannon in it that shot wax onto the wall in the corner. Because “the corner is culture” or something like that. We were actually able to see the museum worker fire the cannon. It wasn’t as exciting as we were hoping it was going to be, but it was still cool to see some dude load wax into a cannon and shoot it at a wall. Probably won’t ever see that again..
After we saw the cannon, we met to go to lunch. I tried really hard to not eat but gave in and bought a cheap sandwich, which turned out to be DELICIOUS. After some lunch, we headed back to the Gugger and finished out our time on the first and third floors. The third floor was meh…lots of junk art and paintings which aren’t my fav.
After the museum, most of the girls went on a mission to find warmer clothes. Barely any of us checked the weather before we left and we regretted that decision immensely when the temperature dropped to about 15°C (whatever that is in F…it’s COLD when it’s raining and you’re in shorts and a t shirt). Katie, Bridget and I lucked out and found a warm-ish sweater thing for around 8€. It was perfect. After chilling out at the hotel for a little while, we met for dinner with Marcel. Before we sat down, we stopped by a place to get some pintxos, which is basically Bilbao’s version of tapas but it also reminded me of an amuse-bouche . They were basically just bite-sized appetizers. At the restaurant, our waiter had paw prints tattooed on his neck and when he smiled, it looked like he had no front teeth but it was a classy place. I got the risotto, which I thought would be good since they make it on the Food Network all the time! Well, it was bland and kind of gross. When everyone saw the portions of our food, the waiter just laughed at us. Let’s just say Katie got four raviolis. Four. We were disappointed. So we made up for it with wine, and apparently were cut off by Marcel after 3 bottles, haha. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for him. I can only imagine how embarrassing we must be. After dinner, a group of us wanted to go out so we walked around until we found a nice little reggae bar, haha. It was nice and…relaxed…so it worked out, haha. We called it a night after seeing the dance off between a dredlocked man and a granny looking woman, which was pretty hilarious.
The next morning, breakfast pigout #2 occurred, this time complete with cheesecake. Yes, there is even dessert for breakfast in Spain. They don’t skimp. We met for 10:30 to check out of the hotel and then went to the Cathedral. As beautiful as it was and as cool as it was to hear the story of the Cathedral, I feel like they’re all the same in every city I visit. I always feel so cold and empty inside them because they’re all so massive. We also visited the biggest market in Europe that is currently undergoing what looked like MAJOR construction so it was probably smaller than La Boquiera. Still cool though, kinda fishy. It was pouring the entire time that we walked around and I was incredibly happy when we stopped in a restaurant for lunch after just 3 hours. Lunch wasn’t that exciting. I didn’t want to deal with fish bones anymore and my only other option was chicken, which I generally hate. Yep, still hate it even in Spain. It was worth a shot.
After lunch we had about an hour of free time, so of course the girls went shopping. First Corte Ingles, then Sephora, then H&M. At 5:40 we left the hotel and met the (party) bus to go back to the airport. It was raining pretty hard so our flight was delayed about an hour and after spending many hours in the airport we finally made it back to Barcelona at about 10:30.
Marcel warned us about being too comfortable feeling and being too lenient with our stuff and just let us know we still needed to be careful and aware of our surroundings. Well, on the subway home a guy tried to steal from Vincent. I saw the aftermath, him snatching his hand away from Vincent once he figured out what was happening. It was kind of scary. They were obvious about it but I just can’t believe it happened right after Marcel said something. It’s a good thing he did though because we were all on our guard.
Bilbao was absolutely beautiful. I’m so sad it rained so much while we were there but it was still so much fun. The city was incredibly easy to maneuver around, which I liked a lot. I never once had to pull out a map. Once we walked it once, I felt good walking around on my own. I felt safe and so clean. I always feel dirty in Barcelona. I can’t wait to see what Madrid and Grenada are like.
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