Week 3 – Thursday 17th July – Bilbao and Suances

Boy, do the Europeans love their small yappy dogs. Everywhere we go we have to watch to make sure we don’t step on them. I’m reminded of it, while we listen to three of them having a ding-dong fight on the other side of the street.

Checking out of the Hotel Pampinot in Hondarribbia, we got on the motorway to Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum. It was a cooler day, so it made driving with the roof down very pleasant, until it started to rain. That was OK, it stopped before we got to Bilbao.

So, the Guggenheim – what a building, in fact what an area. Outside the museum is “puppy” the 30m high floral sculpture of a puppy that started off as a temporary exhibition, but because of it’s popularity is now a permanent feature of the entrance to the museum. The building itself is a masterpiece construction of titanium, glass and stone, set in a large park beside the Nervion River. The museum, which is a stylized rendition of a ship is set between two bridges on the river and had a garden and river walk way surrounding it, so it is possible to get many different views of the building from lots of different elevations. The inspiration for the design is to create the illusion that the ship is moving up the river towards the city. Between the museum and the river is a shallow pool, with a bridge walkway over it, to create the link between the museum and the river.

We walked all the way around the Museum and over both the bridges. The bridge at the bow of the ship is accessed by climbing the stairs in a large tower that represents a sail. Although I’m not good with heights, I was ok with the metal meshed stairs that took you up to the level of the bridge, because they were all within the structure of the sail. It was the solid metal bridge that went over open space from the sail back to the bridge that made me feel a bit queasy. From the bridge, we looked out over another pool on the other side of the ship. Lots of people had thrown coins in the pool beside the river, but this other pool was about 40metres below the level of the bridge and so throwing a coin from there seemed like much more fun – so Anne and I did. And we watched our coins sail down and go ‘plop’ in the pool. Because the pool is only shallow, we could see the coins sitting on the bottom and ours were the only two coins in that pool.

Having walked right around the Museum, viewed it from a range of angles and elevations and been impressed by what we saw, we decided we should “pays our money and takes our chances” about what might be inside. Art galleries can be a bit of a lottery, you never quite know what you are going to get inside and we were quite disappointed by the Peggy Guggenheim we’d visited in Venice last year. Nonetheless, this was a great building and the art inside would surely be great, wouldn’t it….surely.

Anyway, a quick summary. Ummm, interesting, but a lot of space for interesting. There isn’t really that much in it. If you took all the items in it, you wouldn’t fully clutter up a large room and it’s all very interpretive…hence the reason they give you the audio guide as part of your entrance fee. In one room, was a largish model of a train wreck, with the streets of a town built on the inside of the train. Also in the room were some paintings, so after learning about the train wreck, I pushed the audio guide number for the paintings, but instead got a dialogue about the artists fascination with hand rails and balconies. Huh? I had a look around, and sure enough on a 20 m wall, was an 8 foot handrail, nothing else on the wall just the hand rail. The audio told me the artist had attached a flick knife to the back of the hand rail to illustrate the hidden dangers that await us all. I wandered over to the hand rail and sure enough, there was a flick knife taped to the back of it….call me an artist… 1 million dollars….thank you…. Caching… How much dope did he smoke to come up with that.

The other major exhibition was by a guy who was fascinated with people, so lots of the rooms had human figures standing round, looking at balconies, listening to walls, talking in groups. In one massive room, the whole floor was covered in a 3-dimensional patterned lino. On one wall, was a model of a small child sitting on a ledge on the wall. That was all….that whole big room for that. After an hour and a half of that, I said to Anne, “somebody had better paint a picture pretty soon, or I’m outta here. And soon we both were.

Overall: Loved the building, could walk around it for hours. As for the art……tick…seen it.

Shamefully, we stopped for lunch at Burger King in the shopping mall where we had parked the car, as we wanted to get on the road to Suances. A shame really, because although it was a food court, the restaurants looked like they all served really nice food and all had linen table cloths and large wine glasses on the tables…not your average food court by any stretch of the imagination.

So off we went to Suances. Just a bit of a blast along the motorway, past Santander, which as the large ferry port is a large part of the reason for all the trucks on the road.
Suances is a beach resort on the Costa Verde. It’s a bit down market compared to what we’d seen at Biarritz, Hondarribbia and San Sebastian.