Day 23: Basque to Andalusia

Another crystal clear sky bluebird day in Bilbao. We set off from the hotel after checking out and wander up along the river and over the Zibuzuri bridge into town. Bilbao is such a modern city now. All the new infrastructure and transport are seamless with the existing grain of the city. There's the Norman foster metro stop entrances, known as Fosteritos and then the tram line along the river, with its tracks that run in a lawned garden in between the tree lined streets. Everything here has a sense of design and quality about it.

 We wander into the Jardines de Albia, a small but beautiful shaded formal park, before heading to an old cafe bar called Cafe Iruña for some breakie, well a juice, coffee and pastry really. The inside is an elaborate mix of patterned wall tiles, floor mosaics and intricate carved detailing in the coffered ceilings. Feels very old worldy, a place that Hemmingway would've frequented. 

We then head back through the town along Mazzarredo Zumarkalea, a ring road that defines the inner core to the riverfront. We turn and head for the Guggenheim museum, stopping to take some photos from the bridge above it, Salbeko Zubia. This building is enormous and extravagant in detail to the point of fussy at times. 

 

 

We reach the entry forecourt, guarded by the large 12m tall flowery dog public artwork.  We head into the gallery which is rather awkward as you descend down a very shallow stair. I guess you could call them stairs although each tread is like a metre in length. It's very uncomfortable. The building has a very sculptural quality and light and shadow are key to the facade and architecture. But spatially it's a little alienating. Even weirder is the entry door. A simple set of small glass French doors set into a huge curtain wall of glass. Very strange. 

Entering into the main foyer of the building and I'm now impressed. Listening to the audio guide given to you when you enter, we hear Gehry talk about this space as the heart of the building, with the lifts, stairs and ramps as the arteries. It makes sense. Most interesting is the light quality in here. It's a beautiful space, but very big and somewhat overly generous with circulation. 

 

We head into the galleries, starting with the large fish room with all the Richard Serra double curved weathered steel sculptures. These things are ginormous. It's great to see them and experience the concave and convex spatial forms in person after studying them at Uni. The room off to the side explaining serra's work, the production of the enormous steel structures and how they got into the gallery is fascinating. I spend ages in here before sim tells me we should move on as we don't have too much time here. This fish room is enormous and seemingly takes up half the gallery. 

 

 
 
 

We then head into the andy Warhol temporary exhibit, 102 panels of large screen prints of the same image but each treated differently and each butted up against the next. It's another large room but it works for these pieces as they all fit in, wrapping the walls of the whole space. I like how Warhol as an artist thought about how his works would be displayed in a space. 

We then head into another temporary exhibit on the Paris avant garde era starting at the turn of the 20th century and coinciding with the Paris expo of 1900. I spend a good 10mins looking at the enormous aerial photograph at the gallery entry which shows the expo area of Paris with all it's pavilions and grand halls in the Trocadero surrounding the central Eiffel Tower. It's changed so much from them it would seem. 

The exhibition features some familiar names of the recent weeks, Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, Tanguy, Calder and Matisse to name a few. All different works however and still very interesting. 

 

We head out and up into a whole floor dedicated to Bouguise, the sculptor behind the large spider on the riverfront in front of the Guggenheim. She did 8 of these spiders, as well as many other large and I must say, weird works. They all seemed quite personal and symbolic. With museum fatigue setting in we wander back down through the cavernous atrium. Gehry for me creates a lot of superfluous space in his buildings. I found it a similar experience to the inside of his Ultimo UTS building, where the external curving building fabric creates a large distance between the functional area and the exterior. What's leftover is somewhat useless space. In a gallery it kind of works and adds to the architecture, but at the same time you can't help but think it's all a but indulgent on the part of the architect. 

We head out through the gift shop. (Gallery gift shops always have such cool things, not to mention good architecture books). We walk through the exit, yes it's another unceremonious standard scale glass swing door, and head back around to the front and into town. 

It's now 1:30pm and we sort out some lunch, trying a small pintxos bar again. This one was good as they heated up your food you selected, but still I'm not amazed. Best thing about pintxos for me is that it gives you an excuse to have a beer. 

We head back along the river, over Caltrava's Zibuzuri bridge for the last time and catch a taxi to the Calatrava designed airport. This guy is a sculptor of structure. Very expressive. Steel is his clay, and then he paints it all white. 

We board our plane to Barcelona and land about 5:30. I'm keen to head to a bar in the airport and just sit and drink a few beers and watch the euro. But nowhere has a tv that is showing it. Crazy. Bloody beIN sports. 

 

We finally take off, after a long delay and get to Granada just on 11pm. It's been a lot of sitting around this evening. I'm over airports. 

We try to catch a taxi into Granada from the airport along with the rest of the plane it would seem. There's none around so everyone makes a beeline for the bus. At €2.70 it's a steal. We hop on the bus, and our phone battery dies. Not really knowing where we are heading and where we need to get off, we catch it to the town centre and then get a taxi to our hotel. 

Turns out to be a good move as we are staying up in the Albaicin, the old Islamic quarter hill town overlooking the Alhambra. Would've been a nightmare lugging up those stone streets with our luggage. The taxi winds its way through the narrow streets. It's approaching midnight and we're slightly anxious as the hotel check in closes at midnight apparently. Adding to the drama a garbage truck turns in front of us. It's rather annoying,m. Apart from the smell, it keeps stopping to pick up the town bins. A 2 minute trip turns into a 15minute pain in the arse. 

Nonetheless it offers us an insight into the waste collection of the town. For those of you avidly following, you may recall my intrigue into waste collection in other cities. Well it seems those underground bins are operated by a hydraulic lift that the garbo presses. Quite an ingenious if not expensive system. 

We eventually arrive at our hotel, Santa Isabel La Real. It's a typical Carmen house building of the Albaicin, White painted brick with an internal square courtyard and a water fountain in the centre. It's a very cool typology. 

A very softly spoken and gentle lady answers the large wooden barn door and ushers us in as if we're taking refuge. Feels like we're Mary and Joseph asking for a room at an Inn in Bethlehem. 

After a long and somewhat taxing journey from Basque in the north of Spain, to Andalusia in the south, we hit the hay, (not literally, we have pillows. Unlike Mary and Joseph we luckily didn't end up in a stable).

mat + sim