Welcome to Bilbao

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This morning, we woke up and found that only three people from our group could attend the closing ceremonies for the Tolosa Festival, so we took a vote and decided to just come directly to Bilbao.

Our hotel, Hotel Hesperia, is really quite nice. It’s another contemporary space. Very clean and nicely appointed. And FREE WiFi that works!

Since we arrived early, we got an earlier admittance into the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. The same guy who designed the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles designed the building. It’s really cool. There is a statue of a slightly abstract spider outside. The spider is thirty feet tall, created by a lady named Louise Bourgeois. On the audio tour thingy, it said that she named the spider “Maman” (Mommy) because she saw her ailing mother in the same light. A weaver who was strong but frail.

There was a very large installation inside by Richard Serra – it’s the kind of thing that you can walk through – made from steel. It’s titled “A Matter of Time.” Lots of curves and cool lines and it created some interesting acoustics. There were a few other things by Serra there, which were interesting, but the big installation was awesome. There were also several items from Constantin Brancusi, which were kinda cool. A lot of what they had was abstract, which isn’t generally my cup of tea, but I appreciate the art, anyway.

Aside from Serra's piece, I'd say that my favorite installation was by Jenny Holzer, it is located off the main room of the Guggenheim, with tall LED columns of text in English and Spanish (red, on the front side) and Basque (blue, on the back side), it is random sayings that were originally inspired by people dealing with HIV and AIDS.

There was a gallery set-up with all abstract paintings, including two by Jackson Pollack. Some of the pieces were very cool. One was called “Vibration” – it was metal squares mounted on a wooden canvas with straight lines behind it very close to each other. The lines made it so that when you walked past, the metal squares seemed to be vibrating. I don’t know that I can really do the piece justice in my descriptions and we couldn’t take photos in the museum, but it was damned cool.

After checking out the Guggenheim, Daniel and I came back to the hotel and have been chilling since. Tomorrow, we part ways with the rest of the choir and head to Tiedra, near Valladolid.

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