Advertisement
Published: November 14th 2009
Edit Blog Post
We must surely be in a very relaxed mode because we didn’t wake up until 8am this morning.That is after 10 hours sleep!!!Or perhaps the 3 days on the road from Barcelona had taken the wind out of our sails and last night was catch up time.
We headed for Bilbao in the late morning with the plan to take in the Guggenheim and the old city and anything else that we see in between.
The drive into Bilbao is along a narrow valley similar to the one that we travelled on to reach Areatza yesterday.
People here are housed in apartments and the buildings are located all over the place anywhere there is enough flat space to put one up.They are rather ugly in design and painted in dour colours but we suppose at the end of the day they are functionable and that is all that matters when you have a large population to house where space is very limited.
So the drive through the outer suburbs of Bilbao winds its way through all these apartment blocks and eventually we emerge above the city itself which takes up all the flat land where the river approaches the sea.
The
Guggenheim gallery dominates the view as we drive down the valley towards the city and we use that as a landmark as we look for a car park which in the end we found quite easily.
We got a good vantage point on the bridge across the river so we could photograph the very large Guggenheim building and then walked around the whole building as the angles and ways of photographing it changed at every turn.
We had a look at what was on exhibit to decide whether we would spend some time inside but the major exhibition was from Frank Lloyd Wright and we have seen exhibits of his work before in Chicago so we decided not to part with €11 each to go inside.
We had lunch of delicious savoury and sweet pastries in a small park amongst the narrow central city streets and then headed over to the main shopping boulevard and then across the river to the old city area.
The principal church on the walking tour of the old city was closed and we couldn’t find any way to get inside which was a bit disappointing so we moved onto the main square and then
through the narrow alleyways to the marketplace which was also closed,this time for renovations.We were thwarted at every turn although the stroll along the alleyways was interesting enough.being early afternoon most of the family owned shops were closed for the afternoon siesta but the window shopping was interesting.
We headed back over to the main shopping boulevard and Gretchen went inside a large department store to see if she could find a new jacket for herself while I sat in the sun outside and did some people watching.
It hadn’t been a spectacular day of sightseeing and as we have said before we have seen so many wonderful places on this adventure that when we have a day of sightseeing like today we feel a bit let down by what we have seen although the Guggenheim was certainly worth the trip to Bilbao on its own.
The city area of Bilbao was nice and laid back with a lot of trees which in the height of summer would give plenty of shade.It would have left a better image on our minds had we not had to pass through the outer suburbs with all those ghastly apartment blocks.
The weather today
has been quite warm for this time of year at 21C and the with the wind now coming from the south it is no wonder that we were down to shirt sleeves today.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.119s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 15; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0882s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb