Arrival in Bilbao

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The journey to Bilbao was actually pretty painless. I was anticipating major trouble since, in their foresight, the Spanish and French trains run on different gauges and the whole Spanish public transporation system is not supposed to be very good. You would not know it from our trip though. After an interesting trip to the train station, we just rode the train for forty minutes to Irun, which is the first town on the Spanish side of the border, and hopped on the bus to Bilbao that left ten minutes later. (Patrice got pulled over by the flamboyant French police. Instead of pulling him over in a car, the tight pants and high boots wearing cop stepped out from behind a building and pointed at the car. Poor Patrice managed to talk his way down to a 90 euro ticket when the cop had apparently first told him that he was going to take his license away. The funny part was that, in addition to his usual reaction to stress of smoking cigarettes, Patrice proceeded to speed even more after he got the ticket.) The drive down was very pretty and it was interesting to see the differences between the two sides of the border. The French side is very flat and agrarian, while the Spanish side was much more mountainous and industrial. Unfortunately, we had to walk across town in order to find the hostel, which we picked at random. Luckily, we pretty much have the place to ourselves and we got the best room in the place for twenty euros a night apiece. Anyway, Mat and I took a nap upon arrival, woke up at 11, ate some kabob, wandered around a bit, and went back to bed. This morning we went to the Guggenheim for a few hours. I think I enjoyed Guggenheim as much I have ever enjoyed a museum before. We went through a couple modern art exhibits and part of a Russian exhibit before Mat got hungry. We had lunch as a subpar Chinese place and then met Laura, Kay, Aaron, and Christine by chance on the way back to the Guggenheim (We knew they would be in Bilbao, but we didn’t work anything out). We just finished working out at their hotel and now we’re going to dinner. It is very nice to be able to understand the language again.

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Comments

[Steph]

Ah! I remember taking that train. I love the Basque country, it is so beautiful. Did they still have that huge flower dog in from of the museum. Well minor detail. Hope you are enjoyed Bilbao

[Kate]

Wow. You've got to love European transit. All these stories sound fantastic. Glad to hear you're back in a land where people speak a language you speak. Did you end up picking up on much French?