Going to the Gugg: Guggenheim and a weekend In Bilbao, Spain

For part of this weekend I went to Bilbao, Spain. Bilbao is in northern Spain in the Basque Country. That doesn’t really mean anything except they get a lot of rain, they have nice beaches and they speak their own language (yes, you guessed it, its Basque, and it looks and sounds nothing like Spanish).

So anyways, I went with Syd, Marshall and Derek. Our flight was at 6:20 am and since the metro closes around 1:30 am/2ish and doesn’t open again until 6:30 am, we had to catch the last train and sleep at the airport. I, being spastically punctual, got on the metro at like 11:45 p.m. and got to the airport by 12:30ish. In retrospect, I should have waited until like 1 am or whatever the last possible metro was to get on. I had to make a connection to get to the airport though so I was nervous and I was too afraid to take a nap because I didn’t know if I would wake up in time for my flight.

When I got to the airport I was the first member of our group to get there and I decided to call the other members to see when they would be arriving. I didn’t have Derek’s number so I just called Syd, who didn’t answer, and then Marshall. Marshall answered and said they (him and Syd) wouldn’t be there until 2 am-ish or later. As it often does, my punctuality got the best of me so I decide set up camp.

I found a spot outside of security with a host of other people who were also camping out at the airport. I tried to pick a spot as far away from the fluorescent lights as possibly but it was difficult. I luckily packed a lot of sweaters and coats for the weekend and I was using my Vera Bradley duffle so I had a decent pillow for my head. The floor, however, was marble and super freezing. It never absorbed any body heat and no matter how long I laid on it, it was still ice cold.

I got about an hour-long nap in before I woke up to the vibrations of my phone. Marshall was calling to see where I was. They found me pretty easily and then we all laid down to attempt to sleep some more. It was probably one of the worst night sleeps of my life. I also had gone out the night before and had only gotten about 3 hours of sleep plus my Thursday schedule at school is class from 10am to 5pm straight thru with only 10 minutes between classes but this particular Thursday I got to skip my last class to go on a field trip from 4 to 6pm to the Prado museum with my Art History class. The field trip was wonderful but it was probably more tiring than my 3 hour painting class would have been.

              So, the two days before my trip I hadn’t really gotten any sleep and then I had a long day so I was pretty exhausted. Waiting for the flight felt like an eternity but we got on and made it to Bilbao without any problems. The only issue was we arrived in Bilbao at 7:30 am and our hostel didn’t let people check in until 12 pm. So we got some coffee at a place that was supposed to have the “best coffee in Bilbao”. It was good, but nothing earth-shattering.

            After the coffee, it was about 10 am (you really take your time at Spanish resturants and cafes, its actually pretty standard to spend about 3 hours at a sit down meal) and we decide we should at least check out the hostel; we had nothing else to do. I kind of wanted to go to the Guggenheim that day, just because we were up early and it was 10 am (which is when the museums opens) but no one else was really feeling it for today.

            We got to our hostel and it was really cute, colorful and tiny. This was only my second hostel experience (the first was in Barcelona) but I think they are fun because you always meet a lot of cool, young people who are traveling. I kind of forgot to take pictures of it but it is PilPil Hostel in Bilbao for anyone who really wants to look it up. It was nice, they had free coffee and tea all day, free breakfast, free tablets, bikes for rent, and a cute little common area (everything was IKEA, Europe loves IKEA) all for like 16 Euros a night.

We still couldn’t check in but the Hostel let us leave our bags there until we could check in. Their free breakfast was still open too so I took advantage of that and had two mini croissants. After that we decided we would just try and explore close to our Hostel until we could check in.

We found this cute little park called Parque de Doña Casilda Iturrizar right by our hostel and wandered around there. Of course, as is customary on all of my trips, it was raining and cloudy and dark. We found The Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao which was also close to our hostel (Bilbao is super tiny, its like a baby Madrid, and Madrid doesn’t even seem that big to me) and our Art History teacher had recommended we go there if we had time. They also were having a Fernando Botero exhibition currently (he does the really colorful cool paintings of fat people, you’d recognize it if you saw one) and it was only 4.50 Euros to get in with our student discount.

At the park

All of us at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao

The museum was cool and it killed the perfect amount of time. By the end of the two hours we were all dragging though. Syd and I needed a coffee I.V. and we all had to keep taking breaks and sitting on benches. We were all kind of hungry too and exhausted from not sleeping so when we finally checked into the hostel we all decided to nap. I slept for like 3 hours. It was great. When we finally woke up everyone was super hungry and we decided to search for food and also find this market that was supposed to be cool. We found a fabulous pastry place and I got a croissant cut in half and filled with whipped cream frosting. It was seriously heaven on earth. I should have taken a picture of it.
After extensive walking we finally found the market called Mercado de Ribera. It was about 4 pm at this time and we found that it was closed because it was siesta time. We were all getting tired again so we decided to take a coffee break again at a local café. After that we wandered in some stores and then went back to the market. The market was actually disgusting. All that was sold there was meat and fish and the entire place smelled like dead fish after a red tide. It was grotesque.

some church i thought was pretty

another pretty church

Main Plaza in Bilbao

Basque Country

When we left the market we were all hungry, only really having eaten those pastry and drinking a bunch of coffee that day and we decided to search for food. Once again, our timing was bad. Most places have lunch specials until 4ish and then close from 5 to 8pm and reopen for dinner. So it was like 6 pm at the time and nothing was open.
We decided to go back to the hostel and use the WIFI and search for good dinner places around our hostel. We found some places and then just around the stroke of 8, it started to monsoon. It was awful but expected with my typical rainy travel days (I haven’t gone somewhere yet that didn’t rain) so we just ran to the nearest resturant/bar and it happened to be a Chinese place. It was actually pretty good though a little pricey.
When dinner was over we wanted to go get drinks somewhere and we went to this place called World of Drinks or something, and got some cheap glasses of wine. It was nice. After that we wanted to find this place called Alhodiga we found in a pamphlet at the hostel that seemed like it could be interesting.
It was actually really cool. The place was huge and I guess it used to an old warehouse. It a giant space and then there were decorative pillars all over it. Each pillar was different. There was also a resturant, bar, swimming pool and movie theatre in there. It was really interesting.

The girls in Alhodiga

The boys

I like the spanish walk signs

The night was still young after that so we decided to check out the outside of the Guggenheim at night. It was beautiful. This part of Bilbao was way cooler and prettier than the rest of it. I have to admit, based off of that first day I was almost upset that I even went on this trip but after seeing the Guggenheim, even just from the outside I felt better about it and knowing that we would see the inside the next day made me feel so much better. We ended up probably walking 7 or more miles this day.

The next day we actually went to The Guggenheim Museum! I was so excited and happy. Its was a horrible day, cold and rainy but I was still really excited. The first thing we saw was the Puppy sculpture/plant thing. It was really cool though I'm sure its amazing in the summer. We then just wandered around the outside and took pictures with all the sculptures. I might have liked the giant spider the best, even though I really hate spiders in real life, this was cool.

me outside the Guggenheim with the Puppy Sculpture

Me and Syd by the Bubble's sculpture

All of us with the Giant Spider

Me outside the Guggenheim

The Estruary Bridge of Bilbao

Inside the Guggenheim was basically instantly amazing. I was seriously in love. I feel like I've become an art coniseur since I've been here. The more art I see the more I want to see. I have a feeling I'm gonna be thoroughly disappointed with museums when I get back to the U.S. 

This said some artsy stuff in Spanish on a scrolling screen, but I can barely understand spanish to begin with an this made me feel like I had epilepsy so I didn't really get what it was saying

Seriously was in love with this sculpture. Its flowers and its bright rainbow, metallic colors. What's not to love?

Inside the Gugg, this picture was illegal but everyone was doing it

This exhibit was called The Matter of Time. It consists of 8 steel sculptures that are shaped like a maze. We loved it. The description in the Guggenheim pamphlet says "Freed from the traditional pedestal space of the viewre, sculpture took on a new relationship to the spectator, whose experience of an object became crucial to its meaning. The Matter of Time enables the spectator to perceive the evolution of the artist's sculped forms, from his relatively simple doble ellipses to the more complex spiral. Shifting in unexpected ways as viewers walk in and around them, these sculptures create a dizzying, unforgettable sensation of space in motion"

Having fun in the mazes

Me and Syd outside the Gugg

We saw works by Egon Schiele, they had an exhibit with 112 of his works, who is an Austrain artist and I was kind of in love with his work. He also had a really crazy life (only lived to the age of 28, dropped out of school at the age of 16, when he started his art career, was jailed for a month for child molestation and kidnnapping, died of the flu two days after his wife also died from the same flu) which was interesting to read about. The exhibit had drawings (it said he never ever erased), paintings, and photography.
I don't know what my favorite piece in the entire museum was but it might have been this one, ( I cannot remember the artist) where it was just a dark room, lit only by a few hanging incandscent light bulbs and then the walls were filled with small (4x6ish, they varied in size a bit) black and white photographs. It was very powerful, and according the audioguide, was both a holocaust memorial and a memorial of all human life in general. All of the people that came before us and lived.
So, The Guggenheim was great and I was very happy I went to Bilbao after seeing it. I loved the Museum and I would love to see all the different Guggenheim Museums in the world now. Thats my goal now after seeing this one. Also, the Claues Oldenburg exhibit was closed (the guy who does the modern looking mickey mouse things) and I would have loved to see it. Its just a good excuse to come back later in life :)

El Escorial

This past weekend I made a spur of the moment trip to El Escorial. My friend Syd had been talking about possibly going this weekend but as of Friday night/Saturday morning at 1 am (I fb messaged her at 6 pm just to see if she was still thinking about going) I still hadn’t heard a definitive response from her so I went to bed. I woke up the next day at 10:45 am and checked my fb messages only to find one that said we were going to take the 11:49 train to El Escorial!

I needed to shower because I hadn’t the day before and I had to make a transfer and hit 10 metro stops to get to the right train station so I was pretty frazzled and didn’t think I would make it. All of us ended up being pretty late and we actually had to run to catch the train and we made it in the last second. It was pretty epic and it got the blood pumping pretty early in the morning.

It ended up just being Syd, Marshall and me even though Syd had invited a bunch of their church friends. No one wanted to get up that early on a Saturday.

Syd and I had learned about El Escorial in our Art History Class so we were really excited to see it. Some fun fact’s about El Escorial: It has six functions: it is a monastery, boy’s school, basilica, library, palace and royal pantheon. It was commissioned by Phillip II to support the Counter Reformation and was designed by Juan Herrera so it is built in the Herrerian Style. Herrerian Style has beauty in it’s austerity. There are no ornate decorations.

So anyways we got there pretty easily on the train. It was only about an hour ride. Once there we just had to find the building. There were fortunately signs everywhere but unfortunately we had to climb a steady uphill to get there. It was like the endless uphill. Marshall, who is the most uncomplaining person I know, was even saying how it seemed like it would never end.

            Finally we made it and I think we were all in awe of it’s size. It was enormous, so much bigger than any of us expected and I finally understood what Herrerian Style was after I saw it too.

Some of El Escorial, even the panoramic couldn't get it all

Courtyard in El Escorial

So I don’t really have many pictures from the inside because picture taking was pretty much forbidden in every room. The one room I was allowed to take pictures in was the Hall of Battles that commemorates every Spanish military victory, by land or by sea. The Hall was amazing, it was covered from wall to ceiling with paintings of the Battle’s and it was quite memorizing. I could probably come back to that room daily for my entire life and find something new each time.

            My favorite room by far was the Royal Pantheon, which is where all of the kings and the wives that bore the next king were buried since Phillip II. It was super crazy ornate, everything was black marble and gold with a giant crystal chandelier. It was so pretty. Of course we couldn’t take any pictures. Sad.

      

Hall of Battles

   There was also some amazing works of art in the museum. They had an original El Greco (“The Martyrdom of St. Maurice”) which is considered one of his greatest works. The work was commissioned by Phillip II for the main altar at El Escorial but the work ended up being too complex for the laypeople to understand so he lost the job.

A work by Bosch, the guy who painted the Garden of Earthly Delights, this is the only pic I got of any paintings

Right before the next group that tried to take pics here got busted. Haha

Next we went the Basillica. It was very pretty on the inside and also huge. No suprise there. The best part was the giant altarpiece and the two sculptures that faced the altarpieces of Phillip II and his family. I got one picture of the altarpiece from outsite the Basilica (photos werent allowed) and I couldn't sneak one of the sculpture.

Entrance to the Basillica

Altar Piece, so so pretty

Then we ventured out into the Royal Gardens. These were not originally added by Phillip II (remember he like the austerity) and they were added later by the Bourbon Dynasty from France. You can almost tell they do not belong because they are so much fancier than everything else at El Escorial. We happened to be there on a really pretty day so the scenery and view was amazing. Spain never ceases to suprise me with how beautiful it is. Something I can't believe what I'm seeing is actually real.

So pretty, I can't believe I actually took this pic

Syd and I

All in All, I'm super glad we decided to go randomly. El Escorial was very pretty and it was such an easy trip. Also, since Syd, Marshall and I all have Abono Passes (madrid metro unlimited monthly passes) the first half (getting to El Escorial) was free. So it barely cost anything, just the 5 euro entry fee and the 1.50 euro trip back. Totally worth every euro penny.