Bilbao & San Sebastian

Guggenheim museum, Bilbao, side profile.










Marie and I took advantage of a recent bank holiday weekend to go to Spain. I really enjoyed the Tudor Consort trip to Tolosa a few years back, and wanted to show Marie this Basque area of Spain, so we went to Bilbao & San Sebastian with a mate Rachael.

I have decided that I am an essentially lazy planner, and am reluctant to do too much more forward planning than is necessary for a short holiday.
Flights - check.
Visas needed - not applicable.
Accommodation - check.
Flick through first few pages of guidebook to work out things which we absolutely have to do - check. The number one thing in all of Spain according to our guidebook was the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and number 22 was tapas in San Sebastian, so that was never going to be hard to cover.
Everything else - it will work out along the way.
This attitude is pretty much all you need for Spain. I was a little worried beforehand about the frequency of buses between Bilbao and San Sebastian, but they went on the hour even on Sundays so no need to worry there.





The Guggenheim in Bilbao was amazing, even before I went inside. My photos don't really do it justice, as the curves of the building are unlike anything I have seen before.
The contents were all modern art, with the permanent stuff being large scale installed pieces and the featured exhibition was on surrealism. It was nice, I liked it.

Apart from the Guggenheim, the other focus of our trip was the food. As you would expect, the tapas was great. The general idea of nightlife in Spain doesn't revolve around getting drunk (unlike NZ/UK), rather it is about socialising with friends/family, eating a little bit and as an afterthought having a few drinks.
On our first evening out I couldn't work out what was different about the vibe. I eventually realised that:
the groups of young men wandering around weren't as drunk as I was used to navigating, there was no hostility emanating from them, there were both elderly and infants out enjoying themselves in the crowd until quite late in the evening, and that guy crouched in the doorway over there? In London he would have been going for a pee, in Bilbao he was merely crouching over to hear his cellphone better.
A couple of things which slow down the speed of intoxication: you have something to eat with every drink, and the measures of wine are slightly smaller so you don't get drunk as fast.
Our first night in Bilbao we wandered around the old quarter eating tapas until we ended up in a seedy little dive chatting to some random guy who was propping up the bar. I didn't realise until I went to settle the tab that he had been surreptitiously paying for our drinks, it was one of those situations where instead of fully comprehending why you just pay the reduced bill, smile, and leave.

From Bilbao we went to the coast, to San Sebastian, which apparently has some of the best tapas in Spain. The pic below is at a dockside seafood restaurant, where we had a very tasty paella and some roast sardines. I never realised that sardines could taste better than they do from a tin, these ones were about four times the size and four times as tasty. Mmm seafood.






Lastly, I also found an advertisement for German beer which is a little more camp than I was expecting...