From Bilbao
Dec. 7th, 2009 02:17 pmI am in Bilbao. I have been to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
It's a really interesting building. It looks great from the outside, and it suits the setting on the river quite well. It's not easy to make sure that you've seen everything. Whoever designed Federation Square has definitely been there. It's like a curvy version of NGV at Fed Square.
The major exhibition that they have at the moment is about Frank LLoyd Wright, which I actually wasn't terribly interested in. Also, a collection of video installation works from various Guggenheim collections, which I didn't like. Most of them failed to be interesting and the one that mostly worked was crude. There was a good bit of video that I saw with P and L in one of the small commercial galleries in Birmingham, but every time something restores my (never strong) faith in the medium, something else comes along to trample all over it.
I like Bilbao though. It's little and it has a river. It's very strange and kind of confronting to have everything been in two languages neither of which I understand. I'm not ever sure what the second language is. The first is Spanish. I have even less Spanish than I have French, and I struggled for my day in Paris between automatically speaking German and trying to remember that I did know some useful French.
I had Thursday in Paris between an overnight bus from Munich and an overnight train to Irun (followed by a bus to Bilbao). I had lunch in a restaurant in a lane near the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, which I found by accident walking from the library to Notre Dame (where I thought there might be some street food, but there wasn't). I had wine with my lunch. It was great. I ordered rose instead of white because that's what I was used to drinking with P and L when we were in France. It was a Greek restaurant because I figured that was my best chance for getting lunch that had neither bread nor chips. I got to have dolmades and moussaka. And the waiter asked if I wanted baklava and, even though I'd been thinking that I'd really an icecream for like five days by then (most of my time in Munich) I figured I test my dislike of baklava. How wrong can you go with nuts and honey, really? The answer to that question turns out to that you can't go wrong with nuts and honey.
I go back to Paris on the overnight train on Tuesday night, and then I catch the Eurostar to London on Saturday evening. It only takes about an hour and a half because of the time difference (as in, two and a half hours of train travel, but arriving one and a half hours after leaving, clock time).
Oh! At the Guggenheim, there was a special exhibition, a re-exhibit of an installation by Richard Serra. Giant sheets of steel wrapped into shapes and you could walk into them. It reminded me of canyon-ing last year (OMG it was last year! July last year in Bryce Canyon National Park).
It's a really interesting building. It looks great from the outside, and it suits the setting on the river quite well. It's not easy to make sure that you've seen everything. Whoever designed Federation Square has definitely been there. It's like a curvy version of NGV at Fed Square.
The major exhibition that they have at the moment is about Frank LLoyd Wright, which I actually wasn't terribly interested in. Also, a collection of video installation works from various Guggenheim collections, which I didn't like. Most of them failed to be interesting and the one that mostly worked was crude. There was a good bit of video that I saw with P and L in one of the small commercial galleries in Birmingham, but every time something restores my (never strong) faith in the medium, something else comes along to trample all over it.
I like Bilbao though. It's little and it has a river. It's very strange and kind of confronting to have everything been in two languages neither of which I understand. I'm not ever sure what the second language is. The first is Spanish. I have even less Spanish than I have French, and I struggled for my day in Paris between automatically speaking German and trying to remember that I did know some useful French.
I had Thursday in Paris between an overnight bus from Munich and an overnight train to Irun (followed by a bus to Bilbao). I had lunch in a restaurant in a lane near the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, which I found by accident walking from the library to Notre Dame (where I thought there might be some street food, but there wasn't). I had wine with my lunch. It was great. I ordered rose instead of white because that's what I was used to drinking with P and L when we were in France. It was a Greek restaurant because I figured that was my best chance for getting lunch that had neither bread nor chips. I got to have dolmades and moussaka. And the waiter asked if I wanted baklava and, even though I'd been thinking that I'd really an icecream for like five days by then (most of my time in Munich) I figured I test my dislike of baklava. How wrong can you go with nuts and honey, really? The answer to that question turns out to that you can't go wrong with nuts and honey.
I go back to Paris on the overnight train on Tuesday night, and then I catch the Eurostar to London on Saturday evening. It only takes about an hour and a half because of the time difference (as in, two and a half hours of train travel, but arriving one and a half hours after leaving, clock time).
Oh! At the Guggenheim, there was a special exhibition, a re-exhibit of an installation by Richard Serra. Giant sheets of steel wrapped into shapes and you could walk into them. It reminded me of canyon-ing last year (OMG it was last year! July last year in Bryce Canyon National Park).
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