Saturday, October 23, 2004

Rishi LOVES Bilbao A LOT!!!

So I think Bilbao may very well be my favourite city so far, which is funny because the guide book I have only talks about this place for like one paragraph! But no really this city is AWESOME. Today I did lots of cite seeing. Peter and I headed to the city's main attraction, the Guggenheim Bilbao museum. Apparently today was like the 7th anniversary or something so admission was free! The museum was soooooooo nice (inside and outside) but I wasn't allowed to take any pictures inside the museum. After getting our FREE tickets Peter and I split up to look at all the galleries. One thing I've learned about myself after looking at all the exhibits is that I'm definitely not a real art buff. Like a lot of the paintings I saw honestly just looked like blobs of paint. There was like a whole display of paintings by some dude that were really just squares of paint with different colours. Maybe I'm just not "cultured" enough to notice all the symbolism, I dunno. Anyways though there was a nice Picasso exhibit that actually took apart one of his paintings from Paris and showed that he had painted something else underneath the canvas...that whole "investigation" was very cool. There were also a lot of audio/visual art displays which were quite nice but rather slow in terms of what you saw. Anyways, after that I toured the rest of the city and was really impressed with the nice calm atmosphere of Bilbao, a very friendly environment just like Zurich was. After seeing other things in the city, I took the funicular so I could get a nice aerial view of Bilbao from above. That was also very nice. Then it was dinner time. I saw this VEGETARIAN!!!! restaurant to go to and was really excited about going there...but it was closed so I decided to go to Subway (yes that's right Subway) because I actually am starting to miss north american food a little bit. I also had some Ben & Jerry's ice cream there, which was very tasty!
Anywho after that I headed back to the hotel to meet up with Peter to do some work and then got ready to go out. I was shocked to see how alive the city was. I walked by the Guggenheim museum at like 12:30 am and there were little kids with their parents playing on the park!!! And there was an area in the city where there were literally hundreds of people standing on the streets having a good time and just hanging out and having a drink. I walked around there for a bit and it was really nice to see and actually quite fun BUT it eventually got a little boring since I didn't have anyone else to hang out with :( So after a while I headed back towards the hotel. The walk back was again quite fun and actually when I got back to the hotel I went down to the lower floor (I heard music and wanted to see what was going on!) and saw a bunch of old rich people partying and dancing to the YMCA which was quite funny. Anyways that pretty much sums up the day and if I didn't already mention it this hotel IS SO NICE, it's really a work of art I'd say. It's around 3 am here now and tomorrow we're gonna head to Bordeaux, France with a stop off (hopefully!) at a beach (that I've read you can actually swim in!) near San Sebastian, Spain.

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