Bilbao

Creepy but cool..
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Our journey to Bilbao was fun as we took an overnight train, our sleeper was tiny and hot, but a great way to travel! We arrived into Bilbao about 7am and for the hour before we arrived we were travelling through a Dickensian landscape of factories, chimneys and rail yards.

Bilbao was a fantastic city; it was small and on a river and had a really vibrant, young feel to it. There was an ‘old’ quarter and then the rest of the city was almost as old and was very easy to walk around. We checked into our hotel and went to get some breakfast and have a wander. We walked along the river to the Guggenheim and were very impressed by the position on the river and just the craziness of the building itself.

Puppy and flowers... awwhhh....

Awwhhhh...
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The Bilbao Guggenheim is a great gallery, it is quite small, but the building is so very fascinating and the specially commissioned works fit so well into the vast halls and atriums. There were a couple of travelling exhibits while we were there, one all on Russian art from the Hermitage.

On our final night in Spain we had bit of a tapas crawl, going from bar to bar eating and we definitely had the best tapas in all of Spain… One particular bar had a leg of ham on the bar in a special holder and they just thinly sliced pieces off in front of you.. yum… they also recommended we have the fois gras which was pan seared and placed on bread – heaven….. while I know it’s cruel, the taste was well appreciated.. Actually all the food we had in Bilbao was great, it’s a really cool town, very friendly and we felt like locals there, rather than tourists, but maybe that was because we almost felt Spanish by the time we left as we loved the lifestyle so much?

We were both sad to leave Spain as it was such a great country and left wishing we were going back again soon.