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Today was Starbucks day and our main day for the center of Bilbao.  After bananas and cereal, we took the metro in and spent about an hour at Starbucks, each of us getting our usuals – Sandy, chai tea latte and me, hot chocolate.  We had about an hour before our assigned entry time for the Guggenheim Museum, so we decided to hustle over to the Mercado de la Ribera.  This was more of a proper market, with places to grab a bite to eat but also places to do your regular shopping for meats, seafood, vegetables. 

We did grab a couple of pintxos (pronounced pinchos) to help get us through our time in the museum – one was basically a small crab salad sandwich and the other was a traditional tortilla omelette one.  The name pintxos translates closely to spike, which references the toothpick that the majority of pintxos use to keep the contents together.

After the mercado, we walked to the Guggenheim Museum.  Ever since it was built, this is a building I have wanted to see and it’s every bit amazing in person as you would expect.  Frank Gehry designed the building by basically letting the pen wander across his page and then used the sketch to inspire the architecture.  You can really see that come through in the final product. 

We really enjoyed our time in the museum.  We spent a little short of four hours. I would guess most people are on a similar page when it comes to modern art – some if it is awe-inspiring and some of it, you’re just kind of like, “really? This sold for x amount of money?”  I’m on that page, too.

Highlights of the museum for us included the Richard Serra exhibit The Matter of Time.  At first glance, it wasn’t so impressive but then as you walked through the full installation and read the descriptions of its planning and construction, it became very impressive.  Which reminds me – this particular museum demonstrated the value of good curation.  I thought the installations were all documented exceptionally well – whether the pieces were impressive or not. 

A work called Untitled (Towards the Aquamarine) by Giovanni Anselmo was pretty cool – 100 canvases standing together with a bunch of granite rocks on top and a small square on the wall painted in aquamarine color.  The rocks stacked on the canvas almost appeared to defy gravity the way it was all put together.  His whole exhibit was really pretty neat.  Sadly, he died just a couple of months before it opened.

Sandy’s favorite piece was Tulips by Jeff Koons.  Earlier this month, CBS Sunday Morning had a story on his work so it was neat to see one of his pieces right after seeing that.  The amount of work that goes into his creations is mindboggling.  Teams of people, tens of thousands of hours.  Quite amazing. 

Another highlight was Soft Shuttlecock by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.  Its main appeal to me is the scale – the first picture looks unimposing enough – maybe a fabric shuttlecock sitting on the corner of a table.  Then, Sandy went upstairs and took a picture of me next to it.  Changes the scale slightly. Use the arrows to switch between the two.

The last piece is another one by Jeff Koons and it is outside the front entrance to the museum.  It is called Puppy and it is covered with live flowers and irrigation all through the inside of it.  The flowers are changed twice a year based on the season.  It was a very impressive day at the Guggenheim.

We were starved after the museum and we wanted to meander the streets of Casco Viejo (the old town), so we headed in that direction.  We found some excellent pintxos to sustain us at Iturriza Taberna in the Plaza Nueva.  One was crab-salad based, one was cod-based, one was goat cheese-based, and one was the more traditional egg/potato/cheese one.

We supplemented our pintxos by splitting an order of churros con chocolate and then walked the streets of Bilbao until the place we wanted to eat dinner opened at 7:30. We ate dinner at Antigua Casa Jesus – a small seemingly locals place.  The owner was very kind and we shared a plate of Iberian jamon, a tomato and onion salad, and bread with olive oil.  After dinner, we took the metro back to Getxo and our apartment.