My ultimate destination in Bilbao was to visit Guggenheim museum though for sure I still wanted to see around Bilbao, one of the city in Basque Country. I started my day before 10am and walked around Bilbao a bit before went to the museum. Bilbao was once an ugly industrial city, some friends told me that there are not so many things to see there. But I found out it was quite a nice city, the old town area is quite nice though it was not that 'bling-bling'. I read somewhere that the city really put a lot of efforts to make itself pretty recently. The Guggenheim museum was one real example of the effort to attract visitors to Bilbao. The museum was designed by Frank Gehry around 1997 (that's one of my motivation to go there since we also have one of Gehry's building in Duesseldorf). I have to admit it is an impressive building inspired by anatomy of a fish and the hull of a boat.
I joined the free English guided tour at 11am and was a nice way to walk through the museum. Lucky me...there was an interesting exhibition from Takashi Murakami (nothing to do with Haruki Murakami....at least as far as I know). I like it so much, the permanent exhibition is quite cool and also the Guggenheim video collections. I have watched one of them which really impressed me, forgot the name though..
It was late afternoon when I finally decided that I had enough time in Guggenheim museum. I went back to the old town area, picked up my luggage and returned back to Santander to catch up my flight. It was a short refreshing holiday, a bit adventurous one but was nice...really nice to get a glimpse of warm before returning to the cold :-P
