Through Bilbao, and back to BCN

On Wednesday we got to sleep in again, then met with city officials for a few more hours.  Sarah and I had lunch and plotted our next move.  There is another slow city—Mungia—in the Basque country, but the contact person there had not responded to our calls and emails.  Mungia is only a few kilometers from Bilbao, so we decided to head in that direction and have a sniff around ourselves.  The drive, in the light of day, was gorgeous—green and winding.

Mungia is quite a bit bigger than Lekeitio.  We found our way to the historic center, parked, and walked around a bit.  Mungia is not as outwardly charming as one might expect, causing us to ask—Why is Mungia one of six slow cities and not, say Cadaques?  We are both curious about why a particular city wants the slow city designation, and then how the philosophy of the slow city lands in that place.  On the one hand, I’m relieved that Mungia, from the outside, seems quite average.  I’ve been a bit worried that we would find only overly precious, pretty towns in our work.  Perhaps if we had been able to penetrate the surface and talk to people, we would have discovered Mungia’s inner beauty.

But we didn’t, and it was 5:30.  We had a 9:30 flight, so we decided to drive to Bilbao and check out the Guggenheim.  I had been itching to go but the work came first, and Sarah had already been there so I didn’t want to push my agenda.  But there we were with a couple of hours on our hands, within spitting distance.

Even with all of the hype and buildup, the museum impresses.  The building itself is gorgeous and it relates fabulously to its site on the water.  We needed a snack, which we got at the museum café, and then had only an hour or so to see what we could see.  The Richard Serra installation on the ground floor completely drew me in, and took a bit of time to explore.  And then we checked out a temporary exhibition called The Luminous Interval—contemporary art from a the collection of D. Daskalopoulos.  Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Chris Ofili—it worked, some of it made me feel calm, some restless, some provoked.  I’m glad I went.

And then it was off to the airport and back to Barcelona, where I met my friend Elke—my fabulous friend Elke, who is visiting from Atlanta—at the airport.  After a morning of work and physical therapy today—my knee is feeling worse, not better—we had a great lunch in the light filled space of Cuines Santa Caterina and then soaked at the Turkish baths for a couple of hours.  We stopped by Formatgerie La Seu for a cheese snack from Catherine the Scottish Cheese Goddess.  She had read my blog post in which I had called her “a bit prickly” but seemed to embrace the label and not hold it against me.  And now Alec is making some sort of Spanish stew that features the enormous, gorgeous cabbage he and Milo bought me for Mother’s Day.