Burgos and Bilbao

June 18

Anna and I spent the morning touring the Burgos museum for hours with the audio guide. It feels as large as a small city inside, and the art and architecture, especially the half dome ceilings, is impressive. In one corner is a clock with a papamoscas that opens and closes its mouth with each quarter hour, looking like it’s eating flies. I feel like it was the gleeful request of some priest who dearly wanted to terrify the children. There are mythical creatures painted and carved into many of the pieces, which I love, and there was a part with all of these miniature towers and extremely intricate carvings that made me think of Galadriel’s Mirkwood or the miniatures of Sauron’s tower. We somehow got lucky and still didn’t get rained on as we made our way back to the the hotel and caught the bus to Bilbao. I liked the hostel - Akellare - and we dropped our stuff so we could wander around for the afternoon. Evidently we should have made it into old town because there were parties and plays all throughout because we got there for Bilbao’s birthday. Instead, after grabbing some pastries (pan con mantequilla is literally buttered sugar bread - don’t be fooled) we went up the ascensor to see views of the city. Bilbao isn’t really my favorite place - I prefer what I’ve seen of Madrid - but we had a good time walking around looking out over the city. The hermitage was absolutely not worth it. It’s just a little white cabin with nothing else that was clearly recently rebuilt. After dinner and a quick nap we headed back for noche blanca at the Guggenheim in the drizzling rain. They were projecting art onto one of the other museum’s walls on the way there, but we hurried on and got in for free with some pretty big crowds, but nothing like what they were when we left. They had some interesting interactive tech art on the ground floor, one of which was this scrolling series of poetry that illuminated the space behind it, where you could stand, in all blue. One side was in Spanish, and the other in Basque. Modern art is not my thing. The one part I really enjoyed was a massive metal installation by Richard Serra of various shapes that you could walk through and be engulfed by. I also quite liked a lot of the cubism paintings, but otherwise I could have happily stayed unenlightened as to the “wonders” of modern art. There was a series of scribble paintings that were “Nine Discourses on Commodus,” but felt like ten-minute messes, and a whole gigantic series by Louise Bourgeois that was creepy and strange and how is it art?? She made all of these “rooms” with different things in them - one looked like a lab with all of these red wax hands and arms and organs and tools, one was just a cage with a shit ton of chairs scrambled inside, etc etc. Here’s the link so you can judge for yourself. She also made the spider that’s outside the museum. I cannot fathom the appeal. We stopped in the Warhol room, and it literally was an abstract shadow print with different colored backgrounds side by side across all the walls in the entire room. I feel like I should be nodding wisely and commenting on the darkness of the human soul, but I just don’t get it. I like whimsy and color and even commentary, but I gravitate more towards the things that don’t need a special pass to see it. The three-story dog made out of flowers outside of the museum was great, though, and Anna and I both wrote and hung wishes for the wishing tree. We escaped the museum around midnight, took a quick tour through the end of the tents set up with endless food for the festival, then called it a night.

High: Burgos cathedral, especially the werewolves, griffons, dragons and lions.

Low: Modern art is baffling. 

Glitter: The museum was free, which tbh is the only way I would have gone.

Burgos Cathedral:

Bilbao: