Spain - September 16 - Bilbao Day #2

We spent the day doing a deeper dive into Bilbao. We started with the Guggenheim Museum, which was very cool. Highly recommended. The museum itself is a stunning piece of architecture, and all of the exhibits were extremely interesting. I think my favorite part was a large exhibit by Richard Serra called "The Matter of Time". It was a large room filled with big sculptures of steel walls set up various patterns, i.e. lanes, mazes, spirals, etc. The thing that made it particularly intriguing is that you could walk through these sculptures...AND...none of the walls were straight up and down. They were all angled/curved in various patterns. It's hard to explain if you haven't experienced, but the effect of walking through these sculptures was...literally...dizzying. It wasn't overly discomfiting, but the impact was definitely real. Both Nancy and I experienced it, and we overheard others talking about it. I kind reminded me of the time that I took Kendall to Knotts Berry Farm amusement park on a day that wasn't at all crowded, so we were able to go on 7 different rollercoasters back-to-back-to-back. The Richard Serra wasn't quite as rough and tumble, but I definitely needed to sit and "unwind" for a moment after going through it. We spent the afternoon exploring cathedrals and the Old Quarter in Bilbao, though we opted for a more traditional, i.e. non-pintxos, Spanish dinner at a restaurant called Markina...which was terrific.