Sunday, January 27, 2013

European Odyssey: Bilbao and the Guggenheim

Early the next morning we arose in the dark as the Explorer approached the Getxo Cruise Terminal.
Bilbao itself is inland from that port, but is connected by the Bilbao River (Ria de Bilbao).
Not long ago the entire 9 mile (15 km) length of the river between Bilbao and the sea was filled with docks and shipyards; although these mostly disappeared in the late 20th Century, the port remains a major European shipping nexus.

The reason for our caffeine-infused morning was our trip to the famous Guggenheim Art Museum in Bilbao. Lindblad had arranged for our group to have access to the museum an hour before it would open to the general public, so no-one wanted to delay the buses!

Our first impression of Bilbao was highly positive. For example, the electric tram line that we crossed, on a pedestrian walkway, to reach the Guggenheim had grass growing between the rails whereas every other I have seen had only naked gravel.

Here we approach the main entrance to the titanium-clad Guggenheim, which faces the river across a sweeping walkway and plaza. Many of the shapes are meant to invoke Bilbao's ship-oriented history.
The art objects around the exterior are a photographer's delight. This is Tulip, by Jeff Koons.
Looking upriver our eyes were immediately drawn to the spider sculpture, Maman, by Louise Bourgeois, one of several copies around the world. "Maman" is the familiar term for "mother" in French. But as one woman in our group said, "I don't care what they call it; it's Shelob to me." Ditto, I say.

The presence of the Guggenheim, opened in 1997, has been an unparalleled economic benefit to Bilbao, giving rise to the term "Bilbao effect." The entire downtown riverfront has been renovated as part of Bilbao's recovery from the economic decline of its earlier industries, iron mining and shipbuilding. The income from the Guggenheim, direct and indirect, has sustained this renaissance. A regional council estimated increased tax revenues from shopping, restaurants, and hotels in the first three years of €100 million. This photo shows a portion of the river walk.

Then it was time to go inside. We were permitted to take pictures of the common areas, but not the exhibits. The museum's sweeping lines continued within.






Many of the exhibits were at best mildly interesting to me, and also to Joan, although some of the weathered steel works by Richard Serra, which you could walk through, were intriguing. We found the museum's exterior and the outside art works more enjoyable than most galleries.

After the first hour, the doors were opened to the public. This group of students made a good photo.

Joan and I began a tour of the outside by admiring Puppy, also by Jeff Koons. This piece has a dramatic backstory, but at the time, we admired it simply as art that was fun to see.
It is all flowers, with a stainless steel armature that is also an internal irrigation system. The scaffolding is present because the flowers were undergoing a seasonal exchange.

From another angle, the puppy appears much larger than the modern skyscraper.
I noticed a small wart on the front of the skyscraper, which turned out to be window washers.
As we followed the elevated walkway towards the bridge, I took a series of pictures, attempting to capture the drama of the Guggenheim's architecture.

Just a little further on, facing inward, was this view.

As my father would have said, "There's not a square corner in the whole place."

From the near side of the bridge there was a spectacular lengthwise view of the Guggenheim and riverfront. This image captures the shadow of the bridge's tower, which echoes the crow's nest of a sailing ship.

The above photo also records fog issuing from underneath the walkway, drifting over the pool in front of the museum. During the day this mist is generated several times, sometimes to the consternation of first-time visitors who think it is smoke. Here is a series of three images showing the development of this fog.

As you can see, it was a fine day to take this walk. Lunch, however, would be back aboard the Explorer. During lunch the ship departed Getxo, beginning a lengthy trip across the northern coast of Spain towards A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela, our destination for the next day.

We were escorted out of the harbor by a police boat, not a pilot boat, a legacy bequeathed to the Basque region by the ETA, designated as a terrorist organization by most Western countries. It is of note that the ETA had been observing a cease-fire, not its first, since 2010, and recently offered to disband, less than two months after our visit to Bilbao.

Our afternoon was filled with attending talks and visiting the bridge, a perennial favorite. Lisa Abend, Time magazine's correspondent in Spain, gave several talks during her time on board, and now that I've written about our first Spanish stop, I'd like to pass along some of her observations, which many of us found enlightening.

She gave a delightful talk on Spanish cuisine and her book, The Sorcerer's Apprentices, which follows the interns at a famous Spanish restaurant during the 2009 season.

At another time she mentioned the failure of many other projects that attempted to reproduce the "Bilbao effect." The combination of a respected world-wide institution, startling architecture, international "mind share," and construction costs kept within the initial budget never came together anywhere else.

And she related her personal views of the European economic crisis, focusing on southern Europe. Her salient point was that the underlying causes were different in each country. Greece was a classic case of borrowing without limit, excessive public subsidies, and massive tax avoidance, as painted by the world press.

Spain, on the other hand, suffered a real-estate bubble similar in many ways to that of the United States, with banks lending recklessly and middle class families acquiring easy loans to finance vacation homes. When the bubble inevitably burst, the economic tsunami was worse than in the US. Children moved back in with parents, and then everybody moved in with grandma and grandpa, because at least they had pensions. Unemployment recently reached 26%, with youth unemployment at a record 55%. That's what happens when a country has no choice but to adopt austerity measures during a severe world-wide economic downturn. This is in contrast to the United States, which pursued a policy of economic stimulation during the worst recession since the Great Depression, at the cost of greatly increased debt.

Portugal was a victim of the general downturn and its own very slowly growing economy. As Lisa put it, Portugal did everything the European Central Bank asked it to do to reduce its debt. However, the economy contracted under the twin pressures of the recession and austerity measures, so Portugal's debt as a percentage of GDP actually increased, rather than decreased, after applying the austerity measures.

You learn a lot on Lindblad trips.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

European Odyssey: Saint Jean de Luz

Overnight we sailed from La Rochelle to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, in the French Basque region and only a few miles from the Spanish border.
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As you can see from the above map, the town is situated on a sheltered bay. Early in the morning, just inside the breakwaters, the view from the ship was impressive. The center of Saint-Jean-de-Luz is on the far left of the photo.
To put this in perspective, later in the day I took a photo from the beach looking outwards towards the Explorer.
We rode the zodiacs into the harbor, which is much more compact than at La Rochelle, which has five times the population of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. This picture shows the floating docks onto which we disembarked.
Our shore excursion then divided into smaller groups, each with a guide, and each small group used radio earphones to follow its guide's commentary as they walked through the streets.

Just across from the docks is the Maison de L'Infante, a handsome pink stone building where Maria Theresa of Spain awaited her husband-to-be, King Louis XIV of France, in 1660.
A plaque, visible at bottom on the edge of the walkway, commemorates the activities of the French resistance during WWII. Saint-Jean-de-Luz was a major transit point for downed Allied airmen escaping to neutral Spain.
Just around the corner we encountered seaweed being unloaded from boats into shipping containers. Seaweed is a name loosely applied to describe several groups of multicellular algae; these plants have culinary, medicinal, cosmetic, and industrial uses. Where this seaweed is bound, I do not know.
Closer up, it looks like this.
The region is famous for its red pepper, the espelette. It is spicy, but not outrageously so, rating about 4,000 units on the Scoville scale. Racks of indestructible copies of these peppers are part of the storefront for the Maison d'Adam outlet in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, which is not far from the docks. Joan and I stopped here on our way back and bought some candies and chocolate, including a dark chocolate bar with espelette peppers that was very good.
Our morning tour passed by the beach, seen in the earlier photo. This building next to the beach caught my eye. Its shape was reminiscent of the Flatiron in New York City, although much smaller and older.

We saw the symbol of the Basque country everywhere in Saint-Jean-de-Luz as we walked from site to site. Originally it was a swastika, but after that symbol was hijacked in the 1930s/1940s it was altered to echo the original form but not invoke the memories of World War II. Here is a closeup ...
... that is part of a shop awning on the ground floor.
Many of the homes were profusely decorated with flowers on windows or petite balconies.

Next we arrived at the church Saint-Jean-Baptiste, where Louis XVI and Maria Theresa were wed.
The nave is ornate, in contrast to the plain exterior of the church.
When you look in the other direction, the church interior reflects its modest, small town origins.
This is not a deficit, but rather a refreshing change from the imposing cathedrals that we saw elsewhere in the trip. Hanging in the center, as you see above, is a ship model, representing the maritime interests of the town, and probably a gesture of thanks from a supplicant.
We wrapped up our morning tour with a visit to the town indoor market. I didn't take a photos inside, but only one of the sign outside, which is in both French and Basque.
For my final image from the morning walk, I present this door knocker.

Joan and I had lunch back aboard the Explorer, although some stayed in town to dine. Afterwards, there were three choices for the afternoon.

  • exploring Saint-Jean-de-Luz further on your own,
  • a tour of the historical city of Bayonne, or
  • a tour of a Basque farmstead and the Basque village of Aïnhoa.

Joan and I chose the Basque tour, which started with a bus ride to the farmstead, Ortillopitz, which dates to 1660.
It's situated in a beautiful location in the rolling foothills of the Pyrenees.
The guide at Ortillopitz spoke both French and Basque, but not English,
so the guide that came with the bus translated the narrative for us. Not always reliably, as Joan, who speaks French, discovered. The farmhouse guide described the Basque inheritance traditions, of which we had heard somewhat already: the parents choose the child who they deem most capable to inherit the farmstead, regardless of birth order or gender. The bus guide translated it as "the oldest male inherits." Given that the Ortillopitz guide was Basque and the bus guide not, we're accepting the "most capable" version.

We toured the farmhouse; this photo is of the kitchen. Note the peppers hanging down at the top right.

Here's a closer look. We do like peppers.
I also took a photo in one of the bedrooms.
After touring the upstairs we descended into the basement.
Awaiting us was a spread of local cheeses, meats, and breads. Yum!
Back outside, we had a little while to tour the grounds.
On leaving Ortillopitz the bus did not turn right, to head directly for Aïnhoi, but to the left. The bus was perilously close to the maximum size the road could accommodate, and the angle of the driveway dictated that we turn left to find a better spot, and then turn around. The driver had in mind the parking area for the Petit Train de la Rhune, a small-gauge (one meter) railway that climbs 2500' to the top of Rhune mountain. This snapshot from Google Maps shows Ortillopitz at the right, at the 'A' pin, and the parking area at the upper left; the distance is under a mile (click to enlarge).
However, after heading into the parking lot, we immediately had trouble. The parking lot was not only full, but overfull, and people had parked in inventive and technically illegal ways. The bus, headed in, could not make the two right turns required to head out through the adjacent driving lane. Time for plan B: the driver nosed into a single-lane parking extension, which you can see in the above photo as a long tendril heading left out of the grey blob of the wider parking area. This maneuver aligned the bus with the intended driving lane, but pointed the wrong way. Our driver, with some assistance from spotters outside the bus, had to drive the bus in reverse for several bus lengths, avoiding mis-parked autos, to regain the road and finally have the bus pointed in the right direction. She did a great job under trying circumstances.

Arriving in Aïnhoa, the bus parked at the edge of town in a small lot set aside for buses.
It's clear that Aïnhoa sees a great many tourists; this sign was the first thing we saw. It's written in both French and Basque.
This sign was also nearby.
Translated, it says "If you want my handicap I'll give you my spot."

Aïnhoa village was destroyed in 1629, and rebuilt in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The main street is considered one of the best preserved examples of Basque life.


But do not become complacent about the light auto traffic; you must be careful crossing the main street.

We then visited the village church.

I present a photo towards the nave,

and one towards the back.

The adjacent graveyard is full of fascinating stonework and cultural influences. The Basque symbol is a frequent theme, and the many round shapes may represent a solar influence.

Entire families can be buried, or at least memorialized, in one spot. Here we see family members who died at ages between 1 day and 86 years.

And every Basque village has its own pelota court with bleachers for the spectators. One of the many variations of this sport is known outside Europe as jai alai.

The strategic feature, the marked flat wall, is known in French as the fronton.

My final picture for this post is timestamped about 50 minutes after boarding the bus to leave Aïnhoa, so it is probably taken while walking back to the docks. Ultralight aircraft seem to be popular in France, judging by the many photo opportunities I've had! Note that the wing includes an advertisement for Toyota (a dealership?) -- click to enlarge.


The next day would find us off the coast of Spain, rising early in the morning darkness to visit Bilbao.