The Guggenheim and last day in Lekeitio

We did do one or two things beside consume twelve courses of grilled goodness, you know. Despite what this blog may indicate, I have other interests beyond just consuming incredibly delicious foodstuffs and writing about them. There are occasions when even I feel within me the urge to take in some culture that does not involve grass-fed beef, water scallops, and rucola, times when I too feel the need to gaze at Great Works of Art and feel myself, mysteriously, internally elevated, or at least a bit smarter. If not smarter, more able to look like an intellectual jerk-off in bars. You can't set your sighs too high.

So we went to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Do I have to tell you the story of the Guggenheim? Doesn't everyone know this by now? So in the mid-90's the Guggenheim foundation wanted to build a new museum to house their giant collection of weird modern art. Being a little low on funds, they wanted a locale that would be willing to shell out for the new museum themselves. Enter Bilbao. Bilbao and the Basque people suffered big-time under Franco's incredibly evil military regime, forcing Basque culture underground and bringing Basque industry to a relative standstill. Franco passed and Spain began to ease uncertainly into the modern age, with the Basque people leading the way. The old shipdock and iron production centers in Bilbao were renovated, new industries opened up in the city, and Bilbainos became determined to transfer their fading industrial city into a people-and-business friendly powerhouse. To everyone's surprise, they did it. When the Guggenheim came a'knocking, the city's leaders decided that a super-prestigious museum of its nature would be the perfect accent to the renovated banks of the Nervión river. The expensive prestige project was approved, and Frank Gehry - the best known Canadian architect (like I know any others) - was called in to design it.


The Guggenheim.

As Bilbao wanted not just a museum but a monument, Gehry conceived the structure as a modern art statue in and of itself, taking cues from the nearby river and other aquatic themes in its glimmering and silvery construction. Sheets of super thin titanium were used to produce the simultaneously undulating and sharp look of the museum's facade, and reflecting pools and outdoor art were added to complete the visually arresting affect. Completed in 1997, the building was hailed immediately by love-besotted art critics as the most impressive building of its time - and to Bilbao's delight, provided the artsy kick in the ass the city's tourism industry needed. Twelve years later, it's still one of the Basque country's must-sees.


The giant spider outside the museum. Often shrouded in fog due to fog-machines. Named after the artist's mother.


Another view.

Despite the Guggenheim's jaw-dropping exterior appearance, it actually is not a gigantic facility, containing a fairly limited number of exhibits. Derided as a mere warehouse for the Guggenheim's extras in past years, it's come into its own as a powerful exhibition center for modern art. At least that's what the modern art critics I skimmed for this blog post said, anyway. Don't quote me.


Bridge outside the Guggenheim.


The Sinophile in me was ever so happy to see that Cai Guo-Qiang was headlining the summer's exhibitions. Guo-Qiang specializes in working with fire and explosives in a long, proud, and sulphureous Chinese tradition. On display were a dizzying array of his weird-ass fire paintings, produced by detonating explosives to produce both abstract images and startlingly deft drawings of specific subject matter. Guo-Qiang is a performance artist: he helped master-mind the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony (the steps made of fireworks were his idea) and has produced videos of his explosions-as-happenings all over the world. His powers extend far beyond his bizarre "gunpowder drawings": Guo-Qiang also produces huge and disturbing works of modern sculpture, many of which were in display in all their unavoidable bigness at the Guggenheim. Claiming to be influenced by ancient Chinese culture, Maoist revolutionary tactics, and the inherent bizarreness of modern 21st century life, I suspect Guo-Qiang is the closest thing to an artist-laureate that China has. He's unmissable.

Some highlights:

- Guo-Qiang engineered a work in Hiroshima where he detonated black fireworks on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombings. I was glued to the video and could not get away: it was eerie and horrifying, some sort of vision from an alternative and sick universe, a warning that we should never go there again. Black fireworks are dreamlike because we have never seen them before and did not conceive that they could exist, a dark counterpoint to July 4th shindigs and Chinese New Year, apparent and mildly disgusting.

- "Reflection: A Gift From Iwaki," which is tremendous Japanese ship filled to the brim (and spilling over) with crushed Japanese porcelain plates and statues of the Buddha. As I have never sat through a modern-art appreciation class (possibly due to a life-long fear of people with oblong haircuts and Ideas About Bauhaus), I could not begin to interpret this for you. I also forgot what the display card said. But it is an image that will stay with me.

- Head On, wherein a huge and slavering pack of timber wolves ascend into the air, dance merrily along like hideous reindeer, then smack snout-on into a clear-plastic sheet, skittering away. Guo-Qiang says it represents the inherent and deadly perils of soaring ambition, others may find it cruelly comedic, everyone finds it unforgettable.

- The Rent Collector's Courtyard has an interesting story behind it. Seemingly appearing to be a creepy collection of crumbling clay sculptures of downtrodden, wailing Chinese peasants, it too contains an element of performance art. Bilbao's Rent Collector's Courtyard is one of many replicas Guo-Qiang has orchestrated of an original piece from the always-overwrought Cultural Revolution, where it was produced to show the savagery and evil of the capitalist system (in Communist eyes, anyhow).

The sculptures, wherever they are replicated, are intended to crumble to dust, leaving behind stark wire frames and little wooden hands and feet and black-button eyeballs. When you walk into the room all the statues are in different stages of decay, some missing limbs, some missing heads, all of them crumbling to dust, making the marble floor crunch-crunch a little under your feet.


Some gentleman out on the beach.

After Etxebarri, which of course you can read about here, we drove back to Bilbao in a state of torpid and animal fullness, we wanted nothing more then to nap and not go anywhere. I felt personally like a boa constrictor that had just ingested an errant toddler - bursting and extremely self satisfied. Possessing no steaming tropical swamps to wallow in, I decided to go for a walk in town to settle things a little bit, and watch the happy hordes of mulleted Basques begin their evening pinxtos and booze crawl.

As I ambled along the sea wall (having adjusted my rate of speed to that of the Spanish, who do not go anywhere in a hurry even in this modern era,) I realized the lighting was ridiculously beautiful, little tendrils of yellow sun busting out of dark evening clouds, tide coming, all right with the universe. So I took some photos.


The town of Lekeitio.


The island outside town.


The island from the seawall.


Cars by the harbor.


Crashing waves outside the fisherman's club.


Fishing boats in the harbor.


More of the harbor.


My dad and I, true brave souls, decided we would go and have a bit of dinner after all. I make no apologies for my metabolism: I turned 21 a week ago and am skinny and nervous, always tapping my leg on things, I am unable to go for more then four consecutive hours without eating someone or I turn into a blonde and nervous imitation of foul Caligula, you get the picture. We picked out one of the little seafood restaurants on the sea-wall and ate. It was 10:00, about in the middle of Basque Country's very relaxed dinner hours.



My dad had a simple dish of scrambled eggs with a bit of salt cod, a nice and comforting combination, the kind of thing a little Basque grandmother (with a mullet) might serve you in bed if you had contracted a sniffle.



Prawns. Yes, for God's sake, I ate more prawns, I might consider eating all the Spanish prawns in the universe if you let me, enginer the wholesale destruction of an entire species, for as said earlier they taste of all that is good and honest in the universe, little fatty heads and tails and bodies. This was a fine salad with artichoke hearts and grilled prawns and some balsamic vinegar, the sort of simple fare I desire most of the time (when I am not dining on barnacles and smoked butter in certain other Basque locales). I ate all the shrimp, but for the first time in a very long while, I could not finish the salad. But it hit the spot.

Nothing Whatsoever in Lekeitio

We essentially did nothing today, which was exactly the reason we were in Lekeitio in the first place. Tourism, as I'm sure you're aware, is often a tiring pain in the ass. You slog through forums and cathedrals and cemeteries and asture monasteries, take photos, listen to interpretive audio programs, and pretty soon you are convinced you will kill a man if you're forced to take in any more culture. You want to experience a wonderful day where there is no culture in your lives at all. This is why God invented the beach, where you can sit outside on a balcony with a glass of wine and some snack food and do nothing whatsoever, and best of all, you won't feel guilty. We in fact picked Lekeitio expressly because of its lack of monuments. We are clever people.


Our hotel and roughly a million small children. More on that soon.

My parents spent a healthy majority of the day sitting on the balcony and doing nothing whatsoever, but I succumbed to my wandering urge and decided to go walk around. It's a charming Basque town, and it feels totally, completely distinct from Castile and Leon, not Spanish or French but something different entirely.



I found a little trail behind an apartment building on the hill and followed it, finding myself on a winding path between locals personal vegetable gardens. It was beautiful, lonely, and slightly creepy, as I kept on anticipating some old gentleman with a beret and a musket to barrel out of the bushes and shout at me. This did not happen.

I came out onto the road again and walked by the ocean, pausing occasionally to look down at the ocean and scare myself with the thought of just how much it would hurt if I toppled over the edge. There are hordes of seagulls nesting here in summer, and they scream and mew like children, a constant back-beat to the sound of the waves. I kept on squinting my eyes and hoping to see a whale, or at least a manta-ray, but no such luck. The ever-skillful Basque fisherman took care of the whales long ago.


The delightfully weathered Gothic cathedral next to our hotel. Kids like to play soccer against the walls here.

One observation about the Basque: they love mullets. Men, women, and children all sport carefully coiffed mullets, with no apparent embarrassment or remorse. Basque experts: is this some sort of traditional haircut, a tradition whose origin is lost in the sands of deep time, a hairstyle cultivated among the primordial pine-woods of pre-Roman Euskadi? Or do they all really have a thing for Joe Dirt?


The island in the bay.

Second: I have never seen more children in my life then in Lekeitio. I suspect the Basque tactic for gaining notoriety and independence may actually be outbreeding the rest of Spain. Every couple had a stroller with a baby in it, hordes of sandy kids roamed the streets and hunted for crabs, teenagers carried around surf boards and drank beer, and everyone seemed exceedingly, well, fecund. Lekeitio certainly seems like a magnificent, near-ideal place to be a kid. You've got the shore, fishing, boats to play around in, giant extended families to buy you ice cream, lenient liquor laws - it's hard to imagine anything nicer when you're underage and frustrated about it.

Lekeitio is not a restaurant mecca, and I only spotted a few actual restaurants during my wanderings around town that day. Most Basques subsist on pinxtos, the bar snacks that have been elevated to impressive gastronomic heights in this part of the world. Unlike tapas, pinxtos are set out on the bar as a sort of casual buffet for drinkers, and almost always are served on top of a piece of bread. Pinxtos apparantly are haute gastronomic delights in places like San Sebastian and Bilbao, but Lekeitio's pinxtos were definitely working class: fried egg, mayonnaise, sausage, and ham seemed to feature in almost all of them. Needless to say they taste very good. Since these snacks are free in unlimited quantity with the purchase of a drink, it seems many Basques take the economical route for their evening meal. So for lunch, we ate at a very underwhelming restaurant by the water.


We wanted paella, but they sold the very last dish of paella they had to a small child (who did devour it all,) so we had to choose other things off the set menu. I went for the peppers stuffed with cod and was not happy to find it came in cream sauce, which is just Not my Deal. It did taste exactly like pimento cheese (attention Southerners). I switched with my dad and just wolfed down some roast chicken.

For dinner, we decided to head back to the hotel restaurant, which had pleased us the night before.



We started with the lobster salad, which was very attractive and nicely composed. One thing I like about Spain is how dishes are often prepared with a lot of care to appearance and composition, even in restaurants that are off the beaten track a bit. The flavor was also spot-on here: tender lobster, fish roe, and a Crab Louie-like mayonnaise sauce dressing. There is not enough lobster in my life.



My dad had a rustic lentil soup. Lentil soups seem to be ubiquitous across cultures, and this was a good, meaty example of the genre. It's the perfect dish for a cold, cold night. As it was raining that evening and the temperature was rather chilly, it was apropo.



I had monkfish with crab, which was excellent - pan sauteed with some butter and herbs. I have gained true respect for the monkfish during my time in Spain. The monkfish is the most hideously ugly fish in the world, the kind of beast you would expect to lurk in the shallows and lop off the legs of innocent women in bikinis, the kind of hideous monster you would expect to emerge from primordial slime when the moon is high. Despite its appearance, it tastes delicious if properly prepared, with a unique texture and a delicate flavor - indeed, it's often called the "poor man's lobster". I also enjoyed the crab claws that came with it. The kitchen cracked them ahead of time. You would not believe how many times I have ordered a dish like this with uncracked crab claws, forcing me to engage in disgusting behaviors to get at the delicious meat because I sure as hell am not wasting it. Have a heart, chefs. Crack the damn crab legs.



My dad had a mixed seafood grill, which was about the same as the pan-sauteed seafood we'd had the night before, if in variety. Tasty and simple, if not particularly flashy. That's what you get for ordering set menus! (But they are a killer deal).



My mom ordered prawns a la plancha, a classic Spanish preparation. Reminiscent of China's beloved salt and pepper shrimps, the little beasties are grilled and salted, leaving the shells cracker-crisp and delicious and the insides sweet like butter. Basque prawns are the best I have ever had. I ended up eating all of her left over heads and tails. I don't care if I am disgusting. I have no shame, I have no remorse, when it comes to suckin' on shrimp heads. I am not repentent.

We headed to bed. The next day we would head to Asador Etxebarri, the food highlight of our trip.

Drive to Basque Country

One last shot of Avila's castle walls.

We left early for our drive to the Basque Country, where we would be staying in the seaside town of Lekeitio. Euskadi is the proper name for the Basque homeland and it truly is a land unto itself - an autonomous region populated by a fiercly nationalistic and unique people. The Basques have been in this region of the Iberian peninsula for as long as anyone can remember, before the Celts and before the Romans - some scientists theorize that our early human ancestors simply turned into Basques in this rocky and green country. The Basques maintained their lands and their individuality against scores of inroads by parties as diverse as Romans, Visigoths, and Charlegmagne's forces, although efforts to turn Euskadi into a bona-fide independent country have met with no success. Fierce fighters, the Basques were known for their bad attitudes by the Romans and in one extremely famous incident, slew Charlegmagne's pal Sir Roland in exchange for the French force's sacking of Pamplona.

But Basques aren't just tough - they're smart. The Basques have commanded economic power entirely outsize to the population and fertility of their lands for hundreds of years, primarily through their impressive seafaring capabilities. Basques discovered rich cod-hunting lands off Newfoundland and Labrador, dominated the whaling industry, and (once their Canadian fishing rights were voided by the Bourbons,) turned their lands into a powerful center of trade, export, and import.

Everything was going beautifully for the Basques until the Spanish Civil War, when (most famously) the Basque city of Guernika was savagely bombed into oblivion by combined German and Italian forces with the blessing of Franco. After the victory of Franco, Basque culture and language was stringently repressed, forcing the Basques to go underground. But the Basques would not be defeated: the Basques bounced back from the lean years of the dictatorship with a vengeance, turning Bilbao and San Sebastian again into centers of industry and shipping.

Today, the Basques are incredibly wealthy and well educated even by EU standards - if Euskadi was an independent nation, it would boast one of the higher GDP's on the continent. For tourists, the Basque country has just about everything going for it - incredibly beautiful scenery, impressive culture and art, and what is widely considered to be the finest and most refined cuisine in Spain. If you can past the X and Z suffused language and the highly-overblown threat of terrorism from the ETA independence movement, Euskadi is one of the most interesting places in today's Europe.


We drove out of Avila fairly early and off into the plains of Castile and Leon. By now, we could anticipate what the scenery would be: rocky desert and scrubby plains punctuated with an occasional humongous castle or cathedral. The route towards Bilbao goes through many of the cities that made Castile and Leon great back in the days of the Empire - Burgos, Tordesillas, Valladolid and Huesca, among others, now dusty outposts (albeit outposts gaining some economic power in recent years). The drive was about six hours or so from beginning to end, but the landscape did eventually begin to change, as the elevation got higher and the trees got bigger and greener.



You know you're coming into Euskadi when the signs start going funny. The Basque language is utterly bizarre, and has no relatives anywhere in the world, originating as mysteriously as the Basques themselves. It is a language that contains an almost obscene quantity of X's and Z's, completely defying your standard-issue English speaker from spelling a goddamn thing. I've been back for two weeks now and I still had to look up the proper spelling of Lekeitio. Although the spelling of Basque looks like something invented by malevolent alien beings, when spoken, Basque sounds relatively normal.

As we drove further into Basque land, the landscape grew verdant, green, and rocky, composed of leafy canyons and small, high-up canyons, traditional Basque farmhouses perched at crazy angles on the side. The Basques adore apartment buildings: even the smallest canyon hamlet had a 12 story high rise apartment building sprouting out of nothing in particular. Do the Basques have something against spreading outwards and would rather keep their development moving up?

We were headed for the fishing village of Lekeitio, located on the Biscayan coast, roughly an hour from Bilbao. The coast was immediately beautiful, reminescent of nothing so much as Mendocino in California - dramatic rocky cliffs falling into the ocean, surrounded by lush pine forest. It was a drop-dead gorgeous Saturday afternoon and hordes of vacationing Basques were hanging out on the beaches and pulling beat-up surfboards out of their cars. They were also smoking weed. (Some joke that the Spanish government supplies the Basques with copious amounts of marijuana to keep them from revolting. Who knows.) We rolled up the coast for a while and found ourselves at our destination.





We were booked into the Princess Aisia Lekeitio, one of the nicer hotels in town with a lovely view of the waterfront. The hotel itself was the base definition of faded glory: it probably would have been a real showpiece roughly 30 years ago, but now smells vaguely of moth. The design scheme focuses on the poor princess the hotel was named after, a minor Spanish noble who was parked here with her children in lieu of anything better to do with her - some distressingly dead-eyed mannequins stood in the hallway. Still, the blue and white color scheme of the hotel was appealing, our room was large and clean, and the staff were friendly indeed - especially when we learned how to say thank you in Basque. It's Eskerrik asko, in case you were wondering.

We spent the remainder of the afternoon hanging out on the balcony. I went for a little stroll around town, taking in the village - it's just about the perfect little Basque fishing village, with a colorful shoreline composed of old fisherman's houses and fish markets, and a twisty, turny, and very vertical interior. Lekeitio is a popular Basque vacation spot but does not seem to host too many tourists from elsewhere - though of course the first people we met at the hotel were American. The little bay the village sits on boasts a beautiful cypress-lined island (with a land bridge that is exposed when the tide goes out), a well kept up beach, and insanely cold water. The water's sub-arctic temperatures didn't seem to deter the hordes of daytrippers, however, who splashed around in the shallows, played with their kids, and sunbathed topless with obvious pleasure. They were probably all high.

We decided to eat at our hotel's restaurant, which was supposed to be quite good, and had a big dining room with a view of the water. Our waiter resembled nothing more then a brusque, if friendly, Basque Hank Azaria. We all decided to go for the set menu.



My mom and I had some simple sauteed mushrooms for our first course. Pretty good, if unremarkable: if you put a mushroom in front of me, I'm going to eat it unless it is poisonous, and even then I probably won't stop to check. I should probably avoid foraging in forests.



My dad had white asparagus with crabmeat. The Spanish love canned white asparagus, are crazy for the stuff, but I've never liked it. It reminds me of what normal healthy asparagus turn into when they are undead. Dad thought it was fine. Apparently he enjoys consuming zombie vegetables.



My dad and I both had the sea bream, which was really quite good - as expected for a Basque fishing town. This was sauteed in quite a bit of butter, a simple and always successful preparation. The flavor of the fish was flaky, tender, and mild, reminding me somewhat of a Biscayan sand dab (one of Northern California's finest aquatic treats). Very tasty.



My mom had what I believe was a kind of sole. The flavor and preparation were about the same as we had - in other words, good - although mom did not enjoy negotiating the bones. I happily relieved her of the fish head. Insofar as I can tell, the Basque have the same delightfully freewheeling attitude towards seafood consumption as the Chinese do. In simpler terms: eating fish heads is awwright.

We headed off to bed to the sound of the ocean - not something I've done in a few years. A good day.