Brock House Monday Travel presentation was really fun since it was about walking through vineyards in France and Spain. Well, we generally don't do that kind of walking but we have been in many of the same areas wandering around the the same villages where they stayed and having wonderful lunches in restaurants.
I was interested in seeing Bilbao, Spain, again as we visited there on our first trip to Europe in 1972. We were mainly driving around France for July/Aug that year but since we were in Biarritz and Spain was so close we decided to enter Spain and we ended up driving across Spain all the way to Barcelona.
Bilbao was very much an industrial city then. We didn't speak Spanish at all and didn't even have a phrase book since we weren't planning on going to Spain. We needed to find a place to stay and Jim got the idea to ask a priest we saw walking by where we were. The idea was that a priest might likely speak French. He did and took us to a hotel and asked for a room for us.
The hotel fellow actually asked the priest if he could verify that we were married. We had shown passports with our last names that were the same. We soon learned Spain was a very conservative country at that time...quite different from France. I had a colleague who travelled around Europe with his wife before they were married but they were Irish Catholics and had assured their parents they would have separate rooms. This was a problem in France because the French couldn't understand why a young couple wanted "deux chambers" (two rooms). They assumed there was a language problem and of course they wanted "une chambre pour deux" ( one room for two). Sometimes they gave up trying to explain it.
Now this architectural wonder is in Bilbao. I just love Frank Gehry.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and located in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. The museum was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Spain, with an exhibition of 250 contemporary works of art. Built alongside the Nervion River, which runs through the city of Bilbao to the Cantabrian Sea, it is one of several museums belonging to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and features permanent and visiting exhibits of works by Spanish and international artists. It is one of the largest museums in Spain.
One of the most admired works of contemporary architecture, the building has been hailed as a "signal moment in the architectural culture", because it represents "one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were all completely united about something", according to architectural critic Paul Goldberger.[2] The museum was the building most frequently named as one of the most important works completed since 1980 in the 2010 World Architecture Survey among architecture experts.[2]
Some other projects by Gehry:
Walt Disney Concert Hall, LA.
