New Orleans To remind, on my return from some trip or another around our wide world, my father would cut to the chase. He didn’t want to see video or photos or hear some tour guide babble. He would charge me with telling him something he might want to know that was interesting to him or where he would learn something new. Returning from Barcelona and Bilbao, Spain with the Organizers’ Forum, I wondered what would intrigue him the most.
My family had been to Barcelona and Madrid once for Christmas, many years ago on what I called our “disaster tour.” Some group had blown up a train near the capital in 2004, If for some reason such trouble in a country forced the price of plane tickets down, we were on our way. We stayed then near the water and the beach in a working-class fishing community walking distance from the Ramblas. Several decades later, gentrification, second homes, and Airbnb have made the area an organizing hotspot with prices that are astronomic. Times change so quickly.
The famed Barcelona architect Gaudi’s biggest benefactor for many of his projects was named Guell. I had not realized until this trip that the original source of the Guell wealth had been slave trading, which he had expanded into textile manufacturing, managed in a very paternal way. In a city where class and class conflict was the signpost for those times, Guell and Gaudi were firmly joined at the hip on the wrong side, which takes a lot of bloom off the rose for me. I did not visit the Sagrada cathedral to see its current development, even though I had read the entire treatment it recently received in The National Geographic.
Truth to tell, in our delegation, I was not alone in enjoying Bilbao more than Barcelona on many counts. Here’s a surprise. After a youthful typing exercise had implanted the fact that “the rain in Spain in mainly in the plain,” we found that this area of Spain, both in the city and even more as one goes into the mountains and to Mondragon, is in fact known for almost perpetual rain. Who knew?
Here’s a tip though if you follow our trail: the Barik card. Grab one at a metro station for three euros, and it’s good for 10 trips. You tap it in, rather than using a credit card, which we found routinely doesn’t work, but the Barik always does. You can add more money to it, once you have one. The real deal is that it reduces the cost from 1.6 euro to less than 1 euro a trip. For a group of more than a dozen, hip-hopping around Bilbao to meetings from the hotel to city center and back, this was a godsend.
If the Sagrada is the big deal in Barcelona, then the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum and its wild design and construction by Frank Geary is the equivalent “must see” in Bilbao. “Must see” is the operative word here, as opposed to “must visit.” We all saw the museum down the street from our meeting with ELA. Visually it’s amazing, but the couple of folks who actually went inside were disappointed at the weakness of the art and its exhibits.
What do we know, I’m sure my father would have gotten a kick out of that information.