Hola, Bilbao

A slow day in Bilbao, but it’s a beautiful city on the Nervión River and a good place to spend a day.

When unlimited funds (the Guggenheim Foundation) meet unlimited imagination (visionary architect Frank Gehry), you get something like this, the Guggenheim Museum, which completely changed Bilbao’s story. The city went from a dying factory town one of the most visited places in the world.

The conversation went something like this:

Funders: “Hello Frank Gehry, we’d like you to design a blockbuster museum on the river.”
Frank Gehry: “OK, but after visiting Bilbao and sketching my vision on a napkin, I think it’s going to be kind of expensive.”
Funders: “No problem.”

Frank Gehry: “I would like the whole outside to be covered with 42,000 custom-made titanium panels that should be hand-installed by mountain climbers.”*
Funders: “You got it.”










Speaking of great art, Martha got to do some painting, which along with her other paintings from this trip look like  . . .

. . . and I got to do some reading, and we had some amazing food.

*True story.