Spanish Bombs

There are lots of pine trees here; it looks like Michigan, except with mountains and terracotta and the occasional palm tree.

I forgot to go on about the Guggenheim museum building yesterday. I´m not usually a big fan of modern architecture, but I´ll take exception here. The building is all layered and silvery and shiny like a fish. Frank Gehry is into fishes; when he was a kid he used to go to the market with his grandmother and she would buy a carp and keep it in the bathtub until it was time to eat it (thank you, audio guide). He´s been into fish ever since. There´s a big fish sculpture in Barcelona that he designed I think for the Olympics. Anyway, all the silver makes the building look pretty industrial, so it fits in with the rest of Bilbao, but it´s also nice to look at so it makes the city look better. Also, there´s this cool statue of a dog or a cat or something in front of the museum, but instead of being made of typical statue material, it´s all flowers (imagine a giant flower pot in the shape of a big puppy). Like a stuffed animal, but alive kind of.

Guernica is between Bilbao and San Sebastian, so it made sense to stop there on the way to San Sebastian. But it turns out the most direct route from Guernica to San Sebastian is back through Bilbao. Oh well. Guernica is noteworthy because Hitler bombed the hell out of it during the Spanish Civil War (here in Spain they just call it the Civil War) and because of the resulting Picasso painting. So in Guernica, I went to the Peace Museum and saw a tiled mural of Picasso´s Guernica (the real thing is in Madrid). Nothing like a peace museum to make you feel all pacifist. The people working there seemed really proud of the museum and were very nice and helpful; in addition to written translations of the information they had English and French speakers on staff and had translations of all the films that they show. I have to admit, I didn´t know much about the bombing of Guernica before today, probably would never even have heard of it if not for the painting, so the museum was really interesting. Apparently the German government fairly recently apologized for their role in the bombing, but the Spanish government has never owned up to its involvement. At the time Franco accused the Basque nationalists of burning the town themselves, even though a) that´s absurd and b) the town was clearly bombed, not burned. Guernica has since been completely rebuilt, no bombed-out buildings left for posterity. It´s a pretty small town, and except for the war-themed stuff that´s not too much to see. There´s a nice park and some cool sculptures, including one by Eduardo Chillida, who seems to be all over the Basque Country, that really looked like a sculptural intepretation of Picasso´s Guernica. But I couldn´t find any information on it; maybe I just saw Guernica in it because I was in Guernica, I dunno. And it smelled good; I guess lilacs like this climate. Oh, and one more thing about Guernica. I´m no fan of spoofs; to me the spoof is the lowest possible form of humor, way below poop jokes or people falling down. But one spoof, if you want to call it that, that I really did like is this painting at the Contemporary Art Museum in Moscow. It´s a spoof on Guernica, using characters from the Simpsons. Brilliant.

I got to San Sebastian this evening. It´s really pretty here. Waves crashing on rocks pretty. Beach at night pretty. Romantic pretty. You can only get so romantic with yourself, though, especially in public, and the couples are starting to get to me. The Spanish are an affectionate people, and it seems like everywhere I go I´m surrounded by couples making out. It´s normal for people to live with their parents well into their 20´s here, often until they get married, which is another reason for all the PDA: There´s nowhere else to do it. I was walking behind this couple having a fight the other night. They were really going at it; at one point the girl pushed the guy up against a wall and was trying to hit him. Discomforting as live violence is, part of me was just glad I wasn´t watching them make out.