Simon Rumble’s blog

Arived in Bilbao on Sunday night pouring with rain. Discovered our hostel was well on the outskirts of town and so had our first night in.

Easter Monday in Bilbao was a ghost town. Hardly anyone about and most of the bars and places to eat were closed. Bit of a dissapointment after the edible delights of Sans Sebastian. Shitty hostel beds gave Simon a really bad back which meant I spent most of the day trying to drag him around town, not there was much to see anyway. Decided to head back to the hostel and have another evening of rest. Dragged the mattress of the bed onto the floor so Simon could get a better rest.

Tuesday morning Simon's back somewhat better so we tackle our main reason for coming here - The Guggenheim. A fabulous building of curved titanium tiles sitting next to the river. Inside went to their long gallery on the ground floor, apparenty longer than a football pitch. The room was filled with gigantic steel sculptures formed into metal mazes with the perspective changing curving towards or away from you as you walk into it, messing with your perception of space, light and sound. Simon couldn't resist an Aussie "Coo-Eee".

We were a bit dissapointed that the permanent Guggenheim exhibition was quite small with most of the gallery space given away to a Russian Exhibition. However this was bloody fantastic too with lots of Soviet era paintings, Kanidinsky and then some weird modernist stuff amongst others. One of our favourites was a video of Lenin turning in his grave.

It was in the weird modernist section that I clocked the face (and body) of someone familiar. Tex Perkins. Australina Rock Legend Sex God!!! I took a sharp intake of breath and hurried of to find Simon who verrified it was actually him. We had read that Beasts of Bourbon are playing around Spain this month. Shaking too much to be brave enough to approach him myself I got Simon to do my dirty work. He approached introduced himself which allowed me to nervously smile and shake his hand too. I'm not washing for a week! Looked at some other stuff after that but can cause I was too excited about Tex. So a dissapointing start to Bilbao but a bloody fantastic end!

We had a fantastic time in Donostia, a lovely town on the Basque coast. Arriving on a train in the early morning drizzle wasn't ideal, but things quickly got better. After a short rest, we headed into the old town and stuffed ourselves on amazing Pintxos (tapas), hopping from bar to bar. Donostia is great for this as each bar has different specialties, and it's accepted that you hop from bar to bar. Cidra (cider) is served in a uniquely Basque way, poured as far from the glass so as to aerate the drink as much as possible, and no more than about two centimetres poured per serve to keep it fresh.

The sun came out in the afternoon so we found some beers and crisps and headed to the beach. To our surprise, Tor and Hannah who we'd met at one of writer Peter Moore's events, were there on the beach! We ended up spending the evening hanging out with them, doing the bar hop and Pintxos thing.

After Tor and Hannah had left, Holly and I wandered around town and were on our last beer when we heard a Basque choir singing and went to watch. Holly asked someone to explain the songs to her, and we landed in with a group including a couple consisting of a Basque woman who speaks English in a cross of Edinburgh and Belfast accents and a Basque speaking guy from Belfast. We chatted away and they dragged us off to a few more bars, including one frequented by Basque seperatists, complete with pictures of political prisoners. Great fun.

The following day, still nursing a hangover, we met up with our new friends to go out to one of the amazing cider barns they have in the Basque country. Here you get a stack of brilliant food and all the sidra you can drink, pouring and drinking in the typical Basque way to ensure maximum aeration.

So Donostia, great place. I highly recommend it! Thanks to Mark and Maite, thanks for showing us around.

Posting this from Bilbao but need to get it out before I forget it all.

We had a fantastic food experience in Barcelona. Lots of tasty tapas stuff, but the place that really shined was off the beaten track and we discovered only late at night. We had some excellent sardines, a first for Holly, and spicy potatoes. It was so good we went back for more.

The second night, we went for the daily special, which turned out to be a meat mountain. Chops, morcilla which is black pudding, ribs, sausages, roasted peppers. Incredible. There should be a picture in our photos, which I would link to except this keyboard has none of the keys in the place marked and no way of changing keyboard layout to something sane.

One of the great things they do is Catalan bread. Toasted bread is served with a garlic clove and tomatoes. You slive the garlic and tomato in half and rub the bread in garlic. Then you smear the tomato over the top. Beatiful!

We caught the overnight train from Barcelona to San Sebastian last night. Slept in our six-berth sleeper, which was quite pleasant.

We've finally found an Internet cafe we can upload photos from. They're still going up but you can see them here

We've been in Barcelona since Monday night and in our first twenty-four hours, we spotted at least forty Iberimullets. It's certainly a popular haircut around these parts.

I haven't got my phone connected to the net just yet, so the attached photo is from Wikipedia and the location is approximate.

Barcelona is a beautiful city and the weather is fantastic! 20-22 degrees every day so far, with clear skies.

The most impressive site so far has been Antoni Gaudi's under-construction Sagrada Familia modernist church. The amazing thing about this church is the way the disparate elements of the design work together so perfectly. The guy was definitely a genius!

Tomorrow we're heading out of town to the mountain monastery of Montserrat, accessible by train then cable car. In the evening we catch an overnight train to San Sebastian in the Basque country.

This is our stuff for the next eight months! About to head to the airport. I can barely lift my pack. Eek!

Last night we celebrated Holly's birthday and had our leaving do here in London. Lots of fun had by all. Thanks to all who came!

Photos here.

We're having a tasty breakfast for Holly's birthday.

We're spending the week at Scott and Katie's place in North London.

This is my shiny new moblog thingy. You'll notice I've got a link at the top of the post where you can see the location of the blog post. Groovy eh? This is via a little Python app on my mobile that talks to my gps and a little Perl hackery with my blog.

I'll be blogging this way while we're travelling around for the next eight months. Starting next Monday. Can't wait!

I just bought a pair of these Sennheiser in-ear headphones. They're one of these deep ear canal designs, with various sizes of soft rubber insert. Instead of sitting in the outer ear, they go right into the ear canal.

I've had many of the crappy ear buds before, but they always either hurt after a while or fall out -- often one side hurting, the other side constantly falling out. So these are quite a revelation.

The soft rubber is very comfortable and blocks out quite a bit of the ambient noise around you. The sound is nothing short of brilliant, particularly the bass. Very clear and punchy. Goes very nicely with my shiny new mp3 player on our travels.