Bilbao and Oñati

Bilbao is a great city. The museum is clearly fabulous, but the rest of the town has a great feel about it as well. It is a former industrial city, so it is no museum of pre-modern times with obvious tourist appeal. Instead, it is an ordinary but thriving city with a very human appeal to it. The food is excellent - lots of seafood and great coffee - the public transport is good, and in the evening the locals walk in the park and talk animatedly with each other.

Oñati is a beautiful small town about an hour south of Bilbao by bus. It's up in the hills, which surround the town. I took the photographs on a short walk in the countryside one evening. It's very pretty, although it wasn't too easy to frame the powerlines out of the shot. The Institute where the workshop was held was built in the 16th century, a beautiful building where the warm sun filled the courtyard in the afternoons. It is a pleasant, old Basque town, where the walls of the buildings are decorated with ETA graffiti. The food in the local restaurants was also excellent, although we drank too much local red in the bars late into the evenings. No, not really too much.