Adventures of a Shrimp: July 2015

After a week in beautiful Bayonne, I hopped over the border (ha! European borders...) to Bilbao, the largest city of the Basque country, though not its nominal capital. After 3 weeks in France it was cool being in a place where I could walk up to people on the street and be guaranteed to get directions or whatever, and Bilbao's a nice little city too, though I only stayed about a day and a half.

The complete day was spent (somewhat obviously by this point) wandering around the city. My hostel was a little away, so I got a nice walk over the river and through a couple of parks on the way.

Looking towards the city centre, somewhere on the right.

First (and only, really) stop in the centre was the Guggenheim Museum. I had no idea what was inside the thing, but had heard that the building was super cool and that it was worth a visit.

The building was indeed super cool.

Flower puppy!

Sadly the inside was one of those places where you couldn't take photos, though there were a few assigned spots where you could, and these stainless steel tulips outside didn't have guards around them so the whole world was shooting them. At the moment the majority of the art in the museum is sculptures by a guy called Jeff Koons. Most of the sculptures are stainless steel versions of light things, polished to a mirror finish. The effect was really awesome, especially for the balloon animals.

Koons made a normal-sized balloon dog, which was then laser scanned and magnified times many and somehow made from stainless steel. If you look closely you can see the tiny twists at the joints, though not so much in the photo...

After the museum I walked along the river to the old city, though I didn't see too much interesting stuff besides the river itself. The old city itself was nice, but I had no money on me so couldn't really do anything.

Cool pedestrian bridge.

The Bilbao cathedral, in the old town.

The next day I caught the bus to Madrid, which I was quite looking forward to. I'd found a camping place, but it was a ways away from the city centre so it was a bit of a mission to get there. It also cost almost twice as much as I thought it was gonna be, when I got there.

In the morning I went into the city to see what there was (though I beelined to the Royal Palace, coz it looked cool). Couple of trains and tapas for brunch later, and I arrived. Old shit in Europe be so fancy.

The front of the Madrid cathedral, across a huge frying pan of stupid hot concrete from the palace.

There was a shitton of people waiting to go into the palace, but it was reasonably big so not really that crowded in the end. I think I've read too many descriptions of ultra-rich palaces and such in books, so I fucking love seeing it in real life.

The outside of the palace with its gilded lampposts.

The palace itself is still used for state occasions by the royal family, so sometimes it's closed, and the area that tourists can go through is reasonably limited. It includes a decent amount of the rooms though.

Some kind of entrance hall.

After this point you go into the rooms proper, where they're all "no photos." Most of the way through I realised I'd been walking around with a perfectly good camera around my neck that would work without bring it up to my eyes, so I turned it on and took a few. Couldn't really adjust the settings so most of them are too blurry to bother looking at, but some of them came out aight. Suffice to say the entire palace was like this.

The dining room, with places for 145. Originally 3 rooms, the walls were knocked down to make space for the massive table. You can just see on either side 5 seats back 2 of the seats are back from the table, and they're slightly bigger. That's where the king and queen sit, and when they actually dine there I think they move the table so it's centred in the room and they're sitting directly in the middle of everything. Or so the tour guide next to me said to his group.

The royal chapel, or half of it.

I can't remember exactly what this room was, but I assume it was some kind of study. It included the abdication speech of the previous king as well as the ascension speech of the current king. Also, obviously, the crown, with the sceptre just next to it.

Almost every room was decorated like this one, with a ridiculous chandelier and usually murals on the ceilings with all kinds of gold shit everywhere. One of my favourites was the room that was entirely decorated with porcelain (except the fancy rug on the floor, but all the rugs were rolled back so all us filthy peasants couldn't walk on them).

Again, not entirely sure what this room is for these days, although apparently a succession of monarchs some hundreds of years ago used it to hold court. Probably among the nicest of the rooms in the tour.

After I left I realised I should've played with my camera a bit and walked through all the rooms again to get better pictures, but it's no biggie really. In any case it was pretty awesome, and if you have a spare couple hours in Madrid it's probably worth going. Chances are if you're in Madrid as a tourist you'll go anyway, but unless you're super strapped for cash, go (and it's free for a couple hours a day but I shudder to think of the amount of people).

From the palace I walked through the city to visit the Parque del Retiro (Retreat Park? Park of the Retreat? Big fucking park in the middle of the city?), going through the heart of the city.

La Puerta de Alcalá, slightly older and smaller than the Arc de Triomphe

Huge phony lake in the park, complete with dinghies for hire.

One of the many boulevards through the park.

Statue of Lucifer being thrown out by his supposedly all-forgiving sun god.

The crystal palace. They had a nice little quiet space set up with cushions and sofas around the place inside, though I dunno how you could spend more than 5 minutes in a glasshouse in the ridiculous heat.

I like these trees.

The following day I went to La Pedriza, a national park some 40 minutes outside Madrid, that was recommended to me. Naturally I left the memory card for my camera in my computer in the hostel, the the photos I took on my phone seem to've deleted themselves instead of copying over...

In any case the place was really cool. The town wasn't much to look at, but the national park basically consists of a huge mountain of big rocks all piled on top of each other, with what must be hundreds of places to go rock climbing. Everyone else that was there was just swimming in the river that ran alongside the mountains, but I was there to walk, so I spent a couple of hours scrambling/climbing up the side until I was at a good spot, where I sat and read for a couple of hours more, until I decided I probably didn't have enough water to wait around any more. Another couple of hours of scrambling/climbing down (there were trails, but I lost it pretty quickly on the way up and didn't even look for one on the way down), and I made it back to town. All in all a good day, though hellish in the heat. Damn Iberian sun.

And then the next day it was on to the bus to Lisbon, to visit João, the awesome Portugalman I met in Chile.

Two trains later (I really like trains, but they're pretty expensive, and if you're reading it's hella easy to miss your stop), I was in Nantes, and went to the campsite in the city. Naturally by the time I wanted to eat it was like 930 on a Sunday and everything was closed, so there was a bit of a walk along the river to find something. Something I noticed in Latin America that's also present here, that I really like, is people picnicking and drinking and chatting in parks and so on late in to the night, even on Sundays. Too bad you'd probably get fined and sent on your way in NZ...

In the morning I went to the Machines of the Isle of Nantes, an exhibition created by two artists which has a bunch of fantastical animal machines. Jules Verne was born in Nantes, so the Machines are supposedly inspired by his books. The exhibition is in a couple of old buildings in the shipyards, and the weather that day was suitably wet and dreary. Inside was cool though, mechanical animals based on real ones.

Every few minutes they have a person or two come and do a demonstration with one of the machines, so you can pass through watching them all in an hour or so. When I got there I didn't realise, so some of them are inactive in my photos. After I'd seen a couple of the shows I didn't bother staying for the rest coz no French and stuff...

Ant with toddler-sized seat.

Weird caterpillar thing.

Slightly bigger ant, with controls for various things at each seat. The demonstrator controls it remotely, but the visitors move the mandibles and the legs and so on as they wish.

This was quite cool (though hard to see). They had a guy pretending to be a drunk old aviator climbing on the thing while it was giving a demonstration of early flight.

Display of carnivorous animals.

Hand-sized venus fly trap.

They asked people around the sides if they wanted to go up on the seats on the walls. I was all over that. Sadly the tree thing in the middle didn't really do anything but look cool.

But we got a nice show of the big bird thing!

It "flew" past us...

... and turned around on under its fancy crane.

I also walked over to the other building next door, which serves as a workshop for the.. museum? At the moment they're building a bunch of huge sea creatures for some outdoor exhibition, but they were all "no photos," so no photos...

The exit for the whole thing is walking along a huge version of the tree thing I was above before. Kinda cool fusion of industrial design and nature.

There's also a 45 ton elephant on wheels that you can go on a ride on, but it was pretty expensive. I wanted to at least get a photo but it was raining a bit and god knows where it was. I though the whole Machines of the Isle thing was really cool, seems like a decent way to get kids interested in maths/science/engineering, though it's obviously not the most practical or likely application for the majority of people. Was also neat trying to work out how the damn things work...

After the Machines, I walked back to the city and got lunch, then started walking to the Botanic Gardens, which were meant to be really nice. I made it about halfway there before I was at the chateau and decided I couldn't be bothered walking in the rain more, and was also quite tired. So I dropped in to the chateau instead.

Saw this guy on the way to the gardens/chateau. Could be a bit of fun to climb.

You had to pay a bunch to enter the chateau, but you could walk around the courtyard and the walls for free, so I just did that. Photo of gilded well (!).

Pretty fancy castle in the middle of a city.

Backside of the chapel.

Frontside of the chapel.

The arrowslits everywhere reminded me that it was, indeed, a castle. Most of them pointed towards sideroads outside, so the other buildings are probably pretty old too.

Weird maze thing made of sticks.

Main entrance to the place, complete with portcullis and drawbridge.

The next day I got the train down to Bordeaux, the first of several places I've since been where it was the same/cheaper to stay in a dorm than camping, and much more convenient. So I stayed in what seemed to be the only hostel in town. In the morning I went for a wander round the city.

I like Bordeaux more than the other cities I'd been, in the centre anyway. There's huge long bits of cobbled pedestrian streets with all kinds of shopping and restaurants and shit, with big squares and historical buildings/monuments everywhere. Walking along the river was nice too.

Can't remember what this thing was commemorating, but it was pretty impressive.

There was one of those marine statues on either side from here.

I went and visited the botanic gardens here, but almost nothing was in bloom, so the most interesting bit was the wall outside:

The next day I got the train to Bayonne to stay with a friend I met in Nicaragua. When I get there there was some sort of Medieval Faire going on, which was pretty neat (and most of the vendors were speaking Spanish so I could actually understand them). The city itself was really cool, loads of houses like these guys in windy little alleys and along the river.

The day after I got to Bayonne we went for a daytrip to some mountains just over the border into Spain with one of Manuella's friends. It's still pretty crazy to me that you can just drive into another country without even noticing. All the roadsigns in both countries around there are in some mix of French, Spanish, or Basque, so there's a chance you need to know the name of your destination in all three. Also just into Spain there's at least one town that seems to be made of liquor stores and tobacconists, as they're cheaper than in France. Probably common across Europe I suppose.

So we got to the place and walked an hour or so through some ridiculously green forest, though it was stupid cloudy and we couldn't really see a lot.

Sheeps tricked me into thinking they were cows with the bells.

We had a picnic at the top, then hung out up there for a couple of hours.

After a while the cloud cleared up and we could see the ocean. Biarritz should be on the right somewhere.

On the way back to Bayonne we stopped at St.-Jean-de-Luz for the Tuna Festival. The town was packed with people and musicians, and the docks lined with rows of tables next to kitchens in marquees. A few euros bought a fat tasty tuna steak, a cake, and a glass of wine. Delicious!

Then another stop in Biarritz to watch the sunset, and finally back to Bayonne to sleep...

The next afternoon we went with some of Manuella's other friends to camp out near the end of a Tour de France stage for two nights. There was maybe 20 people in our campsite, which was surrounded by other campsites and campervans, and these guys were pretty fuckin well-prepared; stove, fridge/freezer, beer tap, TV to find out how long until the cyclists pass by.

We spent the first night drinking and singing (though not in any language I speak, that was fun.. Though I did give a rather stunning rendition of Pokarekare ana. Can't even remember most of the national anthem). In the morning we were treated to this view of a sea of fog:

Looking up towards the end of the stage.

Our campsite.

I spent most of the day reading and drinking and eating delicious things, along with playing some game that resembled a cross between petanque and tenpin. Pretty good day, really.

The next day all the fences were set up for the stage, the cops were in place everywhere, and a horde of fans had arrived. Sometime in the afternoon a caravan of sponsors' vehicles passed, throwing out all kinds of free junk, and then the wait for the racers began.

This guy came past first, a couple minutes before the next people.

Then his bros on the motorbike. Was kinda surprised there was only one or two bikes like that.

Afterwards, all the other racers came past in groups or pairs. The best bit was that when they came around the corner below us they'd just been climbing, and the forest uphill opened up, so almost all of them looked up towards the left, and then this look of dismay crossed their faces as they realised they had another 1.5km or so of climbing to go. Poor fools. When all the racers had passed, we struck camp and headed back to Bayonne.

The following day I went to wander Bayonne a bit, and visit the Basque Museum. The Basque country straddles the border between Spain and France on the Atlantic side, where the traditional culture is still strong. At various points in history the Spanish and French governments have tried to suppress the Basque language (Euskara, in Euskara), but now in Spain there's an increased drive to save the language. Not so much in France, apparently...

Anyway, the museum was good, filled with old-school Basque stuff and a bunch of info about their culture. Should've taken notes...