So Bilbao was pretty sweet...the Guggenheim was amazing, such a cool building! It was through this building that some of the people in my group began to appreciate Frank Gehry's work...

Bilbao was a fun little college town with lots of neat architecture, alot of big name architects startin' to come through, and Gehry's Guggenheim was the catalyst of it all...pretty cool that a well done piece of architecture can completely revitalize and turn the tide for a struggling town.

we were only there for a short time, but had some good times walkin around, seeing things, getting approached by young spanish men while sketching (I had a designated sketching buddy after that..haha), and then one night we had the adventure of looking all over town for a place to eat, only to have to settle for a take-out pizza place...we ate the gigantic pizza's outside...in the street...on the ground...haha. The pizza was so greasy, and nobody else wanted to finish it, so I ended up eating about half of this gigantic pizza by myself; much to the surprise and amazement of the guys!

From Bilbao we took a bus for the next couple of days through the beautiful Rioja...the wine region of Spain. We got to tour some pretty sweet wineries, many of which were designed by famous architects (so there was actually an architectural advantage in it all... really!) But it was also pretty sweet to get to see the process of wine making and to get to sample some of the famous wines...quite fascinating! And tasty...:)

Our next destination in spain was Madrid...