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    So, Bilbao Then...

    EDIT: Removed
    Last edited by Johnny Velvet; 05-11-2021, 12:17.

    #2
    I don't have any concrete suggestions but food in the País Vasco is almost always uniformly excellent. The pintxos are wonderful but slightly costly, but just about any menu del día will offer good value. As usual, look for places which are full of locals.

    This is good:

    http://www.bilbaoturismo.net/BilbaoT.../bosque-de-oma

    And you can do the San Mamés stadium tour:

    https://www.athletic-club.eus/en/ful...san-mames.html

    Finally, it won't be sunbathing beach weather, but this town is worth a day trip (easy by bus from the bus station):

    https://eternalarrival.com/travel-bl...-secret-beach/
    Last edited by Sporting; 31-10-2018, 15:38.

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      #3
      A review from the man hisself: EIM

      https://www.onetouchfootball.com/sho...elona-v-Bilbao

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        #4
        I've actually got some useful information. Remind me when I'm back from Aldi; I need to buy sausages and binbags.

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          #5
          Cafe Iruna - Probably not the best food in Bilbao, but easily the best setting. Beautiful building, with high ceilings, and impressive interior. They do pintxos (everywhere does pintxos) and their manu of the day is about 20 euros for three courses and a whole bottle of cava, or wine, or cider. We thought this was ridiculous value, but it's one of the more expensive daily menus.

          Cafe Bar Bilbao - One of the best looking bars I've ever seen. It's located around a square that's rammed with little bars, cafes and restaurants of varying quality. Start here with a tiny beer and a croquette speared to a bit of pepper and some bread and move your way round the square.

          Kubrick Bar - Really weird Stanley Kubrick themed bar. Feels more Berlin than Bilbao, but interesting so worth a look. The toilet doors are ace.

          Take the train out to Gernika for the day. The Peace Museum is great, and it's a nice town considering it was bombed to shit in living memory.

          There's more, but my notebook is upstairs. I'll add to this later, but these are the off the top of my head highlights.

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            #6
            kokotxas. Fill yr plate with the little buggers. That fishmongers here throw away hake cheeks is a fuckin war crime.

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              #7
              Fantastic city, Bilbao. First place I visited in Northern Spain and it was quite the difference from Southern Spain. Aside from climate, unlike Southern Spain where they quaff a glass of wine if that and, if they do drink a beer, it is a half. Bilbao has a proper drinking culture to the point where you see gangs of teenage Goths drinking pints of their version of snakebite which is Kalimotxo - half rough red wine and half coke. Beer is drunk in pints as well and there is local ciders which are flat but get served in barrels that are high up. You are given a empty jug for the table which you hold near the floor, turn on the tap of the barrel and, due to the height is being poured from, it gives if some effervescence.

              There is a great food culture in Bilbao as well with their own versions of taps which is pintxos. These aren't dissimilar from tapas but usually genuinely just a mouthful and, as you take them from the bar and eat them, you put the cocktail stick that was in them in your jacket or shirt chest pocket and pay for however many you have accumulated. Slightly different from Barcelona is that there, as I remember, were streets with lots of pinxtos places and people would tend to wander along the street from one to the next, having a beer and pinxtos in each. One of the idiosyncrasies of Basque cuisine is the txokos, all-male private eating and cooking clubs that take over a closed restaurant on a Sunday and take it in terms to cook for each other. Obviously, these aren't for tourists but I have had the pleasure of hanging out at a Bilbao restauranteur's BBQ and they know their stuff even if they were drinking red wine at breakfast time. Oh, that reminds me, Bilbao - unlike the rest of Spain - is pretty dead on a Sunday. It being a fishing port, the fish is usually great as well. Seconded on hake cheeks. We went to a restaurant that did hake cheeks and I thought they were going to be tiny scallop type things - perhaps battered. No, it was a fucking huge hakes head stuck in the middle of the table that we just dug into with our forks.

              We travelled around a bit but the one place I would really recommend is Guernica. It is a nice drive up into the mountains, obviously historically important and an interesting place in itself. We ended up drinking in an ETA bar up there - Guernica, of course, being a focus of nationalism - and playing a bit of pelota - a type of squash played with hands. After almost breaking our hands on the wooden balls - as well as almost getting our bones crushed by their handshakes, we pledged never to never to get into an argument with a Basque bloke. Actually, this isn't as glib as it sounds. The Basques are very different from the Mediterranean Southern Spanish and barcelonés descending from miners, fishermen and dockers. At the end of the day, Bilbao is a proper working city with the old docks right in the middle of town and the Guggenheim and its accompanying rise in tourism still hasn't changed that yet. As an aside, whenever I asked my dad about all the cities that he had visiting around the world when he was on the oil tankers, he was always disparaging about them. It was only later that I realised it was because wen they docked - assuming they weren't somewhere dry, like Dubai, when they stayed on the ships anyway - they would just head to the nearest bars which were in the docks area and pretty ropey. We both agreed that we really liked Bilbao and I realised that, for him, this was due to the city centre and its somewhat more cosmopolitan pleasures so easily accessible from the old port. The cider and great food probably helped as well. Hondarribia is a beautiful town on the French/Spanish border but a long - if lovely - drive from Bilbao itself.

              The Guggenheim is obviously worth a visit not least for the sheer incongruent nature of looking like a spaceship having landed at the end of a Spanish avenue. We went to an Athletic game at the old San Mames which was a great atmosphere in a ground that was right up against residential housing and narrowish streets where the supporters congregated outside and drank in small local bars. I haven't been to the new one yet but, as it is next to the old site, I wouldn't have thought there would be too much of a difference. I would recommend visiting for a match as I would the whole city and area. Indeed, having seen EIM's recommendations, I with I was going back.

              Actually, I have found a write-u of my first trip that is vaguely amusing, entertaining and a little informative

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                #8
                Originally posted by EIM View Post
                I've actually got some useful information. Remind me when I'm back from Aldi; I need to buy sausages and binbags.
                If their sausages are that bad why not get them from somewhere else?

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                  #9
                  Yeah, they're big Anglophiles. Which is fuck all use for you and Bored, but I reckon you could pass as English if you put your mind to it.

                  It's basically an edgy, less smug Barcelona. I really liked the place. The old town is great - I was walking round one evening and a load of locals just started having a dance to traditional music. Probably about fifty or sixty of them all in unison. It was great. It's strongly and visibly political, lots of Refugees Welcome flags and posters. There's one neighbourhood round the back of the station, that has a huge mural of Basque civil war fighters, labelled ANTIFAXISTAK. It's cool as fuck. There's also a smart monument to the local civil war fighters on the hill overlooking the city. You get there by the funicular and there's a pleasant park an all.

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                    #10
                    Good post, Bored, but I'd be wary in making generalisations about the drinking habits of the Spanish. I've seen lots of heavy drinking in places such as Córdoba and Sevilla, for example. And the custom of drinking a brandy or whisky or sol y sombra (brandy and anis) in the early morning is pretty common (relatively speaking) in much of the country. If we are to generalise, I'd say that young people in the southern half of Spain tend to prefer crap beer to wine, whereas up north wine is much more popular.

                    For cider you really have to go to Asturias. You really have to go to Asturias for many reasons, but this is just one of them.

                    San Mamés: not exactly next to the old site but occupying part of the former one. I think it may be a bit more open-plan (as far as surounding streets are concerned) than the old one. I only went to one match there, pre-rebuild: Athletic 1 Sporting Gijón 2, with a young Luis Enrique scoring both away goals.

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by Sporting View Post
                      Good post, Bored, but I'd be wary in making generalisations about the drinking habits of the Spanish. I've seen lots of heavy drinking in places such as Córdoba and Sevilla, for example. And the custom of drinking a brandy or whisky or sol y sombra (brandy and anis) in the early morning is pretty common (relatively speaking) in much of the country. If we are to generalise, I'd say that young people in the southern half of Spain tend to prefer crap beer to wine, whereas up north wine is much more popular.
                      Indeed, like in many countries where alcohol is cheap there's a fair amount of it being absorbed at all times, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botell%C3%B3n

                      https://www.lne.es/opinion/2011/04/0...l/1058630.html

                      But yeah probably more in the north than in the south, they also have those Basque festivals in Bilbao & area during which they drink the town dry. Last went there about 10 yrs ago, great city. Apart from what's been mentioned, the Casco Viejo (medieval old quarter) is fantastic + La Ribera Market.

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                        #12
                        Oh, my observations of drinking were just personal observations and, in thinking about, from my first trip from 15 years ago. I was just struck by the difference between where I went in Southern Spain, where it was only the British that appeared to drink beer at all, and the more seemingly anglicised drinking patterns of the Basques. Having said that, in my brief second stay during Euro 2016, my Basque travelling partners seemed to be drinking beer and wine roughly equally. What there was though, on both trips, was a very British-feeling dedication to getting fairly hammered. Cider definitely features heavily albeit I accept it may not be the largest consumer or producer of cider.

                        Although I loved Barcelona when I went there last year, I do like EIM's statement that Bilbao is "an edgy, less smug Barcelona". It did seem to have a really good alternative scene from what I could see - not just the Kalimotxo-drinking Goths - and we went to a couple of good nightclubs and an anarchist punk bar (that did great pork scratchings) etc.

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                          #13
                          Some googling has informed me that wine drinking, per person, is highest in Spain in the Baleares and lowest (strangely, given the production of high-quality wine there) in La Rioja.

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                            #14
                            [QUOTE=EIM;1488397]Cafe Iruna - Probably not the best food in Bilbao, but easily the best setting. Beautiful building, with high ceilings, and impressive interior. They do pintxos (everywhere does pintxos) and their manu of the day is about 20 euros for three courses and a whole bottle of cava, or wine, or cider.

                            Menus del día in the north of Spain often come with whole bottle of plonk included whereas here (Valencia) and other regions, you have to make do with a single paltry glass.

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                              #15
                              Thank all of those well off Germans for the figures in the Balearics. Jan Ulrich alone skews the average.

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                                #16
                                Nothing useful to add, but I can't resist telling my Bilbao-related story. I was a contestant on BBC Mastermind in 2015. My family support for the day was one of my grown up daughters and one of my sisters. My specialist subject was the Thirty Years War, and I had Peter H Wilson's book on it with me for last minute revision as we waited in the foyer. Sis asked me if it was good. Not bad, I said, it's readable and it's got some interesting extra stuff like telling you when some incident in the war is the subject of, say, a famous painting. That prompted sis to mention some painting she'd seen recently in the Bilbao Guggenheim, "you know, the gallery that Frank Gehry designed". "Ah", I joked, "must make a mental note of that, architects aren't my strong suit. Bilbao, Gehry, Guggenheim." An hour or two later, in my general knowledge round, John Humphreys asks which city the Gehry-designed Guggenheim is in. Made the difference between 4th and 3rd equal, that did. Thanks Big Sis!

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                                  #17
                                  Bumping this thread in case anyone has been to Bilbao in the past five years (not as if anything has happened since then). Will be spending a week there in April, hopefully see Gernika and San Sebastian, but largely staying in city. Awaiting ticket details and keeping fingers crossed that Athletic v Sevilla is on during the week we're there.

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                                    #18
                                    When I saw this thread at the top of the page, I thought that the Tolkien appraisal discussion had gone off on a tangent.

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                                      #19
                                      There's a San Sebastian thread that has more recent activity than this one.

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