Zubizuri Bridge

Continued from First Lunch

Four syllables needed to say "white". Basque is a difficult language!

In the previous post, I referred to this pedestrian bridge as sexy. Well, as Plato says, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. This bridge has raised quite some controversy in the past, and not everyone likes it. Remember, I said about walking on foam? Well, the original material used for the deck was glass, and, well, walking on glass in Bilbao can be, mmm, rather treacherous!

They say it's a very rare event if you spend 3 days in Bilbao and not witness rain. This was personally confirmed in my 3 days there. Rained on the 3rd. No kidding. Apparently, a lot of people slipped while crossing the bridge during wet weather, so the local council decided to carpet it. Now, I'm left wondering how the bridge originally looked!

Read more about the bridge in Wiki.

Here are more shots of Santiago Calatrava's creation.

Under the bridge

Puente Zubizuri in the daylight

In monochrome

Twilight time

Reflections

From a distance

And since I like this one so much, I'll reproduce it here again.

The sexy one

Which of these shots do you like best? Why? I'd love to hear your opinions!

First lunch

Continued from First Tour.

We'd just come down from Mount Artxanda, and we were hungry. Also it was getting late for lunch and we were afraid we won't be able to find somewhere decent and which was still serving. We walked a bit from the station, looked at a few menus, until we came to Restaurante Zubizuri (Paseo Campo Volantin, 23), the first we liked the look of; there were interesting-looking pintxos on the bar, and the prices were not too off-putting. There was also quite a crowd, so we figured that it must be good, or at least decent.

We went in, asked if we could sit down, were told yes, so we did. No-one came to the table although there were waitresses busying about. Minutes passed by until we thought it must be a self-service restaurant (in spite of seeing waitresses carrying food). Wrong. They offered menu of the day, tapas and pintxos. We weren't even offered the menu to look at, and they had one.

Tired of waiting, and not wanting to leave, we ordered drinks from the bar, took them ourselves to the table, ordered some tapas and pintxos and also brought them ourselves to our table. The cod was good; the rest, sort of average. Price was costly €3.50 per pintxo - I left the restaurant still feeling hungry. Service was non-existent. For us anyway. We left more because of the service than the price. In Plaza Nueva, you can get good service, good food - 12 pintxos cost, on average, €20.

So, pay heed to me. They don't deserve your money. They don't want to work, don't give them any. It isn't a cheap place, so you should expect some form of service at least. Go elsewhere. It could be that the staff were not happy, but that isn't the problem of paying customers.

We left as soon as we could.

Woes were forgotten when we stepped onto the walkway of Zubizuri bridge.

We'd, of course, seen the bridge before, but this was the first time we actually crossed it. It must be the first bridge I've crossed whose walkway is foamed; I felt like taking my shoes off and walking barefoot. Just adds to the sexiness of the bridge - the softness of the walkway, I mean, not my walking barefoot!

Thus, a sexy bridge needs a sexy photo...

The sexiest bridge in the world?