This past weekend, we took our first “side trip” to Bilbao, in the Basque region of Spain. While it wasn’t my favorite city, the food and drinks were good. I did learn the following, though:
1. Bilbao appears to be wealthy. Very, very wealthy. (The actual disposable income in 2004 was about €14000.)
2. On the weekends, they take hardcore siestas in Bilbao and there is hardly anything open before 8 p.m. They also close at 10 or 11 p.m.
3. Euskara (the language of Basque Country) is nothing like Spanish.
4. Basque Country resembles Northern Europe. I thought I was in Germany the entire weekend.
5. The Bilbao I experienced was very windy, which made jackets a necessary article of clothing.
6. The Guggenheim is awesome, but not being allowed to take pictures is no fun. How does one describe the awesomeness of it without pictures?
7. Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time is the best piece of art I’ve ever experienced. It was disorienting and the acoustics were so different throughout the piece that I had to sing as I walked through some of it.
8. The outlet mall in Barakaldo is a great place to buy some clothes, but the ATM nearby charged quite the fee…
9. IKEA is awesome.
10. La Garriga and Barcelona honestly feels like home to me. (And to everyone else.)
This coming week, we’re finally going to see the MV Explorer, the ship that sails for Semester at Sea (SAS). SAS has been an Imagewest client for almost one year now. The agency has been working closely with SAS to revamp some of their marketing material, and we actually get to explore the ship on Friday. Hopefully, we’ll see some of our efforts at work. SAS has already started to use the Twitter background created by the team last spring. They have also implemented some of our ideas for their website already.
