Bilbao - Days 39 - 42 - The First Night

Alright, now I'm starting to get to the really good stuff: all of the trips I've taken recently, starting with my trip to Bilbao, Spain, where I visited my UMW roommate Emily, who studied in Bilbao for the semester.  Her semester schedule was much more in sync with the American university schedule than mine is, so she was in Bilbao from the end of January through mid-May...I actually visited on her last full weekend before her semester ended.  I left Munich on Thursday, 6 May (Day 39) and was supposed to stay through Sunday, 9 May (Day 42)...but because of the lovely volcano up north, I got an extended stay in Madrid (where I had a layover during both my flight there and back) and made it back to Munich on 10 May (Day 43).

But that's getting ahead of myself...I'll start off with posting about the first night there.  I didn't arrive in Bilbao until about 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, so we got dinner in town and then took the 30-ish minute metro ride from Bilbao to Neguri, the town where Emily lived with a host family.  I never actually met Emily's host family - apparently it was normal for her not to see them very often - but her room was pretty nice.  I saved a bit of money by staying in the room with her rather than trying to find a hostel somewhere, so we were nice and cozy sleeping head-to-foot in her bed...

Emily's house...her host family owned the second floor:

Emily's room - she had this room and a bathroom to herself, down the hall from her host family's part of the apartment:

After putting my stuff in the room, we explored a bit of the town.  From what I saw of Naguri in the three days I was there, it seemed like a mostly residential town, with its biggest attraction being the beach, which was a ten minute walk from Emily's room.  Here's what I saw of town the first night:

The Neguri metro station:

Some of the houses along the main street:

As we walked to the beach, we saw some gigantic houses:

And some cool old-looking place...Emily didn't know what it was, and I didn't see any sign or anything:

 

Finally, my first views of the beach:

As we walked along the boardwalk, we passed this giant sand carving:

And more pretty views:
 

We took a different path back to Emily's house, and passed a kind of bay area, across which we could see one of the neighboring towns:

This picture is actually a cropped section of the first picture...the only way I could get a clear picture of the lights was by putting the camera on the concrete railing and I couldn't decide if I liked the picture better with the railing cropped out or not, so I decided to post both!

We passed through a beautiful park as well...the next day we walked by again while it was still light out and there were plenty of families strolling along the paths and kids running around, but I like these photos at night:

We finally made it back to Emily's place shortly after leaving the park, and spent the rest of the night catching up and relaxing...how I've missed my random conversations with Emily!

Coming up in my next posts: pictures from Bilbao itself, especially from the Guggenheim (a famous art museum in town) and pictures from the beach, where we spent all day Saturday.  Hopefully I'll update more tomorrow...or rather, later today since it's 1:36am...but for now, time for bed!