Main Street of Bilbao: Gran Via

The part of the Gran Via we are walking through today is only one half, the first half, the first part that was built. If you want to read about its origins and Bilbao in the Ninetenth century, go to the post Gran Via de Don Diego Lopez de Haro

An entrance to the Bilbao subway train, designed by Norman Foster,
and also a view of Gran Via from Plaza Circular

A city like many other cities. As special as any other city. Nothing special. Somewhat characteristic. North of the South and South to the North. South to the nearby sea through which the bilboes (whatever they were) sailed to England some hundreds of years ago.

An old European city, and yet, tipically Ninetenth Century in its urban core.

Why does Bilbao have so little remainings from the Medieval Ages? Too many floods, too many fires and a growth too quick to be carefull in certains periods of the XXth Century.
The urban Expansion that was planned and executed during the last 1800s had its most important thoroughfare, its Main Street, where banks and trading companies hurried to take their places. The Main Street is called Gran Via, Gran Via de don Diego López de Haro. If we walk from the neibourhood of the Plaza Circular towards Plaza Moyua we will see the buildings, the trees, the windows, the paths, the shops you'll find in the following images. The photographs were taken a crazy autumn day that believed to be a spring morning.

If you're staying at some small hotel in the Old Quarter, lest's say the Petit Palace Arana or the Tryp Hotel, and you want to get to the Guggenheim Museum, the Main Street wil guide you. From the neighbourhood of the Moyua Plaza and from Moyua Plaza itself, were you can settle in the Carlton Hotel, both the Pelli Tower and Frank Gerhy's Guggenheim Museum are visible. If you have a room in one of those hotels of the Ensanche (the Nineteenth Century Expansion Area, where the industrial grounds have supported the rise of the new Bilbao), you are in the Gran Via or next to it. These hotels include NH Villa de Bilbao, Abba Parque, Hesperia Zubialde, Ercilla, Meliá (former Sheraton ), Miró, Dómine and others.

Today's walk starts at Plaza Circular and ends at Plaza Moyua. There are more than 50 images ahead, so it's better to double click one of them to start the slide show

 

To the post Gran Via de Don Diego Lopez de Haro

Going back to English

Going back to English. A recovery.

(I wrote this last summer)

At the age of 49, when life used to end, I decided to go back to English.

Which is not exactly going back to the very beginning, as Spanish is the first language I knew. But Spanish is also the time present, and English is stuck somewhere in the thread of my memory, or was stuck there in eternal childhood.
Waning and floating in the waters of misuse like a foetus in a flask.

I am almost in my fifties, an age when the drop appears steeper in front of us. But at this time I have still made one more decision, which I don’t do very often.  I have decided to make English my reading language.
Because I’ve decided to go back to English, to make it live and grow and stretch, to make it work.
And I believe this is the only way to do it.

At the age of 49, before surrendering completely, I enact my last rebellion.
Mind is the stage, memory the background.
I pull on the thread; I go into the mist of childhood.
The knot is somewhat messy, inside the fog, inside the rain, but it glows with a soft light.
That’s emotion.
Emotion opens the doors and tears the curtains. It’s attached to the words. English is not an emotionless language to me. So I must take advantage of this power, the power of feeling.

English was stuck somewhere in the thread of my memory, in the mist, in the mess. And then I decided to go back and start working at the point it had been abandoned.
The main thing I did was to read English books. Only English books.
I live my life in Spanish, and there isn’t time for everything, so I try to dedicate to English almost all the reading time.
It was hard at first. I went bumping against the never-heard words, the unknown idioms.
But I didn’t give up, because the light was glowing on the stage.
 Our feelings give us astonishing powers of memory and persistence.

Of course, we live in the world of the Internet, so I can also listen
I try to listen every day, to keep in touch with the sound, the sounds, the living music.

Then it happened. The living music came back. There was motion inside. It began to breathe. The language, I mean. It stretched out, it grew; it’s slowly growing up.
It’s beating like a heart. Something is flowing through it. It’s a machine of signs doing its language thing in my brain.

Going back. This is going back. This is going inside my memory to rescue someone I could have been, something which could have been mine.

Rebellion. This is rebellion, the last rebellion against things as they were, as they are and as they are supposed to go on being. This is an act of freedom against all the imposed, against the way things have worked out to make me be the one I am and those who I am not. But among all those who I am not, lie the ones I could have been. And among them, there’s the child who is waiting for me to guide her through the maze, so we can make it together to a new self.

I’ts the last chance to build something with words, with thoughts, with feelings, with new knowledge.
A last stretch of life.
And this pulling through and ahead is like going back.
Back into the labyrinth to take hold of something I had left behind. It’s a new source of will. It’s a kind of beauty. It’s the magic machine that will help me go and live my last life.

So I go back in order to move forward. I travel to the past to rescue the hidden power of an incomplete task, the fuel of a possible life, the energy that propels Dr Who’s time-space ship into the final leap, the final step of future.
I don’t care how much it lasts. It’s the journey what’s worth the worry. It’s always the journey.

Bilbao is a city in the North of Spain. Maybe you’ve heard about it because it’s got a Guggenheim Museum. When the moon glows in the evening sky, I think: the same moon is glowing right now over the roofs of London.