Old Friends

Shan and Travis just left this morning, and it was absolutely wonderful having them here. It was probably the second or third time that I've seen them since graduating from TAMS, but its kind of amazing how easy it is to be comfortable with people that you knew ages ago. And they brought us coffee, still whole, and a grinder, pretty close to enough to last us until we get back to New York.

They also inspired us to plan for our first apartment when we get back to New York. They bought a house and have redone most of it themselves (ripping out the bathroom completely, redoing the hard wood floor, painting, etc.) I haven't actually seen the apartment that we've signed a lease for, and Matthew has only seen it a party, not really in terms of "do we want to live here?" so it will be interesting once we get back and figure out what we've signed up for. In the meantime, we've been drawing out possible layouts and talking about furniture.

I went to Bilbao with Shan and Travis on Saturday. Matthew stayed home to "work." The outside of the Guggenheim is even cooler in person than it is in pictures, because changing position by a few feet can give you a totally different angles on the building. The inside however was less interesting for me; I'm just not a modern art girl.

After the Guggenheim, we went to old town Bilbao for lunch. After wandering the small roads, we found a place with a menu of the day that looked pretty good. While we waited for a table, there was a woman in a tight and tiny red dress making eyes at Travis. She kept trying to catch our attention and talk to us. After like 10 minutes, it finally clicked on me, and I turned to Travis and asked if she was a prostitute. We did the best we could to ignore her, but we were very confused how she thought she might pick up a guy that was standing with two women. Would we just not notice that he had gone off with someone else? Crazy lady.

After lunch, we stumbled on an shop selling "artisanal ice creams," and the flavors were too delightfully weird to pass up. They had cinnamon and roses, lavender, "kalimotxo" (Spanish/Basque for red wine and Coke), and Rioja red wine. Shan tried a mojito sorbet, and Travis and I settled on a local cheese with quince and walnuts flavor. It was really tasty, but towards the end it got a little exhausting. I kind of wish that I had tried the Kalimotxo.