We left Madrid on another night train, and had to share with some rather rude Spaniards who liked to have the door open and smoke in the hallway. I put a stop to that pretty quickly I assure you. Though we had paid for a cabin with beds, none of them on the carriage were ready and were all folded down into seats. Being clever little Kiwis Bron and I fixed it up without a worry and though I tried to tell the other cabins what they were missing out on I think it fell on deaf ears.

   In Bilbao we dropped our stuff off at the hostel (a very nice hostel run by the YHA infact) and headed for the Guggenheim Museum. I enjoyed this a lot more than Madrid, there were huge sculptures on the first floor, lots of mobiles on the second and the coolest peice of art ever on the third. The art to which I refer is an 11ft high shiny blue steel balloon dog by Jeff Koons. The plaque said it was version 1 of 4, so I have a new mission in life. To see the other three, and preferably own at least one of them :-)

   The next day we took a bus to San Sebastian on the advice of the train guy, it was fast and direct, just what we wanted. According to the train guy there we had to wait four hours and pay six Euros to cross the border to France. Luckily eagle-eyed Bronwyn had spotted a tourist info place, and they pointed us to a private metro system that got us there in less than half an hour for just over one Euro. Can you see why I hate the Spanish train system?

   Returning to France was great, the reservations were cheap, the system was reliable and best of all I was able to speak to the train guy in his language and understand his response. Ever since I have been decoding as many of the station announcements as I can and I think my French is improving a bit. But only marginally.

photo added August 20th

The giant flower dog at the Guggenheim, Bilbao