The Guggenheim Bilbao is closed on Mondays. And yet here we are on Monday in Bilbao, a place that would be much better to take a day trip to then to spend three nights in. Unfortunately Bilbao is six hours from anywhere one would want to spend three nights in. Regardless, this isn’t an oh-fuck-it’s-closed story, because Sophie and I knew the museum would be closed. Which is why we planned to spend our extra day here in Basque country doing two other things: sleeping late, and laundry.
And so we arrived off the train from Barcelona last night at 11pm, walked the kilometer to our hotel, and told the guy at the reception desk that we had a reservation. He said, “No.” He seemed confident that settled things and turned back to his computer. Back in September I might have assumed that he was right and just headed back to Barcelona. But now I have 11 weeks of hardcore travel experience under my belt. So I replied, “Yes.”
“For tonight? No.”
Clearly I’d lost this argument. I considered also telling him that we had no money or clean clothes to see if he could use some no’s to fix that too. But because I happened to have proof of my outlandish claim of a reservation, I produced that. The clerk examined it skeptically, then handed us a room key in much the same way that one would hand one’s car key to someone claiming to be a valet parking attendant at Denny’s.
We unlocked the door to room 206 to find a strange mechanical device humming away happily in the middle of the floor. It was kind of a metallic shoe box with a fan at either end and a label that said “Steril-Room.” With surprising nonchalance we unplugged Steril-Room, assumed that whatever it had been protecting us from couldn’t be immediately fatal, and went to sleep.
We did not, however, sleep late. That’s because Sophie has some medication that needs to be refrigerated. She normally asks reception to put it into the kitchen fridge, but clearly if she had asked Dr. No down there he’d just have looked at the package and said, “This does not need to be refrigerated.” So instead she decided to get up early before the ice packs melted and see if whomever was on the morning shift would be more helpful. Also, I couldn’t sleep because the reservation snafu, combined with Steril-Room lurking in the corner, gave me nightmares about housekeeping repeatedly opening the door in the middle of the night to tell us that we had to let them know that we were in there.
The morning reception lady was more helpful than Dr. No in that she explained that the reservation mix up was my fault, because I had said “that you made the booking on the web, when actually you made it on Expedia.com.” Then she told us where the fridge was and shooed us away with one of those little shooing-away waves that Gloria Swanson used to do.
Up early with plenty of time to kill and the only clean item of clothes left between us being a single pair of cargo shorts, we turned to laundry. Here I should explain something. There are two types of places in Europe: in the first type, laundromats are plentiful and easy to use, with a box on the wall that controls all the machines and magically produces free soap if you need it. In the second type, if you ask someone if there’s an establishment in which you can do your own laundry, they look at you as if you asked them if there’s an establishment in which someone will scoop your brain out of your skull and use it to stuff a partridge. Bilbao, we learned after navigating many ugly streets in the pouring rain, is the latter.
Nevertheless, I am an optimist. Tomorrow the museum will be open, and it will be beautiful. We’ll be several hours closer to not being in Bilbao anymore, and eventually we’ll drive off into the sun, wearing our clean socks that we may or may not have washed in the bidet.
