We had a pretty chill day today, with only 1 planned, program activity, touring the theatre. It was the Teatro Arriaga, the same theatre where we watched Saioa perform two days ago. We learned a lot about the theatre, including the many reconstructions it went through after a fire in 1915 and the 1983 flood. The theatre is named after a local classical artists, who historians think could have been a Spanish Mozart, but had unfortunately died when he was 20 because of tuberculosis.

After we finished the tour of the theatre, we had the rest of the day and the night free. We first went around the new part of Bilbao visiting different shops and even visiting a chocolate shop. This morning, breakfast wasn’t provided by the hotel, so we got to go to a patisserie, where I had a cafe con leche and a bollos de mantequilla, a local pastry that is a sweet bun with a layer of sweet butter spread inside.

After we had lunch, we went into the Casco Viejo to get some souvenirs. We were really lucky today, because the sun was shining the entire day, and there wasn’t even the slightest risk of rain. After going from shop to shop and finding souvenirs for my entire family, we decided that we wanted to go to the overlooked we went to yesterday for sunset. Because it was 6 and the sun wasn’t supposed to set until 9:30, we decided that we would get dinner first. The first place we tried to get food from, which was a 20 minute walk from the Casco Viejo, ended up not having any sitting place, and the pasta was fresh, dried pasta, which obviously wouldn’t work for our dinner. We then decided to walk to the funicular, and on the stop at a pinsa restaurant (very similar to pizza but prepared slightly differently) that was recommended to us by our fellow students.

After we finished dinner, we headed over to the furnicular to head up to the overlook just in time to catch the sun setting. We took a lot of photos, having a lot of fun, and we even got ice cream on our way back.

Today was an amazing day, because we were able to spend the day as we liked, without having a restriction on time. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, when we get to visit San Sebastian, but for now, I’m going to be signing off to watch Eurovision 🙂