Today was yet another amazing day in Bilbao, and I can’t believe that our trip is coming to a close so soon. We started the day off with breakfast in the hotel before walking over to the engineering school for a balance workshop with Mikel, which was super interesting! We first started with a lecture on what balance was, how it worked, and what can impacts balance. I learned about how the vestibular system interacts with vision and the proprioceptive system to influence balance as a whole. To take a deeper dive into how balance is clinically assessed, we used the Berg Balance Scale, which involves the patient being blindfolded and having to complete a variety of tasks related to balance, and you can score anywhere from 0-56, with 56 being the highest. It was super fun to complete these tests with my classmates, and I even had a little bit of fun taking funny photos of all the people blindfolded.

After the balance workshop, we got lunch at the school cafeteria before getting a tour of Project BiSKY, which is a student-run group at the engineering school that builds rockets! We received a short presentation on the group in general before getting to see all of the rockets that the group was building, which was super cool! The groups goal was to get a rocket all the way to space, which I thought was super cool.

After seeing the rocketry project, our group walked over to Bilbao’s football stadium, known famously as La Cathedral! We got a tour of the whole stadium, including the box seats, the locker room, the press room, and a whole museum portion including a variety of cool artifacts from the sport! Overall, it was really cool to see a place that is so important to the Spanish culture of sports. After the stadium, most of us took a long walk to Old Town for some souvenir shopping and of course our group favorite dessert place, Gelati Gelati! I got mango of course, and I have no regrets. After gelato a group of us went and enjoyed some pintxos from a super cute cafe in the area, which was delicious! After pintxos we made stops at a few other stores along the way before heading back to the hotel for a chill night in! Overall, it was another great day in Bilbao, and this city is definitely starting to feel more like a place I know well.