Last day in Bilbao
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Today we have our last full day in Bilbao before renting a car and driving down the coast. It's been a quiet and lovely stay. The city presents a stark contrast to Barcelona, which seemed noisier, dryer, hotter, and - at least in many sections of the city - more frenetic. The Bilbao we have experienced has been cool, damp, and relatively quiet. Our lodging is in one of the thousands of apartments in apartment blocks that crowd the steep hills. This apartment block probably dates from at least 1960. The buildings in our area differentiate themselves by their different colors. Our block is blue. The next one is red. The neighboring block is yellow. And so on. Our first full day was at the Guggenheim Museum, a notable attempt at urban transformation. In 1991, Bilbao was a post-industrial city slipping into chronic economic depression, when the government of the region suggested to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation the plan to build an art museum in the city's run-down port