Barcelona4 – Saturday – Roman ruins

Saturday was the 2nd day of our hop on/off bus ticket.  A quick breakfast and we were off and running.  Unfortunately, we didn’t take the time to work out a good plan this day.  So we winged it and ended up with a workable day.  We also ended up bumping into some old friends, but I’ll get to that.  On the walk to our bus I saw this ripped out newspaper picture in the window of a delivery van and had to take a photo, excuse the glare.  Hard to believe it’s been about a month since we watched the game back in Madrid!!!

  It reminded me of the start of our trip back in Madrid and the pride we’d seen the Spaniards exhibit over their team.  We hopped the bus after playing our morning ritual of try to remember what the scary clown was wearing (a game I started to keep Theo engaged in something other than trouble), just in case any of us forget…   On the bus route,  Maeve spotted this fanciful elephant.  She was saying ‘goodbye upside down elephant’ as I shot this photo.  You can see the words Caixa Forum on the building behind the elephant.  Caixa is the largest bank in Spain and their name was everywhere in Barcelona, including the Science Museum we’d gone to the day prior.  I’d planned to get out at the 1992 Olympic stadium and walk around it a bit.  As it was on the Montjuic (jewish mountain) hillside, it was also an opportunity to get a nice view of the city.  But I missed that stop.  After some “discussion” with Kate we ended up staying on the red route and transferring to the green route down at the beach.  Our new green bus pulled out then started backing up.  The driver came up to tell us the bus was broken and made us get off as he apologized.  We decided to walk the beach a bit to see what the man-made Barcelona beaches looked like.  Despite it being high-season, they weren’t as busy as the Fuengirola beaches we were at a couple of weeks earlier.  I’d read too that much of the sand on the beach had to be trucked in again each summer following the winter storms.  But the beaches made a lot more sense with the new Barcelona tourism town.  At the beach I had to go out of my way to ensure I got a shot of the big fish sculpture, adding Maeve just to increase the cuteness factor.

  In fact, she’d heard that so much from me over the trip that she started explaining the whole theory to Kate.  Dad needs me in the photos because I make the photos more cute.

After checking out the beach we hopped onto the green route and finished the eastern extent of the beaches via bus.  The green route passed through and then back through a rather significant park.  We’d planned to spot it from the bus and then hop off on the way back through if it looked like a place the kids could get their ya-ya’s out, as Kate puts it.  We didn’t spot any good playground equipment but there was enough shade and some water features, so we gave it a go.  At the least we could eat our lunch.  By sheer luck we bumped into these hillside slides that looked like you could really get going on them.  The stainless steel looked hot in the sun, but for the most part, they were protected by shade trees.  Zeke’s shirt slid well on the slides, but the cotton that Theo, Jane and Maeve were wearing was not working well.  I happened to have a slick shirt on too, so I donated it to the cause.  Here’s Zeke and Janie in my shirt bombing the hill.

A family had a puppy with them, the dad struck up a conversation with me.  It happened to be the puppy Nit’s first day outside.  Kate said she’d been watching him and he was scared of the pigeons.  His boy was learning English and tried a few phrases on me and the kids.  Hello, my name is **forgot it**.  Zeke shot a little Spanish back at him and I asked the dad about Catalan as Barcelona was his home town.  Yet another Spaniard that spoke excellent English!  We got a picture with them before they had to leave.

After lunch we hopped back onto the bus, destination Roman ruins.  These were ruins that were “discovered” underneath Barcelona.  It was a neat experience to ride an elevator down a few floors and step out into the ruins of a Roman city.  The buildings and streets above supported by large steel beams and huge cement columns.  Incredible to think what’s under the old large cities of Europe.  Especially those that at one point had fallen under Roman rule and then built right over the top of that civilization.  In fact, later at the Picasso museum I saw the same phenomenon.  They’d excavated some below the bag check lobby and then put glass floors in so that you could see the large ceramic containers they’d found.  Amazing history in those cities.  Anyway, we made it a few rooms into the Roman ruins, when who should we bump into but Bob and Trisha.  They accompanied us the rest of the tour and we exchanged more travel stories.  The kids especially seemed to enjoy telling them their experiences.  We all thoroughly enjoyed the Roman ruins, especially the terrific audio guide which attempted to explain exactly how the Roman city was laid out. INcluding a laundromat, public baths, church, and winery.  The most incredible fact… the Roman laundry used to have containers up in the street that they asked the public citizenry to pee into as they needed the urine for laundry product.  In fact, they were only allowed to do this after paying a tax to the government!  We weren’t allowed to take photos but I snuck this shot of Janie and Kate flanking Bob and Trisha.

After talking about the Roman baths with Maeve I attempted to drive my point home as Maeve is quite fond of baths.  And we pretended that we had to walk out of our house to the public bath, then walk home.  After the Roman ruins we all split up.  Bob and Trisha heading for the old city, Kate Jane and Zeke heading for home, and Theo Maeve and I heading for the fountain.  Theo and Maeve having evidently gotten enough energy from their sweet treat to do a little more trekking.  In the end I took a wrong turn and didn’t make it to the park with the fountain, but we stumbled upon a group of about 8 old men playing bocce ball with heavy steel balls.  One set a darker silver than the other.  We sat down and watched.  The men were quite animated.  It was quite clear they enjoyed kidding eachother, even if I didn’t know what they were saying.  It was also clear they’d all been doing this quite a while, as they could throw their ball underhand and land it in the air 20 feet away directly on the opponents ball which would send both of the balls flying to a sidewall. I said it was time to move on, but Theo begged to watch ‘just one more game’.  I wanted to watch more too, but it made it a lot easier to sit and stay knowing they were enjoying it too.  Can you spot them watching in this photo?

The last game we watched one of the teams had lined up all their balls past the pallino (the small ball that your balls need to be closest to) and on their last throw they simply pushed the pallino back to their row of three balls.  The opponent threw down his cleaning rag, crouching closely to the three balls as he counted uno, dos, tres, following that with some words that must’ve meant something like ‘how didn’t I see that coming’ at least that’s what his tone and actions said.

We walked home and met up with the rest of the crew.  Kate had gotten them a sweet treat of candy.  I told Theo and Maeve they weren’t allowed to have any as we’d already violated the single sweet treat rule of thumb and they’d helped me with a 4 pack of ice cream bars I’d bought at the grocery.  Thank goodness it didn’t seem to ruin their supper.