Another chilly day chased us out of Calafell and sent to Tarragona, which is only a half an hour drive away. Tarragona is one of those important tourist destinations, you know. Romans came in this and that century and proceeded to do whatever it was the Romans were good at doing until that and this century, after which they, apparently, took a big bulldozer and turned everything into ruins, because that was their way.
No, for real, it is amazing that they built stuff that is still there (more or less) after two thousand years. But I have to admit, after a trip to Rome some years ago, I acquired a certain kind of allergy to anything in a state of ruin. Which is probably why after a tour around even a tinyish circus (ruined, needless to say), I was bored senseless. Much more interesting it became shortly afterwards. On the way back to the less ruined center of the town we stopped to look through a fence at how the workers dig out – yes – more ruins and do something with concrete, apparently in an attempt to make ruins more suitable for tourists to walk around after having paid appropriate admission fee. The present state of the site allowed us to stop and speculate about all the layers of human activity on top of the Roman heritage, when the ancient walls were used as foundation for slightly less ancient ones, and so on and so forth. I was just in the middle of an uninteresting speech on the subject, when one of the workers (actually, the concrete lorry driver), after shuffling his foot in the sand, picked something up and turned to us saying something like: hey, here’s a souvenir from Spain! And handed a piece of ancient-looking ceramics to Lidia. He-he. We take things people give us first, and ask questions later, so – if you see a green amphora in some museum with part of a handle missing, let us know, we might give the missing piece back.
Do you think it is the end of the story? No-no, it is Spain after all. Fifteen minutes later, already at a reasonably crowded square, I lift my gaze up to the corner where some honking of a large vehicle’s horn is taking place. Wedged in one of the tiny streets, I see the familiar huge concrete mixer lorry, with the happy driver waving some more Roman pottery at me (oh, be honest: at your wife rather than at you, it’s a Spanish lorry driver). Anyway. I don’t know what the hundred people in the square thought over their tourist editions of paella, but we now possess a bit more fragments of ancient spittoons to return to archeologists in case of an archeological emergency.
P.S. I enjoy the thought that the pieces like these have no scientific value whatsoever and that truck drivers have some unwritten authority to distribute them among the tourists of their liking. I don’t know if that is true, but it is true that it made this little trip an unforgettable one.