Sun baked

Friday, 26 January 2024: Morning run - the City of Arts & Sciences route: Writer Azorin St., Realm of Valencia Ave., Mayor Reig St.,  Institute of Workers of Valencia Ave., cut-through to Ave. of the Silver, Ausiàs March Ave., Manuel Granero Square and home. 

I’ve decided my Pierre Gonnord book, despite its diminutive size, was a pretty good purchase after all. The images are beautifully reproduced. They bear repeated viewing. And it was published in 2017 so includes some fine portraits from later years that weren’t in the book I originally ordered.

After lunch-dinner - roast pork with all the fixin’s (well, some of the fixin’s anyway) - we rode down to the Turia near Torre de Serranos (one of the two surviving mediaeval wall towers) and found a bench in the sun - though filtered through trees. 

Torre Serranos

     A group of 30-something women were having a girls-day-out picnic lunch at a table just behind us. It was pleasant to hear their laughing voices - until I got lost in my book. It has occurred to me more than once this year, observing people on the street - and in the parks - that, despite Spain’s supposedly macho culture, a lot of women here, even middle-aged women, appear very confident - the way they hold themselves, the way they walk, the way they’re not afraid to talk loudly in public. Brits might say “bolshie” - from Bolshevik - which means combative or argumentative, but is often intended as a not-so-subtle put-down of women who vigorously insist on their rights. Of course, maybe I’m just deluding myself. Maybe women here are just as put upon as elsewhere. Probably, in fact.

The book I’m reading is an odd one, The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. It’s a fantasy about a hidden underground world accessible through magical doorways from the real above-ground world. It’s filled with books and stories, a “starless sea” of honey, owl kings, cats and unusual people. Are they real or just characters in stories? The main protagonist is a graduate student who stumbles on a mysterious book about the place that he finds in his university’s library. It’s definitely not my usual fare, but it’s amusingly written.

Underground seems to be a theme with me anymore. Since I started reading The Starless Sea, I’ve read a New Yorker article about a Spanish woman who lived for 500 days, totally on her own, with very little outside contact, in a cave a couple of hundred feet below ground. And then today, I was reading a story in The Paris Review - oooh, ain’t I getting fancy! - about a mother’s relationship with her rebellious teenage son. In the final, apparently metaphorical scene, they explore a cave together that they’ve accessed through a deep sinkhole in the middle of their unnamed community. And then, there was nature writer Robert MacFarlane’s fabulous Underland, which I read a few years ago, about various underground environments he’d researched and explored.

After the sun got too low to provide any real warmth, we walked up into the city and meandered around the narrow streets in something like the aimless way I do when I’m on my solo outings. By the end of it, though, Karen’s knee was giving her grief, so we headed, very slowly and gingerly, home for the evening.

Carmen streetscape: note the crabby-looking evil twins in black

Cluttered Carmen antique shop

Saturday, 27 January 2024: Fast walk this morning: a modified and elongated train station route that took me into some fairly mean streets west of Joaquin Sorolla station - dim, narrow streets of down-market apartment buildings. Not mean in the sense of threatening thugs on every corner - nothing as bad as our city centre! - just a slightly down-at-heels working-class neighbourhood.

Our life here has settled into easy-going routines. We hang around indoors in the morning, reading the papers and, in my case, magazines, or blogging. Around noon or a little after, the sun hits our juliette balcony and we squeeze into the little chairs and sit out there, reading or, in my case, sometimes, working on my cryptic crosswords, and bake in the sun. Then comes lunch-dinner. 

Today, for the first time in a few years, I made us spaghetti carbonara. Karen has been experimenting with something called resistance starch as part of her anti-diabetes diet. The idea is that you cook the pasta - in this case, but it works with rice and potatoes too - the night before, refrigerate it, then heat it up the next day. The glucose hit, for reasons that I don’t really understand, is much, much lower. I couldn’t get pancetta so we had to make do with bacon, but it was still pretty good.

Lunch-dinner is followed by a walk or bike ride. Today, Karen wanted me to choose where we went and I chose walking down Carrer de Ciril Amaros, a posh shopping street in the Eixample neighbourhood, to the Pont del Mar bridge. She didn’t make the obvious objection that we’d just done that a couple of days before, so off we went.

The shops were mostly closed, it being siesta, but it’s still the most pleasant street for walking in this direction to this destination. It wasn’t quite as warm today, or sunny, but it was still nice, about 18C. We found a stone bench about halfway along the bridge and settled in. The sun came out. We were startled every 20 minutes or so by cannon-like booms - a firework of some kind - but could never figure out what it was about. We read our books. I took more cheeky candids of people sunning themselves below in the park - my not-so secret agenda for the day. 

     Then we walked home by a different route so Karen could test her blood sugar two hours after eating. It was within the acceptable range. We’d had pasta before done this way, but never as the main dish.  So good result.

More sunny days

Wednesday, 24 January 2024: Fast walk in the morning, down almost to the river on Carrer de Centelles and back along Av. Regne de Valencia. A warm day, headed for 23C. 

After lunch-dinner, we headed to the beach by bike. After our first beach day last week ended up a bit of a fiasco, we thought we’d give it another go. We left it a little too late, though. By the time we got down there, ditched the bikes and walked a bit on the promenade, the sun was getting low. We sat on the wall along the walkway to catch the best of the remaining sun, and read for 40 minutes or so. More tourists about than locals on this working day. 

Then we packed up and went home on the tram and tube, doing a small grocery shop on the way. There was a concert in the university series I could have gone to, but by the time we got home, I would have had to rush to get there. No worries, there’s more free music to come.

Thursday, 25 January 2024: Thursday is now our going-out-for-lunch day. I spent a good part of the morning researching places we might try. I searched “‘menu del dia’ lunch restaurants valencia” and came up with a few new recommended possibilities. 

We set out at about 1:30 for a place that looked promising, down in Eixample, just off the Gran Via - Restaurante El Trovador. We had been warned it was a very popular place for working folk to get their lunch and it was busy when we got there. It’s a small place and there was a queue already forming. We opted to go back to another on our list that we’d passed along Gran Via - La Turqueta, one of several in the city owned by Grupo Saona.

Spotted on the way: Basílica Sant Vicent Ferrer, Eixample 

Spotted on the way: posh apartment block on Gran Via

It was pretty good. Nice clean, modern decor. There’s a bright section at the back with a big window and tropical plants. Without a reservation, we were seated a little to the side of it - with artificial lighting and fake plants. The €12.95 menu del dia offered a fair amount of choice, but a lot of it was pasta, seafood or vegetarian. I had a kind of open-faced sandwich of bean paste, potato and cheese on flatbread for starters. Karen had chicken-stuffed lettuce heart salad. We both had the grilled pork and potato main. It was perhaps a little sparse compared to the servings at Tasqueta de Mercat, the restaurant we went to last week, but tasty. We both had two drinks: three white wines and a beer. And a very good chocolate tart for dessert. 

The drinks, not included in the menu del dia, must have been expensive because the bill came to €42.70. That also included a small service charge that is either not levied at most places or included in the fixed price. That’s about CDN$65. Still pretty good for three courses and two drinks for two people.

We were entertained by the neighbouring tables. At the one nearest, there was a young family with a very lively, happy baby of about nine months. Both being babyphiles, we were smitten, Karen especially. 

The table on the other side had a middle-aged mum and dad and two pretty, dark-haired twenty-something daughters who I kept glancing at because they were so similar looking. I finally decided they were indeed identical twins. Which was interesting synchronicity as I had just that morning read a review in the New Yorker of a new book about twindom, How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins by Helena de Bres. De Bres is a New Zealand-born professor of philosophy at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her twin, Julia, a lecturer in linguistics in New Zealand, and also an artist, collaborated with her sister and provided illustrations for the book. 

Karen couldn’t really see the restaurant twins clearly from where she was sitting, but at the end of the meal, she got a good look at them, and confirmed: “Yes, twins.”

It was already after 4 by the time we left the restaurant - the service was a bit slow towards the end. We headed down to the river to the Pont del Mar (Bridge of the Sea - despite being nowhere near the sea) where we were pretty sure we could sit in the late sun for a while and read. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned, but part of our routine in this nice weather is to sit out on our tiny balcony, reading and baking in the midday sun. Mad dogs and Englishmen. The sun is gone from the balcony by 2 or 2:30, though.) 

The stone-built Bridge of the Sea was constructed in 1591 to replace multiple earlier wooden bridges that had been swept away by the river. Now, of course, it spans a dry riverbed. It has two very nice cupolas with statues of bishops. It also has stone benches built into its sides. We were lucky to grab one in the sun. Karen read. I read too but also took some cheeky candids of people in the park below and on the bridge.

While we’d been looking for the restaurant, an email came in from the bookstore where I’d ordered a book by the French portrait photographer, Pierre Gonnord. It’s the book I discovered at the library last week when holed up there on a rainy day. They had my book. I was excited. We were only a couple of blocks away from the shop. So when the sun went behind the buildings, we headed over there. 

It had already passed through my cynical brain that finding the book at such an excellent price - €19.90 for a very well-produced coffee table book, one that I actually wanted, especially when it was unavailable at mainstream sellers - was almost too good to be true. And it turns out, it was. 

     When I got there, the guy brought out this tiny paperback book of photos by Gonnord. I said, no, that wasn’t the book I’d ordered. He said, ‘El libro mas grande?’ He shook his head and said, ‘No es possible.’ I was pissed off. It might have been an honest error - that they’d sold out of the book I wanted, but inadvertently left the ad up at their site. But it felt like a bait-and-switch, especially when he was offering this clearly inferior product at not anywhere near as good a price. He showed me another full-size, hardcover book of Gonnord’s work that he had in stock. It was newer and only €25 but didn’t have the images that were in the book I’d wanted. I should have just walked out, but I looked at the small book and it did have the images I liked. It was €15. I ended up buying it. At least it will remind me of Gonnord and his photos.

Full moon: view out our back window

Happy St. Vincent the Martyr Day!

Monday, 22 January 2024: Today is a statutory holiday across the Valencia region, and only the Valencia region, to commemorate the city’s patron saint. Shops are closed, there’s a big procession, which we’ll go out to see soon, and general festiveness. 

Saint Vincent was a third century Spanish church deacon from Saragossa who was martyred in 303  for preaching his faith, on orders from the Roman Emperor Diocletian. He’s also the patron saint of Madrid and is revered in other cities across the Catholic world. He’s a busy chap. Valencia Cathedral has what it claims is his uncorrupted arm preserved in its crypt. So he has a pretty special relationship with the city.

More on the procession later.

I forgot to mention… The other night when I was coming home from my afternoon/evening walk around the old city, I came upon a huge pro-Palestinian rally in the centre. The crowd had flooded out onto Xativa street, a major artery, part of the inner ring road. It blocked traffic on the road and pedestrians on the sidewalks in front of the bullring. I was on a bike and had to detour around. Luckily there was a pedestrian route between the bullring and the train station, despite the construction on that street, and I was able to get home without going too far out of my way. 

I don’t know if the majority of Valencians necessarily sympathise with the Palestinian cause. The crowd seemed young, though, and I think the young everywhere are more apt to side with the Palestinians. Not that my sympathies aren’t mostly with the Gazan civilians at this point, but it’s a bit unnerving to see large crowds of people demonstrating against an explicitly Jewish state. You know how easily that could flip into anit-semitic hatred.  

The other thing I haven’t mentioned is our dog problem. We have one neighbour, on the ground floor, who has a terrace out the back. They have a large dog that I suspect they don’t very often - or ever - walk. They let it out on the terrace where it does its business. That’s their look-out, but the dog also barks constantly when it’s out there, loudly. Sometimes, off and on, for an hour at a time. We think it’s bored and protesting being shunned by its pack. 

Then the other night - Friday night - we heard a much smaller dog, clearly inside, howlng pitifully. We’d never heard it before and haven’t since, so I suspect it belonged to someone who was visiting. The people had probably all gone out to the neighbourhood bars to party and left the poor dog alone in a strange apartment. It started whimpering and crying at about 10 o’clock, just about the time people go out here, and it was still howling at 4 o’clock in the morning when I woke up. Karen couldn’t hear it, but I had to sleep with a pillow wrapped around my head.

Later: We walked over towards Placa de Reina (Queen’s Square) a little after 11 in the morning. The St. Vincent procession was supposed to leave the front door of the cathedral and pass through the square starting at 11:30. As we were walking over there, I started wondering if we had our information correct. The centre seemed quieter than it often does on a Sunday. I thought it would be jammed. But then we got to the cathedral square and found a fairly large crowd lining the route the procession would take. We got up fairly close to the cathedral doors and could see mounted horse guards waiting to accompany the procession. I didn’t notice until I looked at the picture later that this one is a young woman, with lipstick and dyed red hair in pigtails.

About a quarter to noon, the doors opened and the congregation came out, followed by a bunch of priests in their vestments. And then St. Vincent appeared. He’s represented by a silver-plated wooden statue of a swooning man carrying a crucifixion cross. It was made by one José Esteve Bonet (1741-1802). They mount it on a catafalque on wheels. We could see St. Vincent swaying above the crowd, glowing in the sun, as it made its way along the procession route. Soldiers with automatic rifles marched beside it - with the two horse guards leading the way.

Once we’d had our jollies watching the procession - and that didn’t take long - the problem became how to get out of the crowded square. It took some struggling through the press and then zigging and zagging along little backstreets to make our way out to where it was less busy. And that was it for our observation of St. Vincent the Martyr Day.

Later still: For my afternoon/evening ramble, I biked over to the north side of the centre and started into the old city near the armouries. As usual, I just meandered aimlessly, occasionally enjoying the streetscapes in this fairly old part of town. There weren’t that many people about and a fair proportion appeared to be tourists.

    

    The photographic pickings were modest. This set of three are of a building in Carmen I’ve always liked. It has a mural that goes around three sides and seems to represent a kind of fantastical river - or maybe the sea. Taggers have been at it in some places.

    This one is the Borja Palace, now law courts, and dates from the 15th century. The Borjas were Spanish nobles before some of them moved to Italy and became the famous, or infamous, Borgia popes, generals and murderers. (Some modern historians have questioned whether they did all the bad things their enemies claimed they did.) Apparently you can get in to tour it but by appointment only.

Tuesday, 23 January 2024: Warm weather has returned. It got up to over 20C today and the sun shone. I ran in the morning - a slightly elongated version of the train station route. In shorts. 

After lunch-dinner, we rode bikes down to the Turia park system. We rode along busy Carrer de Colon (Columbus St.), dodging pedestrians and electric scooters, and then walked down into the park at the Pont de l'Exposició (Exhibition Bridge). Designed by famous architect and native son Santiago Calatrava - who also created some of the buildings in the City of Arts & Sciences - it’s referred to popularly as La Peineta (the comb), because the arch makes it look a bit like the decorative combs Spanish ladies traditionally wore in their hair.

We didn’t walk far before we came on a reasonably comfortable-looking park bench in the sun. We’d brought our Kobos and sat reading for 45 minutes or so. There was no wind and the sun was hot - although it started to cool off before we got up to leave. We saw people nearby lying on blankets, sunbathing - almost certainly not Spaniards, some of whom we later saw wearing their puffer jackets. 

    At one point a fellow came along on a bike pulling a kiddie trailer with an elderly Samoyed dog in it. The guy was in shorts and t-shirt and had a huge pack slung over his back. He looked to be in his late 30s, with long dark hair pulled back in a cue and vaguely Latin American features. They stopped at the water fountain across from our bench so dog and man could have a drink. Then they pedalled off. We speculated idly about what his story might be. Karen thought he might be on a gap year, or taking some time mid-career to find himself. I suspect he was just unemployed and homeless - but not letting it grind him down too much. He looked fit and healthy.

We walked up into the city and through some of the same streets I’d haunted the previous afternoon. We were looking for possible restaurants for our Thursday lunch out. We didn’t find any, and ended up walking far too much of the time in heavily touristy areas. We kept going in circles and ending back at the Placa de Reina, a place we avoid at all costs most of the time, because it’s absolute tourist central.

Unidentified church near the centre

Moor's head door knocker

Note: You say Russafa, I say Ruzafa. Let’s call the whole thing…confused. 

If you have a smattering of Spanish, you might be a bit puzzled by my spellings of some place and street names here. Pont de l'Exposició? Isn’t that sort of Spench or Franish? Sort of. 

Valencia is a confusingly bilingual city. We hear more Spanish - or think we do. But the official first language is Valenciano, which is very similar to Catalan, the language (or dialect as some insist) spoken in Barcelona. So Pont de l'Exposició is Valenciano. Bridge in Spanish is puente, there is no elision of the la in Spanish before the word Exposición, which is also spelled slightly differently. Yes, there are definitely similarities between Valenciano/Catalan and French. 

I find myself more and more defaulting to the Valenciano versions of place names. It’s what you see on street signs and even on Google maps. But in some cases, I’ve stuck with Spanish spellings. Ruzafa rather than Russafa, the Valenciano spelling, for example. I’m confused too.

Not your grandmother's Vivaldi

Saturday, 20 January 2024: I’ve always been impressed by the residential architecture in central Valencia, most of it built in the 18th and 19th centuries. (I think.) Especially the way many are decorated with plaster bas reliefs and ornate wrought ironwork. 

I noticed the bas reliefs on a building over in Eixample the other day and photographed them. It’s an affluent neighbourhood, and I assumed the level of decoration was a function of the wealth of the barrio. But no. Once you’ve noticed one ornately decorated building front, you start noticing them everywhere, including in our neighbourhood, which was traditionally a working-class and lower middle-class area. (Ruzafa has gone way up market just since we started coming to Valencia.) Here are two within a few blocks of us, both at least as ornate as the one in Eixample. (If you want to see the decorations, click on the picture to enlarge it.)

The stuff built this century and the latter half of the last are, of course, mostly just as boring and utilitarian as the modern architecture in other big western cities. But in the older neighbourhoods like Ruzafa and Eixample, looking up is often a small delight.

I ran today, down to the river and along it to the centre. I came up near the Alameda tube stop, and jogged back a way to Carrer de Ciril Amorós. It’s one of my favourite streets. Since it runs right through the heart of affluent Eixample, I was surprised to learn that it was named for an early 20th century Valencia-born footballer. The street is lined with posh shops - including the ones we call abuela shops: expensive kids’ clothing stores where we imagine the neighbourhood’s rich grannies shop - and equally posh-looking apartment buildings. I was looking for a cross street and a bookshop on it with the unlikely name of Railowsky - the bookshop, that is.

After writing about the Pierre Gonnord book I’d seen at the library the other day, I went looking for it online. I was disappointed to find that it was ‘temporarily unavailable’ at Amazon in the UK and in Canada and out of stock at Chapters-Indigo too. The list price in Canada, when it was available, was $80, which put even more of a damper on things. Abe Books, an online second-hand seller, didn’t have it either. Then I found it at a Spanish online seller, on sale for €19.90 (about $30). Whoop! Trouble is, it would have cost extra to have it shipped, and receiving a package here would be complicated for us given our incompetence with both the Spanish language and our intercom system. On the off-chance, though, I checked the company’s location and found they had a shop right here in Valencia, not that far from us.

    So that’s what I was doing this morning after my run. It was a little disappointing that, when I found the place, they didn’t actually have the book in the shop. But the sales guy said they could get it in a week or so - mas o menos (more or less). They took my name and contact information. We’ll see.

Later the same day: I went out again for my now almost routine late afternoon solo ramble. Karen is nursing her bad knee and quite involved in her painting and stitching right now, so doesn’t want to come. Plus, the weather wasn’t great, though at least it was dry today. 

I headed for the historic centre, as always. It’s clear the golden age of Valencian street art is over, as I wrote last time, but I thought I’d try to document the decline. This first one is an example of the ambitious massive-scale murals that I’ve enjoyed photographing in the past. But it and others on this three-storey-high wall were made in the mid- to late-teens and are starting to look their age, with paint flaking and bubbling on some. It was made by a competent artist and has a sort of mysteriousness about it that I’ve always liked. But note the way some no-talent tagger has encroached on it. There seems to be some respect for classic murals like this one, but not a lot. It didn't stop this tagger from partly covering it.

    The next one is another favourite from a few years ago. But as in the first example, it’s now starting to look a bit decrepit. And the taggers and scribblers have cluttered the wall around it with their unimaginative kilroy-was-here scratchings.

    This one is like a lot of the newer stuff I’ve seen this year, not that there’s that much about. It’s smaller and, to my eye, lacking in subtlety or wit - kind of cartoonish.

    And then, here are three that give me some hope. They’re still much smaller than the big murals of the past, but they at least have some originality and a sense of design.

I also like the streetscapes in Carmen. The first is just around the corner from Plaça del Tossal, a very lively square with a bunch of restaurants and bars. It’s a bit touristy but has a young hipster vibe about it. The picture was taken in Pl. de Sant Jaume, looking down two forking streets that go deep into the less touristy parts of Carmen. The second is a cul-de-sac with flats on one side and a series of murals - now old - on the other. I always forget it’s a cul-de-sac, walk down to the end and mentally slap my forehead. 

It’s also hard for me not to photograph the mediaeval towers, the remnants of the wall that once went all the way around the old city. This one is Torre del Quart. It was built between 1441 and 1460. The pock marks in the stonework are from shelling by Napoleon’s troops in a successful siege that lasted from 3 November 1811 to 9 January 1812. 

    The other neighbourhood I like in the old city is the network of streets just to the east of the Central Market and Silk Exchange - don’t know what it’s called. I love the streetscapes here, with the pastel buildings and their overlapping planes. The walking woman who appeared unexpectedly from around the corner just as I shot was a gift. 

Sunday, 21 January 2024: The weather is getting back to normal, though it was still unseasonably cool for my fast walk down to the river and back this morning. The Weather Channel said it was only 4C when I went out, but it didn’t feel anything like that cool. The pixel boards said it was 12C or higher. The sun was shining again.

Later in the morning, I went out, alone again, to a free concert at MuVIM, the Museum of Illustration and Modernity (don’t ask why those two things go together, I don’t know). It’s the museum we visited the other day when the cleaner was here. Karen didn’t come because she doesn’t do classical music. The concert was by a group called the Covent Garden Soloists, which is made up of players from various orchestras in England, though none of them, seemingly, is actually English. The director and one of the soloists are Hispanic - the reason, perhaps, that they were appearing here - and the rest appear to be Russian. The music was a kind of baroque sampler, with excerpts from various works by big-name composers of the era: Handel, Vivaldi, Bach, Telemann, Albinoni.

There was a long line of mostly older folk snaking around the building waiting to be let in, which I joined. Ten minutes later the queue started moving. When we finally got downstairs to the room where the concert was happening, I suddenly noticed that everyone ahead of me was proffering tickets. The concert was free, but apparently you needed to ask for a ticket at the front counter on the ground floor. It was a way to limit entry to just the number of seats available. I shrugged and looked puzzled when I came to the ticket taker. “No entry without a ticket,” she said. Then she pointed to the side, indicating I should wait. A couple of minutes later, a man already inside - either one of the organisers or another patron - stretched out his hand and passed me a ticket. I had to sit near the back, but it was on the centre aisle, so I could see the players when they finally appeared. 

The important thing was, I was in! I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this concert. It was superb. These are really world-class players. They play a vigorous, muscular style of baroque music. Two violins, viola, cello, double bass, continuo and a trumpet soloist for some of the pieces. I think you’d call it a chamber orchestra. It filled the room with ease. The audience response was rapturous, two or three standing ovations at the end. The band played one of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concertos, complete, for its encore, the final Scherzo movement at break-neck speed. Not your grandmother’s Vivaldi.

Later the same day: Karen and I went for a walk over to Central Park, a few blocks away. By this time of day, the sun is long gone from our tiny balcony, but it’s more open at the park with no tall buildings to block the sun. Being Sunday, the place was hopping. Lots of families, kids racing around. In one of the renovated railway buildings, there was some kind of ethnic festival going on. Lots of Africa-looking people, a flag outside that looked vaguely familiar. Turns out, it’s the Pan-African colours. Loud music came from inside and it looked like there were booths set up, possibly offering food. 

    We walked on a little further and found a bench in the sun and settled. I went for a wander at one point but came back and sat down again to read. I’ve started a brave article in the latest Harper’s by Bernard Avishai, an Israeli-Canadian journalist. It’s entitled “Israel’s War Within: On the Ruinous History of Religious Zionism.” Not that I didn’t know it already, but it’s heartening to have confirmed that many Israelis dislike the country’s religious right and sympathise with their Palestinian neighbours - if not their jihadist government - as much as I do. 

We stayed for almost an hour. Members of an American-style marching band sitting not far away by one of the fountains were noodling on their xylophones and pounding on drums. Eventually, it got a little irritating. African children ran up and down the watercourse that flowed by our bench. They were having a grand time, playing with the water and watching things float along on it. When the sun finally deserted our bench, we got up and walked for a bit, then headed home.