Intimidation

The other weekend all the museums in Barcelona were open until 1am and free. Andrew, being the museum and free stuff enthusiast that we all know him to be, managed to drag me out to take advantage of the weekend. We tried the Picasso Museum, a must for anyone who comes here, but the line was down the whole block and we figured that while it's a must for anyone who visits, it's not a must for anyone who lives on the next street over and can pop over at any time that there isn't a line full of visitors. So we decided to head to the Museum of the History of the City instead.

On our way there we had to cross Via Laietana, a fairly major road in our neighborhood. Right as we were about to do so we noticed a few armored police vans pulling up and blocking off one of the roads. We might have been able to ignore that but then more and more vans pulled up and more and more policemen in full riot gear hopped out of them and lined up blocking the street. You can't ignore the potential for excitement there so we decided to hang around and see what was going down.

I called this post "Intimidation" because that seems to be the first impression policemen here go for. None of this Officer Friendly coming in to the schools to talk about how drugs are bad and policemen are your friends and are here to keep you safe. In Europe it's been my experience that policemen are here to make you feel like if you step out of line the kaibash will be brought down on you, swiftly and without mercy. Even if you're marching in a demonstration against facism, which is apparently what called them out in force (and riot gear). The funny thing was, they were just guarding this one side of the street, and not the other side that leads to where we live. Guess you can demonstrate against facists only in areas zoned for such. But we never got to see any heads knocked together, to Andrew's great disappointment.

Oh, the history of the city museum was interesting, but probably only because we live here and it was interesting to see how the city has evolved. Some remarkably well-preserved Roman ruins, though.