I love the ocean here. The sparkling mediterranean is full of colors, moods, drama, and wilderness. Rivers run from out of secret tunnels beneath the city and spill out in ever changing ways, green and cool, through the beach into the giant sea. What a treat to be able to walk to the water in ten minutes!
Except in the Summer.
Then, as far as I'm concerned, who cares?
That was supposed to be rhetorical, but it turns out there is an answer to it, and it is "everyone!"
On these endless warm and sunny days the stupid road along that coast runs fat with cars as ever. The famous ocean walk, almost fully exposed to the sun in black asphalt, feels like it's melting my shoes. And down below the seawall the beach is a baking expanse of hot stones. The deadness of Summer has beaten the waves away leaving the Mediterranean with the dull flatness of a lake.
When we walk through the streets, keeping earnestly to the shade, on a Sunday, we wonder how in this mighty tourist town, at the height of the season, it can be relatively quiet, until we emerge on the shadeless shore.
Everyone is there.
Everyone.
In the whole world.
The beach is piled with people. Umbrellas run as far down the coast as one can see. The water is a playground of people bobbing, boats motoring, and parachutes carrying little figures along over the water. For, I don't know, a hundred euros? a person can get pulled along on a parachute behind a boat so they can look down and see me walking along with my darling wife saying "Are you ready to leave the beach yet?"
And if she isn't that's okay too.
There's a nice ocean breeze.
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