After our trip to El Museo de Bellas Artes, with detour to Hospital Clinico, we decided we had earned a nice lunch. Thanks to a restaurant list shared by Mario at the school, we decided to go Italian at Prosciutteria Tommaso. Got in line for lunch around 3 (very Spanish) and were seated – at a nice corner table upstairs, surrounded by art – around 4. What followed was indulgent and delicious.

We started with mussels and a zucchini carpachio with thin shavings of parm, dollops of roasted tomato and a scattering of arugula.

Followed this with pasta carbonara with truffles and tortello verde (spinach stuffed oversized tortellini with gorgonzola sauce).

Washed it all down with two generous glasses of wine each – Albariño for K and Tempranillo for R.

Finished “lunch” around 6pm and enjoyed our gentle walk home, floating about two inches above the park. Ahhh.

(For the record, I should note that we shared an apple around 9pm and called it dinner. It was enough.)

We were in the Museo de Bellas Artes, gawking at the incredible art, when we heard a crash. Turned in time to see another visitor, intent on crossing the room to see a painting more closely, flying over the low bench in the middle of the room.

(R here: I turned the corner into that room just in time to hear a crash and see a woman suspended improbably in mid-air above a stone bench, face towards the ceiling. It looked a bit like an action shot from a rugby match.)

Joan (whose name we later learned), hit the marble floor hard. Fortunately, she did not land either head first or with wrists extended. Not so fortunately, she gashed her shin and landed with all her body weight on her right shoulder.

Using our best school Spanish, we were able to translate between Joan and the security guards. Ultimately the guards called an ambulance, but because Joan and her husband Eric didn’t have their travel insurance documents on them, I rode with Joan in the ambulance while R and Eric went back to their hotel to collect the papers.

The driver/medic spoke limited English, but between her English and my Spanish, we worked it all out. She was very patient and introduced me to a new Spanish phrase–con dos, somos uno.  Roughly, with two, we make one. The local version of “it takes a village.”

Joan and I arrived at the very crowded local hospital and got her checked in–super easy process. Eric and R arrived shortly thereafter, and we said our goodbyes after connecting them to the triage nurse who spoke English.

Joan later sent a picture of herself back at her hotel, sporting a spiffy new sling. Turns out she fractured her humeral head (top bit of the arm bone) and is not thrilled about losing her golf game for a while.

All in all, we were impressed with the system; the ambulance driver even made sure to pick a hospital that would be easy for R and Eric to get to from the hotel given the road closures for Las Fallas.

(R here again. Joan had managed to get within one room of the painting she really wanted to see, Juan Bautista by El Greco. K made sure later to go back and take a picture of it for her.)

What with school and homework, we did very little by way of museums and sights in our first two weeks. But today it begins! After a simple brekkies at our hotel, we walked through the park to reach The Fine Arts Museum. Oh wow. (Already revisiting our perpetual travel need for more superlatives.)

We started in the lower floor with the medieval stuff, thinking we’d give it a quick look before moving on to the Renaissance and upstairs to the 18th and 19th centuries. Little did we know how captivating their collection of altar pieces would be.

The scale of the altar pieces were incredible, but the details in the paintings really drew us in, especially the sly bits of humor in various expressions.

We had just moved on to the Early Renaissance – “Hey, everyone, I’ve discovered perspective!” –

… and encountered Botticelli’s  portrait of Mark Rylance in Wolf Hall –

(OK, I thought the resemblance was extraordinary, but possibly it was some Greek dude called Michele Tarcaiota) when…crash.