You know how when you’re married to someone and they want to do something weird you just say, “okay, sure, whatever”? Well, here we are in the part of Spain known as the Basque Country. We Nevadans know about the Basques because there are a lot of Basques in Nevada; there is even a Basque Studies program at UNR, but most people wouldn’t have a clue who the Basques are. Anyway, here we are in the Basque Country, having had insufficient snow to ski our brains out as desired. We’re on our way home from the Pyrenees, and we find ourselves in San Sebastian, a lovely town in northern Spain that has changed my formerly bad attitude about the Basques.
It’s January, we’re on the Atlantic Coast, and it is raining. Really raining. Walk around town and get soaked to the bones kind of rain. But, what can you do? This is where the part comes in about your husband suggesting something that is really unusual and you say, “Sure, Honey, that sounds great!” Last night when we were making plans for today, Jack suggested going to the Concrete Museum. Yes, there is a museum dedicated to concrete here. And you know what? Every single one of us said, “Cool, let’s go.”
Okay, a little history here. Jack’s dad was the go-to guy in the New York City area for getting your concrete rebar reinforcing put in correctly. You had a trick concrete job to do – the TWA terminal at JFK, a fancy bridge or museum job with fancy concrete work – John Hayes was the man to call. So it comes by Jack genetically to be interested in building technology. And the rest of us have been happily pulled along for years. So when Jack suggested going to the Museo Concreto in this lovely town in Northern Spain, well, we were in.
When we got there we were afraid that it was closed because there weren’t any cars in the parking lot. Happily though, it was open, and we had the place to ourselves. The place was pretty cool. We learned something about how concrete is made. Cement is part of concrete (we knew that), but there was more to learn. Here’s where my confusion was: I remember going to Greece on a family vacation when I was a kid and my brother and dad had a conversation about how Western Civilization had lost the recipe for concrete during the Dark Ages. I had an image in my mind of a recipe card that was misplaced. I don’t actually know what they were talking about, but please, Dad and Brad, weigh in on this. (Alex actual lectured me on how it was totally inappropriate to use the term “Dark Ages”. I admit that I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to his protests, but I’ll check back in with him on that later.)
It turns out that concrete (as opposed to cement) was developed in the mid 1800’s as a product that could be used to form rock-like molded structures. That’s different from cement that had been used for centuries as a kind of building glue. (No mention in the museum of losing the recipe card for an era.)
Did you know that to make concrete you have to bake the first two (of many) ingredients at the incredible temperature of greater than 1400 degrees C? Holy cow. That’s hot. And it makes you really wonder how one works out the resource economics of this process. That takes a lot of fuel to heat the ingredients to that temp.
Anyhow, that’s how we spent the morning, the only vistors to the Concrete Museum in beautiful but wet and cold San Sebastian, Spain. We all enjoyed it, and would have even more if we’d been able to understand more of the exhibit’s explanatory documentation which was in Castilian and Basque. Our Spanish is getting better, but, we couldn’t get all of it. The bottom line is, if you find yourself in San Sebastian in January and need to escape the rain, check out the Concrete Museum. You could do worse.
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