VALENCIA...oranges, oceans, y ooohhh so good dessert

Link for pictures:

http://northwestern.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105245&l=7566b&id=2409539

23 Noviembre 2007, Viernes

Valencia! Today I had lunch with the fam, playing with baby Claudia and talking to the titas. (aunties). We went to the airport and were off to Valencia on my personal favorite airline ever, Vueling. As we were getting off of the plane, we noticed that none of the signs at the airport were in Spanish. Now, Spain has 4 official languages…castellano, gallego, catalán, and euxtarra (Vasque language). And of course we knew in Barcelona that Catalán is spoken, but apparently in Valencia they also speak ¨Valencianá,¨ a close relative to Catalán. I was lucky that my sister Inma was visiting because she lives in Valencia and therefore made a list of things for me to do over the weekend. She also answered every single transportation question, since she works in the airport there. (I love Inma). We hopped on the metro and headed to our hostel, Indigo Youth Hostel, supposedly one of the top ten youth hostels in Europe. It was alright, the one in Malaga was actually exponentially better, but it was everything one comes to expect from a hostel, brightly colored exteriors meant to be ´hip´ and dorm like rooms, with a cleanly (hopefully!) simplicity. Our room had an added plus….a heater! I don´t know if I´ve mentioned this, but since it has become a bit colder in Sevilla, I sleep with at least 3 blankets, a sweater, sweatshirt, and various other layers. We cranked that sucker on high and enjoyed the sauna like steaminess in our room, before heading out to explore a bit. We ended up having dinner in a very Spanish restaurant called Jamón! Jamón! (like I said before, you can´t get much more Spanish than Jamón). We shared an amazing salad and a potato and tomato tapa. Afterwards we walked around Barrio del Carmen a bit, and saw the old Catherdral and Basilica in Plaza de la Reina. We met Natalia´s friend Liz who had flown in from Nantes, and walked around a bit more before settling on coffee and dessert in another café called Pepe Pica. Feeling quite exhausted, we called it a night and decided to get up extra early to see the sights the following day.

24 Noviembre 2007, Sábado

Today we got up at 830, with much silent grumbling in my mind because I had been having one of those amazing dreams, I recall it was something like I found out that I owned an amazing, furnished country house and then……BEEP, BEEP….

Anywho, we went to have our ¨breakfast included¨ which was toast and marmalade. Afterwards we went to the central market, full of fresh fruits, veggies, cheese, meat, sweets, and any other food you can possibly think of. The market was bustling with morning activity as we wandered around, pointing our Spanish delicacies to Natalia´s friend. Valencia is famous for its amazing oranges so we decided to try one out to see what the hype was about.

Having exhausted our senses a bit, we checked out the local shopping scene on Calle Colón, which was not that exciting since right now, I´m quite acclimated to Zara, Bershka, Stradivarius, Pull and Bear, Mossimo Datti, H and M, El Corte Inglés, Mango, Women´s Secret, Calzadonia, and all of the rest of the about 20 stores that make up the Spanish shopping scene. We also got to see Valencia´s Plaza del Toros, which was quite beautiful. We then hopped on a bus and headed to the beach, Playa Malvarrosa.

Even though it was chilly, I took off my boots and headed towards the water. The sand was quite soft and a pleasant kind of warm, which was the complete opposite of the ice-cold water. As we were walking along the beach we witnessed two interesting events, one…a group of people were painting the beach and some little boats resting on the beach. Also, one grandpa got into a fight with a passerby. As we approached I heard the list of Spanish insults, filipollo, maricon, no tiene cajones, etc. The police came to break up the fight. We decided to sit down and eat our Valencian orange. Nearby, a local was building a huge sand castle on the beach, and we watched it grow as we savored the juicy goodness which the orange totally lived up to the hype…we then searched for a recommended paella location, seeing as how paella is at its best in Valencia. We were told we had to wait until 2 o´clock for lunch, so we sat down and gossiped for a bit.

We sat outside right by the beach and ordered sangria. Note: quite interesting is the fact that the whole time I´ve been in Spain, I have only seen sangria offered in touristy locations. Unless it is typical to a part of Spain I have not visited, I really don´t think Spaniards drink it. We have something similar called tinto de verano, but it´s not exactly the same. Hmm….reminder to self to wikipedia sangria.

Anywho, we ordered the mixed paella which came with chicken, rabbit, and seafood. It took another 45 minutes to come, but it was DELICIOUS…we couldn´t finish it because it was sooooo huge. After our delicious meal, we took a bus down to the modern museum park, which has the museum of arts and sciences, and Europe´s largest and best aquarium. The whole park is quite beautiful, it had a modern design, and is all in white. Pools and fountains bring the place to life, and reflect off of the white facades. We decided to go inside the aquarium, and headed straight to the dolphin show. It was amazing! The dolphins did crazy tricks with the trainer which have to be illegal in the United States due to animal rights, but it was way cool to see the dolphins flip up their trainers and jump really high. It was also interesting to hear the whole thing in Spanish…

We wandered around the aquarium and saw belugas, penguins, sharks, and these amazing tunnel aquariums. One thing that I think is so funny in Spain are the translations of captions. You will read something in Spanish, and then the English underneath which is butchered! I don´t know how you could publish something written soo poorly. It´s not like there is no one who doesn´t know English, it´s taught in every school from a young age.

After the museum, we went back to the barrio of Carmen and ate at a typical tapas place recommended by my ¨sister.¨ We had tortilla española, queso manchego, mariscos, and pimientos. Then, we wanted to have dessert so we went inside this Italian restaurant and decided to share a dessert platter. You should see this thing! It was monstrous!!! There were about 4 or 5 different kinds of desserts, all smothered in whipped cream and different kinds of sauce.

We decided to go out and walked around the nightlife district, which of course was still dead around midnight. After having a few drinks, we saw some crazy band play at a club, and then met some interesting English guy at another club. Finally, we ended up at Bolsería, supposedly the hottest Valencian club. It was just like any other place really, but I struck up conversation with an interesting guy. He was an Sri’Lankan Australian, that is, he moved to Australia when he was a child, and now had finished studying commercial law in London to move back and start working in Melbourne. I don´t think he had met many Americans before because he asked me if America was just like American Pie, to which I sadly had to say yes. I learned a lot of things about Sri Lanka, like their main religion is Buddhism but the culture is similar to Indian.

The next morning, we got up early and had a typical Spanish breakfast of no talking until café con leche, and tostadas. Liz left to catch her flight, but Natalia and I continued onwards, exploring. We saw the Columbus marketplace, where a band was getting ready to play, and then took the metro to some place a little farther away to have horchata and fartones. Horchata is a Valencian drink made from ¨chufa,¨im not sure how to say that in English. It´s very vegetabley, and fartones are these long donutey things you dip in horchata. They, were, DELICIOUS….yummm….apparently Valencian ground is perfectly for cultivating chufa, something which the Arab conquerors discovered hundreds of years ago. When we arrived back in the center, we found we had just missed a fallero, or Valencian flamenco, show, and saw pretty little girls dressed in fallero costume, which looks very 18^th century, and just beautiful. We lunched and headed to the airport.