Valencia, Spain

Things just keep getting better and better – the cities are prettier and cleaner, the weather is nicer and the company is really nice. About this last point, actually, I haven’t really been alone in almost 2 weeks!

Well, Valencia did a great job in keeping up all of the trends. I think the one thing that sucked about this leg was that I was covered in bed bug bites, an itchy reminder of the horrible hostel I stayed at in Barcelona.  (Tip: Do NOT stay at the Rambla&Catalunya hostel in Barcelona, regardless of how good the location is or how much money you think you’re saving. I really hope this will be googled.)

Also, for some reason everybody thinks I’m a Spaniard. That is, according to strangers who ask me questions on the street. They all really do act very surprised when I tell them, in broken travel-Spanish, that I’m Canadian. Wow, which reminds me – people in Valencia are not as fluent at English as people were in Madrid, Barcelona or, well, most other non-English speaking cities I’ve been to in Europe.

Valencia immediately feels much smaller than Barcelona, though it’s still a very modern city, even complete with a nice shopping area:

On the left, the center square. On the right is a coliseum of sorts that sits beside the northern Valencia train station, barely visible on the far right of the image. 

The first morning we woke up in Valencia was very hot:

so we decided to go to the beach, something which was surprisingly easy to do:

The second day, we went on a walking tour. (Free and highly recommended). It began at Plaza de la Virgen:

In Plaza de la Virgen stands a cathedral. It turns out that a (apparently symbolic) governmental body has been meeting outside of it every week (Thursday at noon) for 1050 years. This is the longest continuously regularly meeting body in the world, which I thought was pretty cool. We were there on a Wednesday, unfortunately, so I don’t have any pictures of the meeting to show you, but here is a picture of where they meet:

Among many other places we were brought to was the main entrance to Valencia:
There used to be city walls surrounding the city, too, but they’ve been gone for ages. Standing to the side of this door, you can see where the walls used to connect to it.

We were showed this cool door:
The virgin mother above the door can swivel and is meant to point inwards when the owners of the house are indoors. (If I’m not mistaken, the tour guide said something about how the artisan who created this entrance went mad upon its completion…)

Also, here’s a really thin house (the red sliver): Right beside it is a “fancy restaurant” that scammed us when we ordered our paella on the first night. 

Valencisms

-In Valencia they don’t speak Spanish or Catalan, but a Valencian dialect that has (quite controversially) not been granted the status of an official language. Apparently, the street names on the maps are written in Spanish while on the actual streets they are stubbornly written in this dialect, making this city extremely tourist-friendly.

-Weird crosswalk:

-The keyboards in all of the computers here (well, in Spain, really) are really annoying since they are different to accommodate the Spanish tildes (~) above certain letters and moving the question mark out of place to make room for the upside-down mark (¿).

-An awesome candy store:
 Notice the decorations on top and on the bottom. Made of candy.

-Oh, I have to mention something cool about the seats in the trains here – you know how when you’re on a coach bus or airplane, you lean your chair back and it takes up some space from the guy (or girl) sitting behind you? Well, in the trains in Spain, (riding in the rain by the plains, plainly staining them with paint again… sorry), the front part of your seat kind of slides forward, reclining you without inconveniencing anyone. It’s not quite as comfortable as the real reclining seats we’re used to, but it’s a pretty good guilt-free compromise.

-Height of flood in 1957. You can also see my dorky new sunglasses:

- In Valencia (as well as in Lisbon), the street numbers are weird. They still go up in pairs, all right, with the odd on one side and the even on the other, but the two sides are not synchronised! On your left you’ll have 24 26 28 whereas on your right you’ll have 65 67 69. Traveling for this long, you start really getting used to always seeing weird things like this, and you start forgetting what you thought “normal” was back home. It’s impossible to keep track of every funny thing, as they stop standing out as much as they’re not as fresh as they would be if I had just left home. Still, this really screwed me up and amused me.

- An interesting gargoyle:

I had two extremely Valencian foods:
-The first, almost obviously, is paella. This is only obvious if you knew that Valencia is the birth place of paella (which, actually, I didn’t).

- The second is a beverage called Horchata. It’s made of ground tiger nuts and sugar, and it tastes like a sweet almondy soymilk. It’s traditionally eaten with a long doughnut stick:

Next stop is Granada. It’s surprisingly wicked here. The Gallway of Spain, I’ll say. Anyway, come read about it tomorrow, or something.