The Valencia Post

Another belated tale of a trip. I wanted to post it before I leave for this weekend and get even more behind.

The weekend of January 20-22, i.e. from that Thursday night to that Sunday morning, I went to Valencia!

That Thursday I went to work, nothing remarkable, went home, packed some snacks, and took the little bus to the airport. Lovely Ryanair flight (read: kind of uncomfortable but you get what you pay for, so, whatever), took a metro to meet up with my lovely Couchsurfing hostess, a girl named Ananda who’d been hosted but had never before hosted. 

We walked to her apartment, had some quiche that she and her sister made, chatted aaand went to bed.  She’s also 22, studies poly sci, and lives with her sister, who was hardly there (and who let me use her bed, yay!) and an insane cat that they recently took in.

Friday I woke up earlyish and we went to the supermarket (proper Couchsurfing etiquette usually entails buying your own food, I’ve learned.) Then we came back and had breakfast.

Sidenote: when Spaniards eat cereal, they pop a mug or bowl of milk in the microwave, sometimes add chocolate powder (Cola Cao, which is a brand name, and an expensive one at that, and the most standard that all chocolate milk mix is called that), and then add cereal. I was so confused that first weekend in Spain when Chani’s mom put a bowl of milk in front of me.

So that day, Ananada (the hostess) was busy doing something with her mom and grandma, so she gave me a little map so I could go touristing and we agreed on a meet-up time  in the evening. She even gave me her Valencia version of a Sevici card, trusting that I would not crash a bike on her account or run up a huge charge. So that was nice.

The first place I went was the Museo del Fallero. Las Fallas is a big festival that Valencia is famous for where a bunch of artists make ridiculously tall (height of surrounding buildings) floats, topped with life-size wax/cloth/wood figurines, then the whole city gathers round and parties and burns the floats.

The float toppers are often satirical social commentary, sometimes related to a movie or something popular at the time, sometimes related to the festival itself with the traditional dress and whatnot, etc. etc. The partiers vote on a winning float topper, which is then saved from being burnt/melted and it’s saved and put in this museum, where they have the winner from each year since 1934 (and the promotional poster from that year.)

This is what the floats look like before they’re set on fire:

And here’s some of the niñots:

I guess there’s also like a beauty pageant each year, so the winner gets painted and put in this gallery:

That day it was kind of cloudy and cold and generally unpleasant, so I took advantage of the “City of Arts and Sciences” (I think the actual name was in Valenciano, but I can’t remember it.)

Another sidenote: in addition to Castellano, lots of people there speak Valencian, which depending on your point of view, is a language, dialect of Catalan (which is a language), or a dialect of Catalan (which is a dialect of Castilian. Or something like that. From what I could see, in the city it’s a lot less used than Gallego was in the cities in Galicia. Though some things were in it, like all the plaques with the titles and descriptions in the fallero museum, and at least some classes in secondary school are taught in it. Ananda said she used to know how to speak it but doesn’t really remember, though she can understand it. Walking around, we only heard it once (outside a market by a middle aged/older lady.)

Anyways, I wnet to see this this City of Arts and Sciences, a few blocks with like 7 different buildings: aquarium, opera house, Imax place, etc. shaped like different things, like one is supposed to look like a big eye, another is supposed to look like a whale skeleton, etc.

Then I spent the afternoon in the aquarium, which is the biggest in Europe and had all the stuff divided up, like there was one building with arctic, another with antarctic, a mediterraean thing outside, etc.

This is not a close-up:

The aquarium also happens to have the longest aquarium tunnel in the world, I do believe:

I happened to catch the dolphins when they were training:

Then to kill time before meeting back up with Ananda, I went and camped out at a café and read and had buñuelos, which I’d read I was supposed to eat there, which were, like a good merienda (afternoon snack), a variation of fried dough, with the super thick dunking chocolate. Amazing. Oh. I also had horchata, which is big in Valencia. I thought it was a Mexican thing. Guess they had to get it from somewhere.

Then I met up with Ananda and we ate dinner, took naps, and went bar hopping cause it was her friend’s birthday. Lovely kids.

Saturday we woke up late and went to the centro. On the way we were stopped by an old lady who was like “excuse me, do you girls have a second?” We thought either she was going to ask for directions, ask for money, or was crazy and just talking. Nope. Option four. She told us a dirty joke and went on her merry way.

In the centro, we saw the mercado central (this guy just walked in my picture; I didn’t mean for it to be that creepy):

Lots of pretty plazas (complete with a peta-esque demonstration):

La lonja (I think this building had something to do with the silk trade):

First braille city map I’ve seen:

This ice cream store apparently has reeeeally weird flavors. Like lentil, garlic, gazpacho, ham... I’m sad it was shut:

The cathedral:

More plazas:

I didn’t actually eat any paella there, but I did see these guys, headed to a party or something:

Some Valenciano:

Then I climbed the belltower stuck to the church, El Miguelete, and saw stuff like this:

Old city gate:

Then the clock stuck four. It was deafening:

Thennn Ananda’s stepdad picked us up and we went to his and her mom’s house, which was on the beach and by this super cool marina:

And we played Wii with her sister, who was 12 (aka my students’ age.) It was fun, though, because she was how I expected my students to be: fascinated with my being American, though in reality, it was more of a fascination with my being from the same country as Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron.

UPDATE: So I wrote this on the bus this morning and am now at home posting it. Today at work, though, someone said something about English people..which they aaalways think I am. It usually goes something like this... them: [random question about England] me: don't know. I'm American. them: really?!?? me: yep. them: [random question about American pop culture]. Today's was if I know Miley Cyrus.

Oh, so, Ananda's stepdad also made a fabulous merienda for us: he made chocolate and set out millions of cookie-type things to dunk in it. (My being healthy thing doesn’t apply on trips.)

That night we went back, watched a movie, and crashed.

Thenn Sunday I woke up and ate breakfast and left!

Whoo anticlimactic ending!