Leaving Valencia

On our last full night in Valencia we stayed up very late - reluctant to miss anything that was going on. Actually we spent quite a bit of that day and night wandering around and shooting bad video - if I ever get time I'll edit it and stick it on me blog. Staying up late was, of course, a baaaaad idea; we had to be up at six to get to the airport. Valencia's airport is only about a ten minute drive from the town centre. There's a direct bus that goes from behind the railway station, about a five minute walk from our hostal. But we had several gigatons of luggage so we took a taxi.

In view of the ongoing security mess as a result of the alleged terrorist plot we wanted to get to the airport as early as possible. But the check-in desk was only going to open two hours before the scheduled take-off time so we had an hour and a half to kill before joining the extremely long queue. We had seen posters at the airport explaining that US bound passengers could take nothing on board, but there was no information about UK-bound flights. Eventually, through a combination of the queue grapevine and BetterArf going and asking somebody, we learned that no hand baggage would be allowed on board. Bugger. I had one backpack containing my laptop, the video camera, BetterArf's camera and a couple of mobile phones. I absolutely did not want to lose sight of that bag, and the thought of it being hurled about various baggage-handling areas and then placed in a freezing cold hold did not inspire me with confidence. When we got to the check-in desk we were not surprised that we were overweight. We explained that two of the bags would have been carry-ons but they charged us for four kilos extra anyway, which begs the question 'is stuff heavier when it's in the hold than when it's in the cabin?' - in the cabin they would not have charged us, but in the hold they did. Theiving barftuds.

Getting through security was the next, very slow, process, and we didn't have time for anything because we had to get straight on the plane.

The flight was OK though, and pretty soon we were at Manchester Airport. The baggage took forever to come through, having been screened yet again, but I was pleased to see that none of the cops or customs peeps wanted a chat. Buddy Brian was waiting to chauffeur us to Liverpool, only slightly worried that we might have been arrested. We spent a couple of days in Scouseland, got rained on a bit, and tried to organise transport across the Pennines.

Buskers and Beggars

Buskers (street musicians) are one of the things that add life to any street scene. Which is why Dubai doesn't allow them. Valencia has a fair collection of buskers, most of them not very good. The preferred instrument of torture is the accordion, followed by guitar and voice. One guy caught our attention as being particularly bad - he could barely play his guitar, and his singing voice was just awful. He always tried to play Beatles songs, but I don't think he knew any English so he was just approximating the sounds of the words. One day he turned up at the beach, accompanied by a fiddle player. The fiddler was pretty good and we were contemplating throwing some money at them. But then matey-boy launched into his Beatles repertoire and we quickly changed our minds.

Beggars are always a pest in any city. Valencia has some interesting ones. There's the well-dressed guy who kneels on a little cushion all day long, head bowed in prayer and cup held out. There's a fair number of old gypsy ladies who tell you sob stories that you can't understand of course because you don't spikka da Valenciana, and finish up by going into whiny mode. I should tell you that if I was ever going to beat someone up it would be because they whined at me. One day a troupe of three young gypsy girls emerged from their stretch limo and began their shift. The one that reached our table first was immaculately dressed and had a cream leather handbag with matching shoes. When she spoke you were dazzled by the solid gold teeth. She quickly got into whiny mode and so she was sent on her way. Half an hour later she was back and I explained that I gave already.

One strange character that we saw around town most days or nights was a middle-aged woman. She wore a smart sleeveless black dress that got more dusty and shapeless as the days went on. When we first saw her we thought she was just drunk and trying to find her way home. Later it seemed that maybe she had no home any more. But she was still drunk. She never asked anyone for money, but she did like to have a good old shout at no one in particular. Most odd.

There were also two or three guys who would patrol the town centre trying to sell assorted trinkets - bangles, silly hats, furry dice etc. I've never wanted furry dice in my car, so of course BetterArf bought me some. They look very nice dangling from the rear-view mirror of my Beemer. Tasteful, like.

¡Hola, Chicos, Chicas!

(This post was written on August 12th)

Now that we've finished our course we have a couple of days just to hang out without worrying about getting to school on time, do homework or pretend to be able to speak Spanish. So today was Saturday, and you realise that the Spanish do weekends a bit differently. I don't know quite what they do, but they certainly don't swamp the town centre and do shopping on a Saturday, and the place is pretty quiet on Sundays too, although there is a bit of a flea market in the morning. I had to do some internet stuff this morning while BetterArf visited a laundry (what a star!). Then we met up for lunch and headed off to the beach. Lunch was a bit tricky because we were too early - Spaniards don't think about eating lunch until 1.30 pm at the earliest. We were about an hour early and both starving so we hit on the idea that El Corte Inglés might serve food on an all-day basis. We were right. El Corte Inglés, by the way, is a hugely popular chain of department stores: they have five massive stores in Valencia alone. We finished our lunch with a slab of This Chocolate Cake Will Almost Certainly Kill You.

Then we visited the music department of El Corte Inglés to see if we could pick up a CD. One of our Spanish teachers had challenged our intellects by playing us a couple of songs by Spanish band Amaral: she gave us the lyrics to some of the songs with odd words missing. Our task was to guess what the missing words were. We had no chance of working out the answers, but we quite liked the sound of Amaral, so we wanted to see if we could get one of their CDs. As it happened our quest was ultra-succesful - the CD Pajaros En La Cabeza (Birds In The Head?) was on special offer, reduced to €6.90 from about €18.

Having completed our shopping expedition we took the Metro to the beach. Valencia has beautiful beaches, but today it was also having a bit of a hurricane. It was somewhat unpleasant so we left and returned to town. Back at the hostal, BetterArf had a snooze while I read The Guardian (which by some magic of technology is available from about 10am on the day of publication), and had a glance through the weekly Costa Brava Times. This is an English-language rag that will be very useful for us, but the letters page is just like that of 7Days! It's full of stuff from whingeing Brits. Ick.

One of the recurring topics on our Spanish course was what and when the Spanish eat. And drink. Basically they just nibble at stuff all day long, and then stuff themselves silly just before bedtime. Interestingly, people in the Valencia region have the longest life-expectancy of anywhere in Europe. This is attributed to the diet: hardly any meat, lots of olive oil, no butter, plenty of salads, lots of garlic, and, most importantly, plenty of good red wine.

Well, I know why they don't eat a lot of meat in Spain: they have no idea of how to cook it. I had a steak at a supposedly decent restaurant during our first week. I don't recall ordering warmed-up shoe leather, but that's what I got. If we managed to get to the University an hour before the class started we could get a good lunch for about €5 at the Campus Caff. But the evening nibbles make up for any shortcomings in the meat department. Tapas are one of the world's great culinary inventions, and the other one is pintxhos. There is a bar called Lizzaran that sells these. They are a Basque speciality consisting of a slice of stick bread (baguette) topped with pretty much anything you can think of - a slice of ham or salami with a couple of olives or potato chunks - smoked salmon with cream cheese or blue cheese - a red pepper stuffed with tuna - a hunk of tortilla. Lizzaran has at least thirty different combinations and the one thing they have in common is that the toppings are stuck onto the bread with a toothpick. You fill your plate with as many pintxhos as you want, and at the end they count the number of toothpicks and charge you €1 each.

Valencia's main claim to fame in the food department is, of course, Paella. I'm going to be a bit heretical here and say that I am not very impressed. We already knew that the 'paellas' you get at most tourist restaurants are rubbish. If the restaurant has a poster or menu featuring photos of the different types (including a curry one), you know that you will get factory-made junk that is rapidly heated in a special machine. We mentioned this to one of our teachers and she recommended we try La Rosa or La Pepica at the beach.

So we took the tram down to the beach one day after school and walked a long way in the wrong direction until we came to a tourist information office. They sent us back the way we had come, and eventually we arrived at a terrace of about thirty restaurants. La Rosa was the second one on the terrace and it was closed. We walked along the whole length of this terrace, and everything was closed. This was about 8.15 pm. The last restaurant was La Pepica where a waiter told us they would be opening at 8.30. So we went away for a bit, and returned at 8.45. The place was heaving, but they gave us a little table. It's quite a smart place that has been going for about 100 years and has a picture of the owner with King Juan-Carlos. The waiters are all very smartly-dressed, and mostly in their fifties.

We ordered Paella Valenciana and when it was ready the waiter showed it to us in its pan and then took it away to stick it on plates (our table being too small to accomodate the huge flat dish). I manage to eat about one-third of mine, and the waiter seemed to be personally insulted that I'd left so much. Well, two things. A: there was far too much and when I am full I stop eating. And B. I didn't really like it. Ah well.

Some of the work we've had to do on our course is to compare our home town/city to Valencia. Odious I know, but our teachers and classmates have been very interested to hear what we have to say about Dubai. And I have been very interested to see how much emotion I keep bottled up about life in Dubai. You all know that we made the decision to leave Dubai last summer when we visited Valencia and Barcelona. And you know that we will be leaving next summer and moving to Spain. This is a city and country that works. Traffic management and public transport are superb. The place is steeped in art and culture. The people are happy and relaxed. The environment and way of life are very healthy. It is a true democracy. It is vibrant. Pensioners are called 'jubilantes'. Life is for living and enjoying. I love it.

City of Arts And Sciences

Of course, Valencia is not all old stuff. This collection of new stuff is Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, designed by Santiago Calatrava.



The building above is the Palacio de las Artes. It's covered in white ceramic tiles and I think they've been having a bit of a space shuttle experience because a lot of them are being replaced right now.



The blob in the middle (above) is called the Hemisferic. I don't actually know what goes on in there. In fact I don't really know what happens in any of these buildings because I didn't have time to explore inside any of them.



I love the way the shallow pools that surround all of the buildings cast a blue-green glow onto the white walls.



The structure at the rear of the picture above is called the Umbracle, and it exists solely to create a bit of shade for the trees and plants. Oh, and also to look gorgeous.







The building on the right, above, is the Museo de las Ciencias.



There is another section to the City of Art and Sciences devoted to Oceanography - more buildings in the same vein - but I didn't have time to get to them. Amazing stuff eh? Actually one of my reasons for wanting to move to Spain is that public services are excellent, and the authorities don't seem to have any qualms about spending money to get outstanding results - if this was in the UK it would be a collection of concrete-block warehouses with maybe a few scruffy lawns around it and miles and miles of car park.

Old Valencia

We are staying in the Historic Centre of Valencia. It's packed with beautiful old buildings, most of which have been sensitively restored. On many sites you can see façades (and in some cases side-ades and back-ades) that are being supported by complex steel mechanisms while the entire inside of the building is demolished. Then they build new floors and walls, and incorporate modern plumbing, electrics and lifts. This process in the UK is called 'façadism' and is much despised by architects. But here it works to preserve the visual unity of a beautiful old city while at the same time providing usable office and residential space.

And while the work is ongoing there is no reason for it to look rubbish. In the pic below, the pinkish facade is actually a full-size print of what the finished building will look like, complete with people waving out of windows and probably a dog peeing on a lamp-post.



One of the main features of old Valencia is the Plaza Del Ayuntamiento - Town Hall Square. In any city, it is always worth looking up at the skyline: this is where the architects go crazy, and they've certainly done that in Valencia. We have domes, towers, turrets and all manner of bizarre stuff. Unfortunately I don't have a photo of the Central Post Office building which is a magnificent example of corporate ambitions expressed on the building itself - we are talking statues of wingéd runners, trains and ships. Magnificent!



Another main feature of old Valencia is the Cathedral area. The cathedral itself was built in a series of phases, several centuries apart. There are plazas on three sides of it, and networks of narrow streets all around. Gorgeous.







In my next post we'll see a complete contrast: the City of Arts and Sciences.This is a set of buildings that would not look out of place in Dubai.

Students Again

Monday morning, we were due at the school at 8am. They do a Sorting Hat thing to decide who's intermediate and who's advanced. Beginners can usually sort themselves out, but we had to wait till midday to see what class we were in and get our timetable.

We had a hell of a time getting to the school. We knew it was in the Galileo Galilei Building on the campus of Universidad Politecnico, and we knew that there was a Metro station called U Politecnico. So we tried to get to that, but we had to change Metro lines and we messed it up. We started walking, but time was running out so we took a taxi. This proved to be a wise move as the campus is gigantic, and actually has four Metro stations that serve it!

We arrived at 0815 and were a bit confused that all the signs were for Don Quijote. We had booked through Estudio Hispanico - we'd seen Don Quijote, but EH were somewhat cheaper. However, it turned out the EH are merely agents for DQ. We were given an introductory chat and a tour of the campus while the timetables were being sorted out. Finally (at about 1230) we learned that we were in the afternoon session, and our first class would start at 1pm.
Our first teacher was a young lady named Maria-José, and she just started talking at us in Spanish. We all introduced ourselves, in Spanish that we just learned a few minutes earlier (yo soy Keefieboy - ka-eh-eh-effeh-ee-bay-o-y grecia). In our group of eight there are two English, one Welsh, one Indonesian, two Germans, an Italian and a Luxemburger. Six are girls, two are boy. Four are left-handed!

We belted through a whole load of stuff, had a half-hour break, and then we met our other Profesor, Llorenç (pronounced Jorence). This is where we discover that that the school operates on the good-cop, bad-cop principle. With a twist. Maria-José looks and sounds cute, but does the hard grammar, gives us lots of homework and expects us to do it. Llorenç looks and sounds a bit dodgy, but tells us all about the rude stuff, gets sidetracked into lots of conversational cul-de-sacs and is generally a good laugh.

Our first day ends with a welcome party. We have to assemble at the school, and then we walk to a bar. BetterArf and I were quite happy because we had just discovered that instead of spending € 1.20 apiece for each trip, we could get a multi-use ticket that is good for 10 trips and costs € 5.60. Yeeha!

The venue for the party is called El (la?) Amsteleria. I don't know if it is owned by Amstel, but you can't get a Carlsberg or a Cruzcampo or an Estrella Dam there. They have a bunch of tables equipped with metered pumps, so you don't have to go to the bar: you do it yourself and pay at the end. Beer, sangria and Agua de Valencia was all free for the first couple of hours. Near the end I wanted a bit more beer and was more than pleasantly surprised to be charged only € 2 for half a liter - regular bars would charge about 5. The joys of studenthood!

Meet Me In Valencia

I had to be at Manchester Airport no later than 6am, so I'd agreed with Brian that we would rise at 5. I set the alarm on my mobile phone for that time, and jumped out of bed as soon as it went off. Made myself a cup of tea, and was getting a little bit worried that I wasn't hearing sounds of anyone else stirring. I was about to go and wake Brian when I noticed that the kitchen wall-clock was saying 0210. Damn! I'd forgotten to change the time on my phone!. So I went back to bed for another couple of hours, but didn't really sleep well. Hey ho.

Anyhoo, the appointed time came and off we went. No problems at all, until I was at the Jet2 check-in desk. They have about six desks and were open for passengers for all of their destinations except Valencia. Valencia passengers got the message 'wait in lounge'. The queue was enormous and it got to about forty five minutes before we were due to depart. I asked at the info desk what was going on and they told me to get in the queue. I did, and it crawled along. After twenty mnutes of not moving very much, a Jet2 staffer arrived and pulled all Valencia passengers out of the queue and sent us to a different desk where we were processed in a hurry. I was mighty pissed off because I really needed some caffeine and a little bit of food. No chance, no time. Straight on the plane and off we go. This being a budget airline, there's no actual food, but I did buy a small bottle of water and a miniscule pack of Pringles for about 98 million quid.



I had called Offspring to make sure he'd met his Mamá: he had, but she'd gone off to try to sort out some accomodation for us. By the way, my Vodafone chip from last year that still had ten quid of credit on it, no longer works. So I got me a Virgin Mobile one instead.

The flight to Valencia only takes a couple of hours, and after I'd picked up my suitcase (yeehaa!), I got a bus into town. As it happened, this bus terminated at the Railway Station, which was where I'd agreed to meet the fambly. And there they were! Marvlious. Slightly less marvlious was that the hostal we'd stayed at last year (39 Euros a night for the three of us) were now asking for 75 Euros - claiming this to be a special rate because we had now become regulars. But BetterArf had found another place. Very centrally located, air-conditioned, 45 Euros per night. And as a bonus for our get-skinny campaign, up four flights of stairs and no lift.

Gifts were exchanged. Offspring seemed less than thrilled to recieve a cuddly Modhesh ('I wanted a mosque alarm clock'). BetterArf had got me the Espanol version of Pterry Pratchett's Feet Of Clay- Pies De Barro, on the basis that I know all of his books word for word, and it would be easy for me to understand. Sadly Feet Of Clay is one that I had read once or twice, but do not actually own a copy of. Well, I do now.

Greetings From Valencia

OK, we´re all here! Having a great time. In total shock from four hours of intensive Spanish every day. No time to blog - maybe at the weekend (bit weird, it´s Saturday & Sunday!).

Adios.