O, Valencia

As you could probably tell by the ever less frequent posts, I have been extremely busy this month. This last weekend (including my birthday) we headed down to Valencia which is just a few hours by train. We had an extremely nice train, the Euromed, on the way down which traveled at 200 km/h. It was almost like taking first class on a plane!

Once we arrived in Valencia we walked from the train station to our hostel down one of the main roads through the city. After changing for the nice weather we took the lightrail to the beach where it was quite beautiful but the wind made it a bit on the chilly side (no complaints though). After sitting for a while we headed toward Consum, our grocery store of choice, and bought some lunch and goods to cook for dinner. Our hostel had a really nice kitchen, so we took advantage of that the first night. Afterward we went to the roof of the hostel for a little while and had a few beverages and some birthday treats.

Saturday we woke up promptly and walked for a little while through the park which used to be a river. However it had a history of flooding and, since it flows directly through much of the city, they cut it off and dried it out. After some debate they decided not to turn it into a freeway but into a continuous park with endless sports fields and trails through the city. After realizing that Valencia is much larger than we realized we took the bus to the aquarium.

A bit on the pricey side but totally worth it, the aquarium was amazing! It is the largest in Europe and had enough exhibits to keep us busy all morning and through the afternoon. We witessed a dolphin show which makes you want to just drop out of college and become a dolphin trainer (don't worry I'm not going to). We went through endless aquariums and tubes underneath them seeing tropical and mediterranean fish and everything from neon octopi to belugas, sealions, and walruses.

This portion of Valencia is referred to as the City of Arts and Sciences which was designed by a famous local architect. There is also a hemisphere building which has two imax screens that are used also as a planetarium of sorts. In addition they have a hugh museum of arts and sciences and an impressive bridge.

Later that night we went out for our paella meal. At this point the weather had taken a downward turn, as the forecast predicted, and it basically rained off and on the rest of the time we were there. We switched to daylight savings time Sunday morning which kept our sleepy time a bit short.

Sunday we got up and just wandered around on our own in our neighborhood, ate a quick lunch, and went on a walking tour provided by the hostel. We really enjoyed it as it was efficient, informative, and quick in just two hours. Our tour guide showed us the church that the Catholic Church claims the Holy Grail was in, but it was closed so I didn't see it for myself.

After the tour we drank some Horchata which is a local drink made from milk, sugar, and tiger nuts which was interesting but not very good in my opinion. Then we headed back toward the hostel to get our bags and walked back to the train station. We still had a bit of a wait until we left, and when the train did arrive we were in car 22. Yeah it was a bit different than the first train. Being Sunday afternoon the tickets were more expensive, so we rode the Arco which was a bit slower and stopped everywhere. We were also pretty packed in there...all in all it was a four hour train ride on the way back. Luckily for us we got back just in time for dinner as I gave Montse a quick phone call earlier in the day to let her know we'd be a tad late. All in all it was a great trip!