Valencia is fabulous
Uff, took me only 3 months to write this down. (and I tried to do a shortcut but it doesn´t work for some reason. Sorry)
I was on a vacation in Valencia, Spain this summer and as the title suggests, it´s a beautiful and cool city. My friend Eva has a sister, Jana, who works there and she visits her once a year and this year I was asked to tag along. Very tempting offer, so of course I agreed.
I have to admit I didn´t know much about Valencia before, I might have even thought it was in Italy.lol So I bought a guide book and educated myself better. The city was full of positive surprises and very easy to fell in love with.
We flew there on Sunday evening, September 4. When we arrived to Valencia we took a taxi to Jana´s flat. It was my first „airport - center“ taxi so it was enough to feel fancy. I usually drag myself everywhere by public transport. Jana´s loft was in a fancy, new, huge apartment building complex. Although only like 20 people lived there so it looked more like a ghost town.
Jana´s loft was very small but very suitable for a young single person. Her balcony was overlooking the pool and we had the pool for ourselves most of the time. Pretty cool. We spent the first morning at the pool and were marveling in the luxury of it. We were waiting for Jana to come home from her training, she promised us to go for a lunch with us. After the lunch we decided to take a walk to one of the ends of the 9km long Turia riverbed park.
Not many people in this city/Spain talk english so we were lucky to have Jana with us to translate the menus for us because there was no way how to figure out what they were offering. She´s been living there for 4 years now so her spanish is good. I don´t eat fishes and I can´t even look at sea food so the eating was pretty challenging. I learned that „pollo“ means chicken meat but even then, it was pretty hard to pick a food for me. That´s why every time we went somewhere without Jana we ate mostly in McDonalds and establishments like that.lol (btw. Have you ever seen Nuns in McDonalds? That was little bizarre experience.lol)
But I also got to eat some safe-looking local meals so it´s not like I avoided it altogether.
We also had to get used to the hot weather. We went from low 20s degrees to 37. The heat was kind of dry, not much of humidity.
We were on our own the second day. The apartment complex was kind of off center so we had to master the local bus transport system. I found it amusing that they had lots of bus stops in the middle of the crossroads. I´m not kidding. We got off in the center and walk around the historical parts. It was very pretty. Obviously you can´t compare the historical level to Prague but it has its own charming historical feeling. All the buildings looked newly renovated and really pretty. It actually surprised me. We started at huge Plaza de Ayuntamiento where the town hall faces the post office. Both buildings were beautiful and the whole plaza looked very space-y. We went to see the Mercado Central, the biggest indoor market in Europe with 900 stalls. We got there at 2pm when the siesta was starting so they were mostly packing their produce. We got to see some fishes and sea food displayed, though. Yuck. La Lonja is right next to the market. It used to be a silk trade exchange and is now on the list of UNESCO. It´s a beautiful gothic building with amazing spiral pillars. It looked magnificent. From there we walked to Plaza de la Reina where the Cathedral is. The Cathedral has kind of an unusual shape when you look at it from the side. Not like any of the many gothic cathedrals I´ve seen before. We climbed up the bell tower (which was a good work out in the heat) and had a nice view over the whole city. We took lots of pictures and then walked to the Plaza de la Virgen which is the heart of the city. It was pretty empty during the day but was dazzling and full of energy at night. From there we walked to the Torres de Serranos which is a very impressive Middle age entrance gate to the city. Then we just continued to walked around in the narrow winding streets and looked around. I was desperately looking for Starbucks at that point cos I was hot and was craving the Frappuchino. They hid the Starbucks well but we found one at the end. It was time to rest, we were happy to be sitting. Then we caught a bus back and lay at the pool and watch a cable tv at night. The cable tv was like a poison. There was always some great movie going on.lol
On Wednesday we went to explore the port and beach. The Formule 1 circuit goes around the port so you can see the marks from the tires on the roads. It took us quite a long time to walk around the port and we were pretty tired so we decided to stop for lunch in one of the beach restaurants. These restaurants are famous for sea food and paellas. We didn´t have Jana so we decided to play it safe and ended up in the only restaurant that offered pizza and menu in english.lol With fully tummies we went to enjoy the beach. There were a lot of people everywhere but I didn´t mind. It was my first beach/sea visit this year and so I would take anything. The water was pretty warm and not very refreshing, though. Lying on the beach is really relaxing, that what I call a vacation:)
The next day was the day D for Eva as we went to visit the Oceanografico, aka the biggest aquarium in Europe. This aquarium features marine ecosystems from throughout the world and it´s so interesting and fun. The Oceanografico is huge, and can easily consume an entire day. Over 45,000 individual animals of 500 different species lives there. The Oceanografico is part of the City of Arts & Sciences complex with a very modern architecture. And of course, with so many pretty animals to look at, our camera battery died pretty soon, to both of us. Grr. But we still got some nice pics. The Oceanografico consists of 5 pavilions, each of them about a different ecosystem, for example Mediterranean, Atlantic Ocean or Arctic sea. The highlights are probably two underwater tunnels where all the fishes swim above you. Very impressive, especially in the shark tunnel! Unfortunately that was exactly the place where our battery shut down so I have only one pic with a shark. Another highlight is definitely a Beluga whale in the arctic pavilion. It made me feel so humble when I saw this giant swimming right next to me. Apparently the Beluga was born in captivity in this aquarium. It was beautiful. We also saw lots of seals and penguins enjoying the sun. And what it would be for Oceanografico without the dolphins! There was a wonderful, high-flying dolphin show. Gosh, I always forget how cute the dolphins are. We spent 3 hours in the Oceanografico and then we went to the Museum of Science and spent another 3 hours there. Like many science museums, this is designed for kids, offering a lot of hands-on activities. The main problem was that roughly half of the “hands-on” exhibits didn’t work and we had problems to understand what to do with the other half. We had to watch people around to get what we were supposed to do. There was also a Comics and Valencia soccer club exhibition. At the later one you could measure your physical strength, that´s if the machines worked…
On Friday we spent more time with Eva´s sister and it was fun because she was driving us around in her car. Fancy:) She invited us for a lunch and we headed to her favorite restaurant on the beach to try the traditional paella. Paella originated in Valencia so our paella was as original as it can get:) As neither I or Eva are fond of the sea food we ordered a paella with chicken and rabbit called Valenciano. Needless to say, not my favorite meal, I know I know, I´m very very picky. It was just too salty/oily. But then I had some sugary desert and the whole experience of sitting in a fancy restaurant on a beach was really cool.
Jana was working in the afternoon so she drove us home and we went to a pool. We wanted to see the city at night so we made a plan to pick Jana up at her work in the evening and then we went to the center. It took us a while to find a parking spot, it was Friday night after all. Valencia at night is beautiful, everything is light up and the city is full of life. All the outdoor restaurants were packed with people. Jana recommended us one restaurant at the Plaza de la Reina and we were lucky to snatch one last free table. And what would be a visit of Spain without a sangria, right. For the food we tried another spanish specialty, the pinchos. It´s a small snack, appetizer, that is spiked with a toothpick to a piece of bread. They are called pinchos because pinchos means toothpick in spanish. Almost anything can be put on the bread and in this bar they had a lot of varieties, mostly fishes. I ended up with sausage, chicken and some salad pinchos. It was yummy. When it´s time to pay the waiter just counts the toothpicks on your plate to get the price. I found that funny.lol
Later in the evening we went to stroll the streets and just soak up the atmosphere. Historical cities are beautiful at night, period.
Saturday was our last full day and we went back to the beach. We went later in the afternoon because it´s unbearable to be on the hot sun over the noon. We arrived around 4pm and rented sun beds because we didn’t want to lie in the sand again. What we didn´t know, though, was that they would be collecting the sun beds back at 6pm!! And we paid a full “whole-day” price. Pfff. The waves were high that day so we had a ball. We jumped the waves as everyone who sees a sea only once a year/in two years would. There was lots of shrieking.lol We left when the sun was setting down and went to one beach restaurant for a quick dinner.
Sunday was our last day. We were waiting for Jana to come from work and then we went to the Turia park again. Just walking around. I wanted to see the Gulliver playground. It´s a huge huge statue of lying Gulliver. Gulliver's body morphs into slides, ramps, stairs and caves, scaled so that visitors are the size of the Lilliputians. It´s pretty cool. When we were walking around in the park I noticed that they were renting bikes and suddenly had a huge urge to rent one and to cycle around the 9km long park but it was too late and too hot. If I ever go to Valencia again I´ll be definitely doing it, though.
When we got back to the apartment we were so hot that we jumped to the pool for a hour before heading to the airport. Jana drove us there. We were supposed to arrive to Prague at midnight but the plane was delayed one hour. Eva´s dad picked us up and was nice enough to drive me home. I got to bed at 2am and I had to get up at 7am to go to work. Pff. The holidays were officially over.
Valencia totally charmed my heart. The wide clean streets, the new roads, the big park, the modern part of the city, the historical part of the city and the port and the beach. I could imagine myself living there. I am a big Prague lover but everything seemed wrong here after the return (my love for Prague is back by now, though). Again, Valencia is fabulous.
The Cathedral
The view from the Cathedral tower
Plaza del Ayuntamiento
The Art and Science Center at night
Valencia at night, full of life
The Oceanografico
The underwater tunnel
Me looking at the shark, aka my only pic
The beach with the port in background. I find something strangely poetic about this
The huge Gulliver playground. And this is just his upper body.
I was on a vacation in Valencia, Spain this summer and as the title suggests, it´s a beautiful and cool city. My friend Eva has a sister, Jana, who works there and she visits her once a year and this year I was asked to tag along. Very tempting offer, so of course I agreed.
I have to admit I didn´t know much about Valencia before, I might have even thought it was in Italy.lol So I bought a guide book and educated myself better. The city was full of positive surprises and very easy to fell in love with.
We flew there on Sunday evening, September 4. When we arrived to Valencia we took a taxi to Jana´s flat. It was my first „airport - center“ taxi so it was enough to feel fancy. I usually drag myself everywhere by public transport. Jana´s loft was in a fancy, new, huge apartment building complex. Although only like 20 people lived there so it looked more like a ghost town.
Jana´s loft was very small but very suitable for a young single person. Her balcony was overlooking the pool and we had the pool for ourselves most of the time. Pretty cool. We spent the first morning at the pool and were marveling in the luxury of it. We were waiting for Jana to come home from her training, she promised us to go for a lunch with us. After the lunch we decided to take a walk to one of the ends of the 9km long Turia riverbed park.
Not many people in this city/Spain talk english so we were lucky to have Jana with us to translate the menus for us because there was no way how to figure out what they were offering. She´s been living there for 4 years now so her spanish is good. I don´t eat fishes and I can´t even look at sea food so the eating was pretty challenging. I learned that „pollo“ means chicken meat but even then, it was pretty hard to pick a food for me. That´s why every time we went somewhere without Jana we ate mostly in McDonalds and establishments like that.lol (btw. Have you ever seen Nuns in McDonalds? That was little bizarre experience.lol)
But I also got to eat some safe-looking local meals so it´s not like I avoided it altogether.
We also had to get used to the hot weather. We went from low 20s degrees to 37. The heat was kind of dry, not much of humidity.
We were on our own the second day. The apartment complex was kind of off center so we had to master the local bus transport system. I found it amusing that they had lots of bus stops in the middle of the crossroads. I´m not kidding. We got off in the center and walk around the historical parts. It was very pretty. Obviously you can´t compare the historical level to Prague but it has its own charming historical feeling. All the buildings looked newly renovated and really pretty. It actually surprised me. We started at huge Plaza de Ayuntamiento where the town hall faces the post office. Both buildings were beautiful and the whole plaza looked very space-y. We went to see the Mercado Central, the biggest indoor market in Europe with 900 stalls. We got there at 2pm when the siesta was starting so they were mostly packing their produce. We got to see some fishes and sea food displayed, though. Yuck. La Lonja is right next to the market. It used to be a silk trade exchange and is now on the list of UNESCO. It´s a beautiful gothic building with amazing spiral pillars. It looked magnificent. From there we walked to Plaza de la Reina where the Cathedral is. The Cathedral has kind of an unusual shape when you look at it from the side. Not like any of the many gothic cathedrals I´ve seen before. We climbed up the bell tower (which was a good work out in the heat) and had a nice view over the whole city. We took lots of pictures and then walked to the Plaza de la Virgen which is the heart of the city. It was pretty empty during the day but was dazzling and full of energy at night. From there we walked to the Torres de Serranos which is a very impressive Middle age entrance gate to the city. Then we just continued to walked around in the narrow winding streets and looked around. I was desperately looking for Starbucks at that point cos I was hot and was craving the Frappuchino. They hid the Starbucks well but we found one at the end. It was time to rest, we were happy to be sitting. Then we caught a bus back and lay at the pool and watch a cable tv at night. The cable tv was like a poison. There was always some great movie going on.lol
On Wednesday we went to explore the port and beach. The Formule 1 circuit goes around the port so you can see the marks from the tires on the roads. It took us quite a long time to walk around the port and we were pretty tired so we decided to stop for lunch in one of the beach restaurants. These restaurants are famous for sea food and paellas. We didn´t have Jana so we decided to play it safe and ended up in the only restaurant that offered pizza and menu in english.lol With fully tummies we went to enjoy the beach. There were a lot of people everywhere but I didn´t mind. It was my first beach/sea visit this year and so I would take anything. The water was pretty warm and not very refreshing, though. Lying on the beach is really relaxing, that what I call a vacation:)
The next day was the day D for Eva as we went to visit the Oceanografico, aka the biggest aquarium in Europe. This aquarium features marine ecosystems from throughout the world and it´s so interesting and fun. The Oceanografico is huge, and can easily consume an entire day. Over 45,000 individual animals of 500 different species lives there. The Oceanografico is part of the City of Arts & Sciences complex with a very modern architecture. And of course, with so many pretty animals to look at, our camera battery died pretty soon, to both of us. Grr. But we still got some nice pics. The Oceanografico consists of 5 pavilions, each of them about a different ecosystem, for example Mediterranean, Atlantic Ocean or Arctic sea. The highlights are probably two underwater tunnels where all the fishes swim above you. Very impressive, especially in the shark tunnel! Unfortunately that was exactly the place where our battery shut down so I have only one pic with a shark. Another highlight is definitely a Beluga whale in the arctic pavilion. It made me feel so humble when I saw this giant swimming right next to me. Apparently the Beluga was born in captivity in this aquarium. It was beautiful. We also saw lots of seals and penguins enjoying the sun. And what it would be for Oceanografico without the dolphins! There was a wonderful, high-flying dolphin show. Gosh, I always forget how cute the dolphins are. We spent 3 hours in the Oceanografico and then we went to the Museum of Science and spent another 3 hours there. Like many science museums, this is designed for kids, offering a lot of hands-on activities. The main problem was that roughly half of the “hands-on” exhibits didn’t work and we had problems to understand what to do with the other half. We had to watch people around to get what we were supposed to do. There was also a Comics and Valencia soccer club exhibition. At the later one you could measure your physical strength, that´s if the machines worked…
On Friday we spent more time with Eva´s sister and it was fun because she was driving us around in her car. Fancy:) She invited us for a lunch and we headed to her favorite restaurant on the beach to try the traditional paella. Paella originated in Valencia so our paella was as original as it can get:) As neither I or Eva are fond of the sea food we ordered a paella with chicken and rabbit called Valenciano. Needless to say, not my favorite meal, I know I know, I´m very very picky. It was just too salty/oily. But then I had some sugary desert and the whole experience of sitting in a fancy restaurant on a beach was really cool.
Jana was working in the afternoon so she drove us home and we went to a pool. We wanted to see the city at night so we made a plan to pick Jana up at her work in the evening and then we went to the center. It took us a while to find a parking spot, it was Friday night after all. Valencia at night is beautiful, everything is light up and the city is full of life. All the outdoor restaurants were packed with people. Jana recommended us one restaurant at the Plaza de la Reina and we were lucky to snatch one last free table. And what would be a visit of Spain without a sangria, right. For the food we tried another spanish specialty, the pinchos. It´s a small snack, appetizer, that is spiked with a toothpick to a piece of bread. They are called pinchos because pinchos means toothpick in spanish. Almost anything can be put on the bread and in this bar they had a lot of varieties, mostly fishes. I ended up with sausage, chicken and some salad pinchos. It was yummy. When it´s time to pay the waiter just counts the toothpicks on your plate to get the price. I found that funny.lol
Later in the evening we went to stroll the streets and just soak up the atmosphere. Historical cities are beautiful at night, period.
Saturday was our last full day and we went back to the beach. We went later in the afternoon because it´s unbearable to be on the hot sun over the noon. We arrived around 4pm and rented sun beds because we didn’t want to lie in the sand again. What we didn´t know, though, was that they would be collecting the sun beds back at 6pm!! And we paid a full “whole-day” price. Pfff. The waves were high that day so we had a ball. We jumped the waves as everyone who sees a sea only once a year/in two years would. There was lots of shrieking.lol We left when the sun was setting down and went to one beach restaurant for a quick dinner.
Sunday was our last day. We were waiting for Jana to come from work and then we went to the Turia park again. Just walking around. I wanted to see the Gulliver playground. It´s a huge huge statue of lying Gulliver. Gulliver's body morphs into slides, ramps, stairs and caves, scaled so that visitors are the size of the Lilliputians. It´s pretty cool. When we were walking around in the park I noticed that they were renting bikes and suddenly had a huge urge to rent one and to cycle around the 9km long park but it was too late and too hot. If I ever go to Valencia again I´ll be definitely doing it, though.
When we got back to the apartment we were so hot that we jumped to the pool for a hour before heading to the airport. Jana drove us there. We were supposed to arrive to Prague at midnight but the plane was delayed one hour. Eva´s dad picked us up and was nice enough to drive me home. I got to bed at 2am and I had to get up at 7am to go to work. Pff. The holidays were officially over.
Valencia totally charmed my heart. The wide clean streets, the new roads, the big park, the modern part of the city, the historical part of the city and the port and the beach. I could imagine myself living there. I am a big Prague lover but everything seemed wrong here after the return (my love for Prague is back by now, though). Again, Valencia is fabulous.
The Cathedral
The view from the Cathedral tower
Plaza del Ayuntamiento
The Art and Science Center at night
Valencia at night, full of life
The Oceanografico
The underwater tunnel
Me looking at the shark, aka my only pic
The beach with the port in background. I find something strangely poetic about this
The huge Gulliver playground. And this is just his upper body.