For the first time since arriving in the UK, Oren and I left these fair shores for a European adventure. I was easily seduced by the idea of Spain at the Spanish festival in Oxford Street. Oren had introduced me to paella at some stage, so Valencia made sense.
I can happily report that there were no transportation hiccups this time around. Begrudgingly we were up to catch a bus a little after 3am to the middle of nowhere aka Stansted Airport. Any claim that is even remotely near London is a lie. You always think the flights are cheap but then you have to factor both the time and cost to travel to god knows where.However the good thing about early morning flights was that we arrived in Spain just after 11am and caught the metro into the city. Valencia airport is probably one of the few airports that Ryanair flies into that is actually near the place it claims to be so it was only a 20 minute Metro ride into the city. I instantly loved Valencia. It reminded me of a sunnier, friendlier Paris without any worry that you will be hassled by people trying to sell you Eiffel towers or tie "friendship" bracelets around your wrists.
We ended up wandering around the marble streets in the rising heat just having a look with no real idea of where we were going. We found this Cathedral:
I had found out that Valencia had a large aquarium that housed Belugas and desperately wanted to go so, full of paella from a local cafe, we walked down to the City of Science and Arts which is basically an architectural wet dream. Myself, I found it slightly tacky. However the walk through the gardens in a now dry riverbed was lovely.
By this time it was unbelievably hot. Having come from a rainy wet London to a very dry sunny Valencia at nearly 30 degrees, we were both melting. I though the aquarium was indoors but a lot of it was outside as you walked between the mostly underground enclosures.
The belugas were amazing but also a bit sad. One spent several hours floating at a gate wishing to get through and the other was doing a constant repetitive pacing through its tank. At one point the one at the gate started making the most screeching whale sound that echoed through the underground viewing area. It's sad that these majestic creatures have to be in aquariums so people can understand why we need to conserve our environments.Our hotel was only about 10 minutes walk across a large bridge after the aquarium where we could delight in the air conditioning. I'm becoming a pro at booking hotels and we had a lovely place I had scored a 45% off. It was very fancy.
Our hotel was also in a good location, between the beach and the city and right beside two shopping centres. We ended up getting some bread, chorizo, duck pate, juice, beer and crisps and settling in for most of the night before wandering the other shopping centre and watching a man fail at selling corn outside our hotel window.We woke up late due to a well deserved sleep in and were welcomed for a cooler day. It was mid 20s for most of the day. We decided to walk down to the beach via the America's Cup village. I guess the unfortunate thing is that because it's been in court so long, the village is dead but we took photos of the NZ building.
We walked right around to the beach and found ourselves a nice spot to rest. I decided to have a swim which was very refreshing in the heat. I liked that no one on the beach had any qualms about their bodies, no one was perfect, it was hot, they worn what they wanted. It didn't feel like a fashion or beauty competition like I had expected.
We both had been working hard so were happy to have a quiet day. We eventually made back to the shopping centre by our hotel and went to a Spanish place that sells montaditos which are a sort of tapas. It took us our first order to realise they were just baby rolls and were served with crisps! I really liked it, it was a lot of fun and with every order we got giant glasses of Spanish beer for only a euro! This of course lead to us napping in our hotel room later before going to another tapas restaurant for dinner that served lots and lots of meat. Oren did very well in proving that money spent on Spanish language papers at Canterbury Uni wasn't entirely wasted. I was very proud of him as I spoke no Spanish at all!
Unfortunately the next day we had a 11am flight back to Stansted. We took the metro and said goodbye to the heat and the sun to return to rainy London.
Next weekend we head to Dublin for which will probably be the last trip for a couple months as Oren can't have leave over the Christmas period from work.
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