My Mom's Weekend, part II

It's a lovely Sunday morning, October 22nd, and the sun shines as if it had never heard of such a thing as autumn. I could live in Spain forever just for the sun! Be gone, autumn blues and winter depressions! My flatmates are in their rooms or in the living room studying, like me until a few minutes ago, and it feels very homey to have them around in comfortable pants carrying around books. These are the days I will remember from my student time here. Even though the boys are all engineers and I'm and economist, the fact that we're all students creates a sort of complicity amongst us.

But I still have to finish telling you about last weekend, when my Mom came to visit! So I've told you about Thursday and Friday. Let's see, well, on Saturday morning Mom and I did what girls do best... shopping! :-) Calle Colón and the perpendicular streets are a great shopping area, filled with Zaras, El Corte Ingleses and shoe stores. But even while shopping culture is never far away, because at the end of Calle Colón is the Plaza de Toros, the arena where bullfights are still held on festive occasions. (Though I think you can hardly consider it 'culture' to kill animals for entertainment.) But the architecture is so typically Spanish and nowadays the arena is also used for concerts.


After a few hours of intensive shopping we went to have lunch at the Mercado Colón, which I've told you about in a previous post. It's a fantastic art nouveau-building which used to be a marketplace, but is now redesigned as a hip place to eat or have a drink.

Like totally cool Spaniards, we had some tapas for lunch: smoked potatoes (they taste a bit like smoked ham), 'alcachofra' hearts (don't ask me to translate that to English, I didn't bring my dictionary...) and a sandwich.

After lunch we discovered a chocolate paradise in a street near Calle Colón! It's a store-annex-café where they serve all kinds of hot cocoa and chocolate desserts. They also sell pralines with the most exotic flavours. We had a taste of those! And as we come from the land of chocolate, we were very critical of course, because we're used to the best, but these pralines totally passed the test! Very much approved!

After siësta - digestion time for all the chocolate we had - we walked to the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias. I could spend a day taking pictures of this! We didn't visit any of the museums, because we will do so when my Dad and brother are here. But just walking around the buildings is an activity an sich, they're so impressive!

After walking around in the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, we continued walking along Turia park, the park in the riverbed which I've told you about. We passed the giant Gulliver, which is a big puppet lying in the middle of the park, covered with slides for children to play on, so the children look like the Lilliputters from the story! I still have to try and get a decent picture of it, because the concept is fantastic. The rest of the park is lovely too: fountains, flower beds, people jogging and cycling... For every self-respecting city out there: be gone with the Seine and the Thames! Make parks in those riverbeds! River are out, parks are hot! We walked until metro Alameda and took the metro there to the city centre. At the Plaza de la Reina we had some excellent tapas: patatas bravas, gambas and stuffed mushrooms! After dinner we walked to Plaza de la Virgen, the most beautiful plaza in Valencia, which is beautifully lit at night. The plaza was full of just-married couples! Apparently the beauty of Plaza de la Virgen is also recognized by wedding photographers. There were five couples being photographed at the plaza at the same time!

And I totally agree with their choice of setting... Don't you?

On Sunday morning we went to a flea market near la Mestalla, the football (soccer) stadion. It was full of old people buying furniture and household supplies! And they sell the weirdest stuff: car mirrors and radios, blank cd-roms (what are those doing on a flea market?) and old 40's radios that apparently still work. I'm not sure if everything offered for sale at the market got there in quite a legal way, especially the first two things I mentioned.

We then proceeded to the city centre to visit the Ceramics Museum, the one which I've already told you about in a previous post. I really wanted Mom to see the beautiful palace where the ceramics collection is displayed.

The museum boast a traditional Valencian kitchen, covered in painted ceramic tiles depicting food and hunting scenes.

This is the bedroom of the Marquês de Dos Aguas, accompanied by a royal yawn!

And once more, the breathtakingly beautiful ballroom, with big mirrors perfect for a little photography experiment!

Leaving the Museum we walked towards Plaza del Patriarca, a cute little square full of mandarine trees. The clementines are already starting to turn orange. By december they will be ready for Sinterklaas to take them to Belgium!

At the Plaza del Patriarca is the Collegio del Patriarca, a gloomy baroque church where one can hardly breathe because the air is so thick with incense. Below, an illustration of the gloominess...

And what better way for my Mom to end her visit in Valencia, than with a typical Valencian paella? The rice was very good, but the gamba's came with legs and heads still attached to them! And though I claim to be a vegetarian of the brave kind, my stomach did make a little turn when I chopped the head of a gamba. Brrr!

And so my Mom's visit ends... and living and studying in Valencia continues. I think I'm going to go back to doing that last thing now...