Three days of rain (and some strange encounters)

This week I’ve received three visitors: my friends Nivard and Karen, current or former flatmates, and an economics pal, Toon. Always great to receive a visit, especially if they bring gifts from Belgium to remediate any possible homesickness. This means I am now once again very well stocked with Belgian chocolate. :-) Unfortunately, they also brought a Belgian thing I didn’t particularly miss: the weather. Almost as soon as I had picked up Nivard and Karen at the airport, clouds started drifting in, making the sky overcast and grey. Not much later it started to rain… and it never stopped until the last Belgian had left town. NO KIDDING. Belgian just don’t seem to be made for good weather. Lucky I’m half Brazilian, then. :-)

So last Wednessday I took the metro to the airport bus stop to go and pick up my friends at the airport. I sat in the metro, listing to my mp3 player and looking quite uninterested, or at least I think so, when suddenly a woman sat next to me and, out of nowhere, began telling me the story of her life. (She’s a Colombian, who came to Spain because she wanted to get to know Europe and who now works as a cleaning lady and is terribly unhappy and wants to return to her indian village in the Amazon forest where there are pink dolphins.)

Then, when I got out of the metro and was waiting for the airport bus to come, a guy approached me and asked me for a light. I said I didn’t smoke and thus couldn’t offer him a light, after which, out of absolutely nowhere, he declared I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Then he said ‘Look!’ and took of his t-shirt, right there in broad daylight! I gave him the most uninterested glance I could produce (which is quite frosty, several friends will corroborate that) and looked the other way. Without moving a foot, I said ‘Have a nice day’, after which he vanished. Lucky for him, one inch closer and his ability to procreate would by no means be assured.

Fortunately, those were all the strange encounters I have to report. I picked up Nivard and Karen at the airport, and later that afternoon we took a stroll in the city centre, had Agua de Valencia as an aperitif, and then some delicious tapas on the Plaza de la Reina. As my friends were tired from their journey, we decided to defer the heavy duty partying to the next night and watched a DVD at home instead.

On Thursday I had to go to class, as I have written before, so Karen and Nivard visited the Oceanografìc and I met them later with sandwiches for a pick nick. They had bought IMAX tickets for the five o’clock session, so meanwhile we took a walk in Turia park and discovered the Gulliver, which is a giant Gulliver puppet, stretched out on the ground and captured by the Lilliputters, covered in slides for children to play on. For the occasion, we thought we qualified well enough as children!

After that we returned to the IMAX to see ‘The Adventures of Shackleton’, another IMAX movie featuring boats, so I came out completely nauseous again! At that point, it had also started raining, so we walked back to my apartment and went for a beer in my favourite café, café Soret.

We cooked a big pot of pasta at home to save money on eating out, and spent the money we saved on a fancy cocktail in Café de las Letras! :-)

Even though we had heavy-duty-partied the previous night, we got up early on Friday morning to visit the Mercado Central, la Lonja and the Cathedral before Nivard and Karen had to go to the airport to catch their plane back home… I accompanied them to the airport, and on the same plane they took to return to Belgium, a fellow economics student, Toon, arrived for a blitz visit to Valencia. At this point, rain was streaming out of the sky non-stop, but that did not detain us from taking a long walk to the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, through Turia park to the city centre, and back again. (Ok, I’m lying about back again, we took the metro.) We had dinner in a pizzeria near my apartment and a very necessary digestive tea in Café de las Letras.

On Saturday morning, we went back to the city centre in the streaming rain, and visited the Mercado Central, the Plaza Redonda, the Torres de Serranos, barrio El Carmen, and we climbed the Cathedral tower to look upon all that. I was getting really, really, really fed up with the fain, and my shoes were soaked, so we bought take away paella and returned to my apartment to have lunch – dry. After lunch, Toon left to the train station for his next destination – he’s making a whole tour around Spain in only five days.

I stayed home, mainly because all my shoes were wet so I could not go anywhere, and I had to do some homework anyway. Today, Sunday, I also confined myself to my room to work on the terrible mess I call my thesis. At 6 I had tea with Cécile in café Soret, and we rented a movie to see at my apartment.

And that’s what I did this very very long weekend!