I got back from the States early Monday morning and we hopped a train to Valencia (after wandering Barcelona a bit and enjoying some cheap 1 euro pizzas). In Valencia, we got lost as usual, but eventually found our hostel tucked next to a church in the older part of town. We bought some (cheap!) fresh vegetables and pasta to cook in the hostel’s enormous kitchen and settled in to finish some work on the hostel’s spotty Internet connection, chat with the other travelers, and watch Miss Congeniality on the hostel’s TV (exotic travel at its best!).
The next day we took a free walking tour that circled the city’s highlights. We saw Valencia’s largest church, which was built on top of the site of an old mosque, which was built on a church, etc, until you get to the ancient settlement that was recently discovered beneath it all. There’s a portion of the square where the old settlement is exposed under glass so that you can look at it from above. Pretty cool.
Our tour guide also led the tapas tour, which travelled the city for the afternoon getting tapas (Spanish appetizers-as-a-meal) and drinks at 3 restaurants. The price wasn’t bad, so we joined on. We met a bunch of other young travelers from Canada, Holland, Austalia, and the UK, and were relieved to speak English for a while with other people who were travelling the same way that we were. Plus, the food was very good, although all vegetarian tapas options consist basically of potato, cheese, and garlic.. We had a couple of sangrias at each place, which caused us to be a little tipsy by the time the tour finally disbanded after 6 pm. I then did some laundry nearby (getting terribly lost on the way home from about 2 blocks away..) while Jeremy took a marathon nap that overlapped the hostel’s two evening events – a flamenco dance show and a pub crawl. So instead we went for a late night walk to explore Valencia a bit more, and spend a while enjoying the long park that runs through
the center of the city where a river used to run before it was re-routed around the city to prevent flooding.And we forget to mention - there was also a beautiful fruit and vegetable market with delicious oranges, as seen here!
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