Valencia

Friday. We had to be at the Universidad de Barcelona by 8 am. We traveled by bus for about 4 hours to Valencia. What a different city from Barcelona. It is a much calmer, quieter, more serence city than Barcelona. We got there at about 1 o´clock and had two hours to explore the city. We quickly dropped our bags off at the hotel and in our rooms and walked around. Valencia was very clean and had tons of beautiful buildings and fountaints. I had delicious froyo for lunch and then we met back at the hotel at 3 o´clock to go on a three-hour tour of the city. We saw some churches, the Cathedral, one of the smallest buildings in the world-with a width of only 105 cm.

My favoirte part of the tour was the arts and sciences section of the city. It was like being in paradise: beautiful opera house, aquarium, IMAX Theater, and open pools of bright blue water. We took a ton of pictures there and I got a hot chocolate there and it was one of the best hot chocolates I have ever had. After arts and sciences, we headed to the port and got off the bus to walk the beach for a little bit and explore the strip of authentic restaurants along the beach. We ended up finding a restaurant called El Coso, where we wound up eating dinner later that night. We got back on the bus and went back to the hotel to nap and shower. At 9 o´clock, we took one of the public transporation buses down to the port and got a little lost. We were romaing around for about a half hour and then finally headed in the right direction towards the port. We had not been all the way down the strip of restaurants and we realized that we were at the far end and had to walk towards the beginning. We finally got to El Coso and we ordered a pitcher of Sangria and shared mixed Paella (chicken, vegetables, shrimp, lobster). It was the best paella I have ever had. We were pretty exhausted from being on a bus all day, so we just went back to the hotel and got a good night sleep.

Saturday. We woke up at 10 o´clock and had a buffet breakfast at the hotel. It was a decent breakfast. We had the option to go to the Museo de Bellas Artes or just to explore the city by ourselves the whole day. My friends and I decided to go to the museum. We left for the museum at about 11:15 and were there by 11:30ish. Bellas Artes means fine arts, so there were a ton of paintaings along with some scultpures and artifacts from long ago. The museum used to be a church and had a beautiful perriwinkle blue ceiling and many of the balconies still in tact that the bishops used 100s and even 1000s of years ago. Most of the paintings had relgious contexts and a lot of them were described the crucifixation of Jesus, the virgin Mary, but also some pink in some of the painting to represent the Jews. Most of the paintings had a lot of gold in them also. We got to see some of Goya´s work, who I learned about in my AP Spanish class.

After the museum, we returned to the hotel and had the rest of the day free. We walked all around Valencia and did a little shopping. I got a shirt at Mango and my friends got things also at Mango and Zara. We also went to the Roman ruins of the city, tried horchata, a traditonal Valencian drink made of ground almonds, sesame seeds, rice, barley, or tigernuts. It tasted very starchy and kind of cinnamony. Horchata very different from any other drink I have tried before. After this long day, we went back to the hotel and napped. We met downstairs in the lobby at around 8:30 and went to the Tapas Festival being held by the port from February 15-17th only. We got really  lucky with timing that they had this at the time we were in Valencia. There were 24 different tapas booths set up with 1 to 3 tapas per booth and 2 drink booths that had beer, wine, soda, and water being served. You had to buy tickets for tapas and drinks, but it was an incredible deal. It was $1.50 euro per tapa and $1 euro per drink. We were pretty hungry and probably went a little overboard with the amount of tickets, but I got 7 tapa tickets and 2 drink tickets. These were some of the best tapas I have ever had. I had paella, toasted bread with roasted eggplant, peppers, and sauteed onions, goat cheese with frizzled onions and jam, shrimp with guacamole, patatas bravas, and chcolate pudding. We also got some free drinks from the bartenders, which was pretty awesome. We were there for about 2 and a half hours and then we went to calle de caballeros, a section of valencia with tons of bars. We went to a few different bars, none of them really comparing to how crazy the Barcelona clubs and bars are. We were home by about 3:30am and went to sleep

Sunday. We woke up at 10 and had to check out by 11:30. We again had a quick breakfast  at the hotel and got back on the bus towards Barcelona and we were back by about 4:30. Valencia was a beautiful city and I would love to go back.