Valencia y mas

The second weekend of Nina's visit, we took a trip to Valencia, Spain, on the mediterranean coast. famous for paella and a spring festival known as Las Fallas, which we missed by a day. I'm ok with that, because what las fallas involves is a lot of things blowing up and a lot of noise. Also, busy, crowded streets and expensive food. Am I turning into an old lady or what? On Thursday night, we slept in the Madrid airport because we had a flight out at 630 am. We arrived sleep deprived, but tried to make it through the day by re-energizing with chocolate and churros. We then walked around ,where we discovered many of the streets were already full of the floats for Las Fallas. These thing are giant, and very interesting artistically, also unfortunately, the things that are blown up at the end of the week long festival. One of my students told me that you often see the artests and workers crying when their float is blown up. We also checked out the old center of valencia filled with the cathedrals and monuments of a typical spanish city. Valencia also had this really great market filled with all sorts of produce and fresh food. it was right across from our hostel, so we went for that every day.
We finally had to crash at the hostel for a long nap, and woke up for some late night tapas.
Saturday, the highlight of the trip for me, we rented bikes and rode them from the old part of town through Valencia's beautiful park all the way to the beach and then down the board walk. it was a sunny day, so a beautiful ride! The beach was a little chilly, but still enjoyable to sit and walk around in the sun before riding the bikes back.

In other news, we saw an American band, yeasayer, in Madrid on Wednesday, a very fun show. I think pretty much the entire crowd was Americans or other English speakers. I guess there are a lot of us here...
And last night, Carrie's flatmate, who is in a Spanish band, had a concert so we went out to that as well.
Nothing much else going on around here, enjoying the finally spring weather as much as i can. It's time to start preparing for my Semana santa (holy week) trip to toulouse, france and PARIS. we get the whole week off work so i am leaving a week from wednesday for Toulouse and then will spend Friday-Monday in Paris.

Besos,

Megan