Well we took a weekend trip to Valencia, Spain which is on the coast of the Mediterranean. We took off at the crack of dawn on Friday. I watched JAWS on my iPad. Which may have been a questionable practice before getting to an ocean I planned on swimming in, but whatever.
Friday past rather uneventfully. We had some free time, but all we did was go sit down at a bar and chat for a bit before heading back to the hotel. Following that we got a tour of the city. This was pretty cool as we got to see a lot of older structures of the city. This tour did boil down to two important parts though.
The first was the fact that they really wanted to teach us how a medieval market worked. So we go to the beautiful market, with enormous lofted ceilings, everything carved impeccably from stone. They go on to point out the beautiful windows which are thin translucent slabs of marble, and describe how the walls used to be painted green, and how the ceiling was blue with intricate stars painted on it.
And then came out market lesson. Hannah was chosen to be the merchant, and she had to sell her purses to Ricardo. So we sat there as she was encouraged to describe the bags as Ricardo would rattle back in reply with elaborate fluent Puerto Rican replies. I mention his replies as the customer because the kid does not speak Spanish, he speaks Puerto Rican. In the Econ class we have together, I can understand the professor's every word, but he just speaks a stream of words. I can pick out all the words individually, but there is no pause in between, so it just blasts on without any time for me to try and understand what I am hearing. If you are reading this, I love you Ricardo, but I am just not that good at Spanish haha. But basically Hannah did a great job of being enthusiastic nonetheless and talking about how smooth her bags were, and the special functions they could serve in comparison to all those normal boring purses out there in the world.
Not sure what I learned about the market besides that people bought in wholesale with credit, but this rather unrelated exercise was a ton of fun.
After this we climbed a particularly tall bell tower in a cathedral. This was amazing because we could see the old arches that were the entrances into the old historic walled city, as well as a number of other old stone churches. In addition we had an amazing view of the mountains and the wind that was butting across the top of this tower made me rather excited to go and camp on some of them. This is an attempt at taking a panorama of the bell on the tower to get the whole thing in one picture:
Another thing we saw on the tour was the thinnest apartment (front) in Europe. At some point they got rid of all the alley ways by building buildings in them. This wedge shape alley was filled, resulting in a front not much wider than the door. 105 cm to be precise (as seen in 2nd picture).
Later that night we found an asian food chain called Wok to Walk. This was so incredibly amazing just because there was seasoning and sauce. Spanish food does not utilize a lot of strong seasoning or really any sort of sauces. Here is Patty appreciating our feast:
The next day we went to La Ciudad de Artes y Ciencias (The city of arts and sciences). This place was literally the setting for a Stargate SG-1 episode - All the buildings were gorgeous and futuristic, surrounded by huge clean clear reflecting pools that were absolutely enormous and everywhere.
Our first stop was the aquarium. It was also enormous and fancy.
Unfortunately they did not have the carcass of the shark from Jaws, the documentary I watched on my way to Valencia, but I did discover something even better. Have you ever heard of the Ocean Sunfish? No? Well, I'm pretty sure it is the inspiration for the pokemon Sharpedo.
We then went to see an Imax movie about the first continuous navigation of the Nile from source to Mediterranian. It was pretty awesome. I would love to visit Egypt and Ethiopia. I really hope I get to camp in the desert in Morocco. But the highlight was the very stylish headset for choosing your narration language, shown here modeled by Robert and myself.
After all this nonsense we went to the beach. I wouldn't advise swimming in the Mediterranean in February, but if you do, get a running start.
Afterwards we hit up a bar. It didn't have anything that was on the menu, but it did have a logo with a very obvious penis.
Later that day we went out to an Argentinean restaurant and sampled their fine steak and extensive malt-derived beverage menu. Which almost made me cry given the rarity of such a menu in Spain having more than 1 entry. After this, we came back to the hotel around midnight to rally and head out to clubs. And in true Joseph Lohman form, I fell asleep texting while hanging out with friends. This lovely picture was taken by Patty and you can see how I was positioned looking at my ipod before he took it from my hand to capture this lovely moment.
Sunday was pretty much just the bus ride back to Madrid; however, on my Metro ride back to my apartment, I managed to witness this man rocking some short shorts with his hiking backpack and windbreaker.
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