Saturday June 19, 2010
The breakfast buffet at the hotel would have been super awesome if it was kept well-stocked, but I think the servers were very pissy that a shitload of Americans were taking over their restaurant. I found that the trick to get a good breakfast was to raid as much from the table as possible, because chances were, food wouldn’t be there if you wanted to go back for seconds. I loved the fresh orange juice and the every type of ham. The fresh fruit and pastries were a plus. I got super sad that the hotel was always out of eggs. Like, wtf? I hadn’t had scrambled eggs since coming to Europe… is it so hard to get some breakfast eggs around here? ><>
After b-fast I burned my eyes out without my sunglasses, which were left on the nightstand of my hotel room, as we visited the Hemisferic and the Acuario at La Ciudad de Las Artes y Ciencias. Why did everything have to be so fucking white and surrounded by large pools of shallow clear blue water that reflected even more of the brightness?!?!? The cultural/entertainment area was completed in 1998, and the stunning architecture and design of the place still looked amazing and futuristic. At La Ciudad, which has a form of “organic architecture,” we visited L’Hemisféric (the iMax theatre = eye), L’Umbracle (the caged landscape walk = ribs of a whale), and L’Oceanográfic (the oceanpark/aquarium = water lily). La Ciudad also has El Palau de les Artes Reina Sofía, where Carmen was performed live the night before, and El Museu de les Ciéncies Principe Felipe, which I sooo wanted to visit, but IES admins were poopers.
Watching an iMax movie about Egyptian mummies was quite an adventure in LHemisféric. Each person wore this funny “surround sound” headgear (okay, random creepy photo I stole off the internet…), from which the narration could be heard in five different languages: Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and German. You know how the screen looks funny when you take off the glasses at a 3-D movie? Well, it was funny to take off the headgear during the movie, because all you could hear was the dramatic background music. I listened to the movie in Spanish, because it flowed better. The rhythm of the British narrator with his deep voice was awkward at times.
The IES admins allowed us an hour and a half of free time to visit the aquarium. L’Oceanográfic is supposedly the biggest aquarium or oceanpark in all of Europe. And given only an hour and a half to see it all? Talk about putting us in a rush! The park turned out to be really big acreage-wise, but the tanks were average size, although, they had a lot of space for the smaller species, and long-ass glass tunnels for visitors to walk through. But I felt that there definitely was not enough space for the bigger animals, three or four giant walruses were crammed into one not-so-big tank, so that they would always be in the view of the visitors. Valentina and I were quite excited to take pictures of our college mascot. Yay, Morse! I thought that the belugas were way cute and beautiful. They always look so humoured, smiling and always ready for a good laugh, although in reality, they probably hate being trapped in a tank. My favorite fish was one in the shark and fish tank. It looked like a big, swimming black volcanic rock with two awkward little fins at the top and bottom of his body to project him forward. Its tail did not do anything though. It was the funniest-looking fish I had ever seen.
We ate IES lunch at a restaurant called La Galería, set inside the center of a shopping mall. I usually associate mall food as bad foodcourt food, but this restaurant served some kickass food. I ate everything that was thrown at me: the appetizers (smoked salmon on a small half of a lettuce heart, salted fish over a large slice of tomato, and croquets), the entrée (deliciously on point chicken paella, because too many people in the program didn’t have the balls to eat seafood), and the dessert (a pudding/flan-like tart). Before the paella was served, a waiter cradled a giant full paella pan in his arms, showing off the size of the pan and the amount of food made for each table.
That multi-course meal knocked me into an hour-long hard coma, from which I had to come out of with a brain transplant of a dying star. Sorry, Susan! So I was feeling quite good to do the optional guided visit to el Museo de Ceramicas. The cheesiest sounding museum ever, right? Who would want to go somewhere to stare at plates and silverware all day? It turned out, the museum is located on the upper-floor of a large house that used to belong to a family of Marquises. Walking through the furnished Baroque and French Rococo rooms was pretty amazing. Who wouldn’t want an oriental room or a ballroom or a garage for my decked out, gold-plated carriage?
Isabella and I didn’t want to waste daylight, so we took the bus to the beach in order to catch the sunset with the majority of the IES group that decided to spend their afternoon there after lunch. Oh how calm the Mediterranean was compared to the moody and windy Atlantic in Porto! It wasn’t quite hot enough to go swimming, since there was no strong sun to warm us up and to dry us off. Instead, we contented ourselves by wandering around, taking pictures, and burying Alex in the sand.
After some thorough almost-July-sand-sculptures-festival-in-Pioneer-Square-worthy sculpting, we transformed Alex into a powerful merman with a Bowflex bod and a large trident (seriously, just a trident). We even sculpted a boulder, rocks, and seaweed on the bottom, because his actual feet couldn’t follow the curvy line of his tail. The human part of the body was especially hard to do, because his chest kept cracking every time Alex breathed or laughed. So we had to be content with making a merman who looked as if he were in dire need of some Jergens.
Being surrounded the sea made us thirsty for agua de Valencia at a restaurant back by the hotel. And I don’t mean water coming from the tap (which tasted horrible, btdubs. I drank it anyways, but it was always a bit salty, and it made my Nalgene smell like the ocean… I guess it’s the complete beach town experience). I mean the drink of Valencia: orange juice, champagne, vodka, and gin on the rocks, i.e.: the most refreshing drink ever that will make you feel quite happy… It is also apparently the biggest accomplice of pickpockets in Valencia, because tourists don’t expected to get so drunk/vulnerable/easy-to-rob so quickly.
That agua de Valencia was followed by more American drinks back at the hotel, where I stumbled upon a bunch of IES kids drinking and talking about religion. Your typical Friday night conversation, huh? Instead of blowing up into a huge fight, the discussion between the practicing Catholic and the now-questioning Christian ended civilly when we headed to an Irish pub near the hotel, where we would order pints of beer. Andrew (a white sunburned brown-haired rising senior at Puget Sound), who was especially drunk already, kept ordering and ordering drinks. At one point, he ran out of cash and walked out of the pub to look for an ATM without saying a word. When the pub was closing, a staff member came by to our table to say that we had ten minutes before we had to leave. Andrew nodded and walked out without saying anything, going in the opposite direction of the hotel. It was all quite comical at first. We laughed at how he does this whenever he gets wasted. But then we realized that someone probably should’ve taken care of him, since he was wandering the streets in a strange city. It would’ve never flied if Andrew were a schwasted girl friend in a drunken daze. We hung out in the lobby to wait for him to show up but ended giving up when it was about 5 am. We’re such caring friends, aren’t we?
Photo credits: Selina Wan, Liza Mazyck, Valentina Savath, and Liza Mazyck
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