( valencia: day fourteen & fifteen )

First and foremost: happy birthday, Joanne! May all your angry cuttlefish dreams come true.

Somehow, in the process of cleaning extraneous files off my laptop prior to coming to Spain, I managed to delete my entire music library. That was about ten years' worth of music I'd gathered.

I wasn't too worried, because I'd done something similar with my ebook collection a couple of years ago, and managed to restore the files easily enough. I downloaded a program called Recuva (free!), started up the wizard, and now it's restoring what it can of my files. I still have no idea how I managed to delete what I did. Takes a certain kind of genius to be as dumb as I am.

I woke up with a migraine (funny — I was dreaming about playing the trumpet in a marching band, with the bass players right behind me, blowing out a low thump, thump, thump. that was exactly the state of my head.), so I ended up lolling about in bed until around ten.

I went first to the Mercado Central, which I'd been to last week. What a crazy mess it was! Worse than last week, even. I didn't get anything this time - admittedly the crush of people got to me rather quickly. I'm fine in large crowds normally, but when they start stepping on your feet and elbowing you in tender places and shouting at you to get out of the way ... yeah, there's only so much I want to deal with. Next week I'll work up the courage to buy some cheese and honey and maybe a few more pastries.


(I am very fond of this lady. There are an unfortunate shortage of Spanish people who are kind enough to speak slowly and clearly in order to help you understand - all the while smiling, because they're happy to help you. She is one of those people.)


(The seafood section is very large and very crowded. The sellers have giant knives that they use to casually cut the heads off whatever fish the customer picks out, so. Bloody knives, bloody aprons, squirming eels and fish and sundry ... not my thing. I ollied out pretty quickly.)


(Candied fruit/vegetables/what-have-you are very popular here.)


(They have a horchata stand which is very popular with the locals. You can buy a litre of horchata and a bag of fartons for cheap. Next time, I'll get my horchata from here - the cafes are much more expensive, and, judging by the number of locals here, I'd say the quality at this stand is at least comparable.)

















Other than that, they had produce, olives, lots of meat, eggs (the egg stalls made me so nervous ... just giant bins of eggs, ready to be smashed in the case of something falling atop them), spices (so expensive!), herbs, fresh pasta, wine, beer, etc., etc., etc. A madhouse of not-so-sweet abuelas.

After escaping the mob, I wanted to visit the Ceramics Museum, but it was around 1:30 at this point and the museum closed for siesta at 2. Great, I thought. I'm never going to see this museum. (I have it planned for Tuesday; we'll see if that actually comes to pass.)







I wandered into a church that was just outside the Mercado Central (Iglesia del Sagrado Corazon, the Church of the Sacred Heart.) It was lovely inside, but again, it felt very much like a tourist attraction. In fact, they were saying mass in one of the tiny side chapels whilst about a dozen tourists wandered around in the church. I can't fault them for that, given that I was one of their number, but it does detract from the ambiance. I took a few quick pictures and then left.

I wanted to scope out Yelmo Cines (the theater where I will be seeing Thor 2 on Oct 31. You Americans have to wait for Nov 8, ha!!), so I began the long trek in that direction (it was another ~3.5km from the Ciudad Viejo.) On the way, I passed by the Universidad Jardin Botanico (the university botanical gardens), and I figured -- hey, might as well make a stop.



It was lovely. Not too much diversity in terms of plant life, but it was a big sprawling cool garden in the middle of the hot city, so I decided to stop and read for awhile. I did pay 2 euros for entrance, anyway, so I had to make the entrance fee worth my while.



About an hour later, I took off again. Passed the Torre de Quatro on the way (another part of the remnants of the wall around the Ciudad Viejo.)

Found the cinema, and was pleased by what I saw. It's far from my piso, my apartment, but it's nothing like the dinky little theater that my roommates and I went to. (That said, they don't seem to have the concept of large, sprawling movie theaters like we do in California. All the theaters are tiny, don't show many films, and have very little ticketing information available online.) A lot of these theaters have movie + dinner deals for about 10 euros. Not sure if that entails eating first, eating after, eating during ...

Took about an hour and a half for me to walk home, then I holed up with emails and grad school stuff. Watched Cabin in the Woods, which - yay, Chris! - but I found it to be a tiresome movie. A deconstruction of the horror genre, in an obvious and very unsubtle way, thank you Joss Whedon, but it still was unnecessarily gory and the ending was so ridiculously silly that I think I let out a huff of laughter when Sigourney Weaver died. Anyone seen any good movies lately? I'm not going to see The Fifth Estate because I'll just come out of it in a passionate rage.

Today, DST struck (I'm only eight hours ahead of California, now!), so I got to sleep an extra hour. Dreamed about something that I can't quite remember, except for the fact that Will Smith's Miami was playing in the background. (I blame that on Tom goddamn Hiddleston.)

I went to the rastro, the famous flea market in the shade of the Mestalla Stadium. First of all: wow. That was an experience. There were probably about two thousand people in that square, and that wasn't counting the vendors.






They were selling all sorts of things: dishware, paintings, flowers, clothing, metalware, electronics, cloth/fabric/thread, kitchen items, furniture, guitars (!), books, comics, music, dvds, records, basically everything you could possibly list, with the sole exception of food. Most of it was crap, but there were also a great deal of diamonds-in-the-rough, to the point that I'm sure that this is where I'll be buying my souvenirs.



I'll come back with more 1-euro coins next week. This time, I just bought myself something -- at on of the stalls, they had a giant pile of Asterix comics in Spanish. I couldn't resist.



When I got back, Ravil and Valentina had a strange request for me. They invited me into their room, opened the window, and then pointed to a family below having lunch at the cafe across the street. Ravil wanted a picture of them. Why? I asked. He said it was interesting, seeing such a large family eating together, the little kids, the grandparents, the ridiculous amount of food ... I'm still not quite sure he wanted the photo, but it didn't cost me anything to take it for them.

I'm at home now, debating whether or not I should go out in search of food. I'm hungry, but I don't really want to leave the house. On the other hand, I've been here for two weeks and I still haven't tried Valencia's paella.

Meh. Dilemma.