Wednesday, 17 January 2024: The weather continues unseasonably mild: 23C with sun and cloud. Our big activity today was going for our first restaurant meal in Valencia.
We go at Spanish lunch time - two or later - which corresponds pretty much to the time we have our main meal of the day at home. We decided to stick to the neighbourhood this time. There are lots of restaurants within a few blocks of us. But fewer and fewer, we’ve noticed, offer the fixed price, multi-course menus that were a great low-cost Spanish tradition for lunch. We wandered for 45 minutes or so and ended up going back to a place we knew and liked from last year - La Tasqueta del Mercat (Market Stall), just across from the Ruzafa market.
Their prices, inevitably, have gone up, but they still have a €14.90 fixed price option that gives you a starter, main, dessert and one drink. Karen had a chicken salad with curry dressing to start and roast chicken with scalloped potatoes and peppers for her main. For starters, I had patatas bravas, Spain’s national snack dish (fried potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce, served with garlic mayo for dipping), and a hamburger with more bravas and an unidentified vegetable mash on the burger bun.
We both had two glasses of wine and, for dessert, the restaurant’s excellent brownie with caramel sauce and candied walnuts, which we remembered from last year. It was all good: high quality ingredients, well prepared and nicely presented. Our young waiter spoke excellent English to boot. Total bill: €37 (about CDN$55). Think what you’d pay for a three-course meal with two drinks in Canada! Now add a tip.
I went out again later in the afternoon and rode over to the old city. I had a good wander, but with little success on the photographic front. One thing is clear: the golden age of Valencian street art is sadly over. The best wall murals - at least in the historic centre - are ones that have been there for years. One giant mural, of a horse being lassoed by snail cowboys, I remember photographing the first year we came here in 2011. The newer stuff is smaller - or it’s just gaudy tagging, graffiti really.
Carmen shop front 
Carmen grot - note the old bathroom tiles exposed by demolition
Plaça de la Verge (Square of the Virgin) - Basilica and Neptune fountain
Thursday, 18 January 2024: Today was our first planned beach day. We left about noon and rode bikes down. It’s about a 40-minute ride, with a change along the way. (You can keep the bikes for as long as you like, but after the first 30 minutes, you start paying by the hour. You can turn the bike in at a station along the way, though - there are stations everywhere - and take it right back out again. Then you can go another 30 minutes for free.)
The day ended up being a bit of a fiasco, mainly, sad to say, because of the bikes.
The high was supposed to hit 22C, with sun and cloud. But the weather reports also warned of a “possible disruption due to coastal event.” It’s supposedly a warning about high winds and high waves along a seacoast. When we got to the beach, it was a bit breezy but the water looked fairly calm. Our usual thing is to walk up and down the promenade, then find a seat, preferably in the sun, and sit and read for a while. It wasn’t going to be that kind of beach day. For one thing, the sky was pretty solidly overcast. Worse, for the first time ever, we ran into a problem with the bike share system.
After we’d settled on a bench, I pulled out my phone and it opened at the Valenbisi app - showing that I supposedly still had a ‘journey’ underway. I didn’t. When I’d turned the bike in, I’d waited for the double beep that tells you it’s properly locked, and the app showed the journey ending when it did. So what was going on?
I sent off a panicky email to the Valenbisi customer service desk. Last year, we had occasion to call on them a couple of times and were able to get through by phone without any problem - and always get an English-speaking agent. This year, they’ve switched to a 900 number, which is free if you’re on a Spanish phone, but which my UK cellular provider’s local partner would not put through because the call would have been charged at a ridiculous €2.75 a minute. Disappointing.
I had an initial somewhat reassuring, if noncommittal, response to my email within 15 minutes or so. But the minutes kept ticking off on the bogus journey. We decided to head home to try and deal with the problem there. We walked to the tram stop and trammed to the nearest tube station. I emailed twice more from home over the rest of the afternoon and evening, but never got another response. The last time I looked at the app, the journey was still ticking away, and was then up to more than 500 minutes.
Friday, 19 January 2024: First thing this morning, I checked the Valenbisi app. My bogus journey had ended, at about 10:30 the night before. According to the details, the bike had been taken from station 165, position 2 - and returned several hours later to exactly the same station and the same locking bay. Which would have been a huge coincidence - if true. The charge against my account was €17. I fired off another email. They eventually responded, saying they were sending the case to their technical staff and would respond after an investigation.
In the meantime, it was cleaning day. Our hosts provide a cleaning service every 15 days. This was the first of them - even though we haven’t been here quite 15 days yet. It meant we needed to clear out to let the cleaner, Adriana, work. But it also turned out to be a day of extreme weather change. Temperatures were dropping during the day to about 12C, and rain was expected on and off, sometimes heavy. A bit of a shock after the dry, unseasonably warm weather we’d been having.
So not a day for just wandering around the city, but we had a plan. Last year, we discovered a lovely public library, housed in a beautifully repurposed Renaissance-era hospital. It’s one of the city’s hidden gems. And it’s right beside one of the big public (and free entry) galleries, MUVIM - the Museum of Illustration and Modernity. So our plan was to go to MUVIM and see what was on show, then scoot over to the library and sit and read out of the rain for a while.
There was only one show on at MUVIM - the other exhibition spaces in the museum were in the process of being changed, we were told. The one still on didn’t sound all that promising, but it turned out to be a lot of fun.
The artist is a guy named Antonio Perez (1934 - ). He’s from Cuenca, a very cool, arty hill town halfway between here and Madrid, where he has an art ‘foundation’. He’s as much a collector and writer as an artist apparently. The pieces on show at MUVIM are so-called ready-mades - bits of stuff found and repurposed, or arranged, to make ‘art’. The Dadaists in the early 20th century invented the idea of ready-mades. Some of theirs are kind of lame (IMHO). But a lot of Perez’s pieces I thought were quite witty. He calls most of them ‘homages’ - to the various modern artists he admires - or ‘winks’ to those artists. Here are a few of my favourites.
Carefully crumpled magazine pages in a Plexiglas cube - not sure who it's an homage to 
Crumpled oil drum - meant to represent...a fish? 
Not sure what these are, some kind of industrial waste he's hammered at to make them look like faces 
Homage to Las Meninas - crushed bases and filaments of light bulbs, mounted on banana clips from which the arms have been removed
The exhibit killed 45 minutes or so. Then we went to the library, which was as welcoming a place as we remembered - almost. We sat in exactly the same chairs we did last year on another rainy cleaning day. Next to them was a rack of books, as there was last year, labelled ‘Books To Look At’. There were a few coffee-table photography books in the selection, including one by a French artist I’d never heard of, Pierre Gonnord. The picture on the cover was an arresting portrait of a young girl with curly red hair. It looked like an old master painting.
I ended up reading the book from cover to cover - well, there wasn’t much to read - and looking at every single photo. They are all fabulous. Gonnord travels around, often in Spain but further afield as well, and takes pictures of people in marginalised cultural or ethnic groups - Romas, the homeless, the blind. They’re large-scale images and always very carefully lit. The subjects most often look directly at the camera. There’s an unsettling intimacy about them. The book beautifully reproduces the portraits. I might have to own it. Here’s a selection of my favourites that I found reproduced on the web.
Karen is sitting in front of the pillar to the left of the round table
Not much later, we headed home. Adriana was just leaving as we arrived.
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