Churro-mania

Wednesday, 21 February 2024: A down day - other than my run in the morning and working on this blog. I was supposed to go to a concert in the evening - one of the UV Winter series, a piano trio. I was looking forward to it. But when I went to register for the free ticket, they were all gone. Bummer. I never had a problem getting into the free concerts last year, but that’s two I’ve missed this year because they were ‘sold out’. One more indication, perhaps, of how this city has grown and been discovered by visitors.

In lieu of a concert, we played Game 4 of the Winter Scrabble season: a win for me, under almost identical circumstances to Karen’s win in Game 3 last week. This time, it was she who pulled high-scorers near the end that she couldn’t play. I won by fewer than 20 points. Series tied.

Thursday, 22 February 2024: Not much visible progress on the Fallas preparations in our neighbourhood. It was forecast to be a warm day, so we planned to head to the beach - although there was also cloud in the forecast, and the dreaded wind icon appeared for some hours of the day. 

I went for a fast walk in the morning and managed to get myself briefly lost. I’m still not sure how I did it - by not paying attention, basically, listening to my audio book (Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer) and thinking I knew the territory too well to get lost. I had to resort to Google Maps to get myself reoriented and headed in the right direction. I definitely went around in circles at one point because I saw the same shops twice.

We left for the beach, on bikes, about 12:30. When we got down to the sea, we ran into a huge demonstration by farmers, protesting the crippling rise in fuel prices. There were scores of big farm machines parked along the road and crowds of country folk, with police trying to wrangle them. Some had signs. They spilled over the bike paths, blocking our way. At the intersection where we came to the main road along the seafront, they had burned something, possibly tires as part of the protest, possibly just wood over which they’d cooked a lunch. It was still smoldering and stinking. Once past Porto, we were free of the worst of it, although there were farm machines parked all along the road practically to the Neptu beach.

It was hazy and starting to be quite breezy, an off-shore wind. It was strong enough to blow sand in our faces as we rode along the promenade. We had a little trouble finding parking spots for the bikes and had to split up. We met up a little later and found a bench to settle on. While Karen read, I experimented with trying to take candid shots of passers by, including kids from the local highschool out doing their PE run. It’s difficult to get the subjects in focus - and difficult to avoid being spotted as the one shot clearly demonstrates.

It was heading for 2 o’clock when we decided to go looking for a place to eat further up the beach. We walked right to the end, to Alboraya, but nothing appealed. There are a couple on the promenade at the end that have reasonably priced menus del dia, but they didn’t feature anything we wanted to eat on this day. So we headed for the tram. 

To try and get away from the wind, we crossed the multiple lanes of the road that runs along the seafront and walked back towards Malvarrosa on a sidewalk in front of a row of villas. I guess we’d never walked over here before - we usually stick to the beach promenade - so we were struck by some of the architecture. The people who live here - or more likely, spend summer weekends here - have a lot of money, that much is clear. The first one that caught our eye was the museum/house of the early 20th century Valencian novelist Vincente Blasco-Ibañez. I’m not sure if this was actually a house he lived in - it looks awfully rich for a novelist, however popular he was, and awfully new too. I’ll have to do some research.

Blasco-Ibanñez House Museum

We found the tram stop after 20 minutes of walking and took it back to the Marítim Serreria tube stop. Sitting across the aisle from me on the tram was a guy about my edge who opened a notebook in his lap. I happened to glance over and noticed that the pages were full of fabulous pencil and ink drawings of people - very detailed, very realistic. As I watched, he found a suitable page and started drawing a young woman who was standing a little further along in the car. He glanced up and back down constantly as he worked, but never hesitated. She got off a little later and he closed his book and put it away. 

When we got on the tube train, he was sitting across from us again, facing us this time, and immediately pulled out his notebook and pencil. I thought, ‘Oh, cool. Maybe he’ll draw me.’ Karen had a completely different reaction. She twisted around and looked out the window. ‘I don’t want him drawing me,’ she said. In fact, he wasn’t interested in either of us. He was drawing the 40-ish woman sitting next to me on the bench.

Spotted on the walk to our restaurant

Our plan was to check out the restaurant in La Nau, the University of Valencia building in the city centre. It looks like a nice place, and the menu del dia is a reasonably good deal, but they weren’t serving anything that appealed to us today - we’re picky. So we trudged on, back through Plaça de Rodrigo Botet, where we had lunch last Thursday. We ended up at a little working folk’s lunch spot on one of the narrow streets leading out of the square. 

Bar Transits has tables outside on an alley - there was a crowd of city street workers just getting up from lunch as we arrived. We decided to eat inside where they have maybe ten tables packed in very tightly. We sat at a table for two right under the counter, with about two feet between it and the next table. It’s very loud - a lot of hard surfaces, and the barman likes to bang things down on the marble counter. We were often shouting at each other to be heard, but it was kind of fun.

The menu del dia includes bread, starter, main, one drink, dessert or coffee - for €12.90. I had paella for starters, Karen had the Valencian salad - both standbys on Valencian lunch menus. We both had something called lagrimas de pollo for our main, which translates as chicken tears. We had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be chicken fingers, but fresh, hot and tasty, served over a little mound of mash. I had a beer, Karen a glass of wine - well, I had two beers. And we both ordered ice cream for dessert, which turned out to be packaged cones from the Mercadona. Fine by us, we eat the Mercadona house brand ice cream bars all the time. Total bill with tip €30.60 (about CDN$45.) We left quite replete. 

New wall art spotted on walk to museum

Our next stop was an art gallery we’d been meaning to visit for some time: the Fundación Mediterranea in the Square by the Central Market, a ten- or 15-minute walk away. The Fundación is a non-profit funded by “former savings banks” - not sure what that means - and has facilities in the Valencia region and Murcia (the province to the south of Valencia). It’s dedicated to cultural pursuits, including exhibiting art, and offering lectures and performances. 

Bank-run non-profit cultural foundations are a big thing in Spain. We’ve enjoyed exhibitions at two others that are active in town -  Fundación Bancaja and Caixa Forum (where we saw the Egyptian mummies exhibit earlier.) Bancaja, which has a beautiful facility in an old palace in the city centre, used to be a mainstay of our visits. We’ve seen some fabulous exhibits there - most memorably, a couple of big shows of Picasso prints. Sadly, Bancaja, which used to be free, at least on some days, now charges an entrance fee. And the shows on offer aren’t anywhere near as appealing or ambitious.

It was really me who had been anxious to visit the Fundación Mediterranea gallery. The current exhibit is of photographs by a Spanish artist called Pilar Pequeño. Photo exhibits aren’t one of Karen’s favourite things, but she humours me. As it turned out, we both really enjoyed the show. The photos, botanicals, are very sensual and strikingly lit. We both liked the colour photos more than the black and whites, but both were good.

Pilar Pequeño

Pilar Pequeño

Pilar Pequeño

From there, we headed home for the day.

I can’t remember when we first noticed it, but a churro stand, with garish flashing lights, appeared on our street, just below our balcony. Well, we knew this was Fallas-central. With two of the biggest fallases, both sponsored to the tune of hundreds of thousands of euros, a block apart just down the street, plus other smaller displays and portable stages for live music, the neighbourhood draws big crowds at Fallas time. We’re looking forward to our first festival churro.

Friday, 23 February 2024: T&Z-minus-one. Brother Tom and Zena arrive tomorrow for a week-long visit.  Yay!

A mild, sometimes sunny but very blustery day today, so just as well it was a day off from running. Winds were forecast to be as high as 45 kph at times. 

Karen said she recorded more steps yesterday (counted by her Fitbit) than any day since we arrived, so she was taking a day off and staying home.  I worked on some photos, read, did some grocery shopping and made dinner, then went out for a ramble on my own about 4.

Fallas bullfight posters that appeared on the bullring recently

I started off meaning to get some shots of City Hall lit by the late afternoon sun. It’s a pretty impressive building that I haven’t photographed for a few years. I was forgetting they’d set up tall barriers around the area where they let off the firecrackers every day during Fallas time - the mascletás. It fills much of the square in front of City Hall. If I stood between it and the building, I’d be too close to get it into the frame with my widest lens. In any case, the sun wasn’t on it. Duh! So I had a go at the roof line of the post office building across the square instead. Also pretty impressive.

Embossed door on north side of City Hall

Central Post Office

After that, I meandered. I couldn’t tell you where I was half the time, but always came out somewhere I recognized. I ended up over in the area around the Central Market and the Carmen district. My obsession with photographing the narrow streets and pastel-painted buildings in the city’s mediaeval centre continues unabated.  

Taking a picture of Mr. TV Head and whatever tagging or mural appears on the hoarding below him has become an almost annual ritual. He was new the first year we came to the city. He doesn’t look in too bad shape given his age. Some other wall murals around the city that I remember from our early days here have either disappeared entirely or are faded and flaking.

     In the evening, we watched the final episode of Expats on Prime Video. It might not be to everybody’s taste, but I think it’s one of the best things we’ve seen in quite a while. Ditto for One Day, which we’ve sadly also now finished.

Fallas is coming!

Sunday, 18 February 2024: One of the big museums in town, MuVIM, the Valencian Museum of Illustration and Modernity, runs a series of free concerts through the winter: Sundays at noon. I went to one earlier this year. There was one today I’d planned to take in: a recital by a celebrated young South African tenor who has won some big music competitions. You have to go to the front desk of the museum and request a ticket. They start distributing them at 11 am. I got there a little after 11:30 and they were all gone. Rats!

Luckily, there’s another free concert series put on by the University of Valencia’s music faculty, that includes some Sunday noon-hour concerts in an auditorium at the Botanical Gardens. All you have to do is show up and they let you in. As it happened, there was also one of those on today, a concert by a wind quintet called Quintet Cuesta. Some of the UV concerts are by very young musicians, some still completing their formal studies. But this was a group of seasoned professionals, players in local orchestras. They even have a few records out. It’s not my favourite combination of instruments - flute, oboe, French horn, bassoon, clarinet - but what the heck, it was free. So I grabbed a bike, rode over there - it’s only a few minutes away from MuVIM - and got a decent seat. 

It was a good, if short, concert, with a wide variety of music, from classical (Mozart) to contemporary (a composer younger than me). The latter piece was…different: an interplay of weird squeaks and squawks from the various instruments, occasionally relieved by short passages of almost melodic music. It wasn’t as bad as I’m making it sound, kind of amusing in fact. I think it was probably challenging to play. The band seemed to relax a bit after that one. They looked a fairly dour bunch when they first came out.
Anyway, I forgot to relate this in the last post.

Monday, 19 February 2024: No pause in festival season here. 

The police tape was still flapping in the breeze from Saturday’s Carnival parade when new temporary barriers went up on our street to accommodate the cherrypickers and workmen erecting light standards. The street will be festooned with festival lighting for Fallas, which is the next big item on the Valencian calendar. The poles to support the lights are secured by guy wires, some of which attach to apartment balconies. There are none attached to ours, but Karen came inside a couple of times because the workmen got uncomfortably close. 

The lights are already up in some neighbourhoods. And last week, they erected floodlights down the block at the corner of Literato Azorin. That’s where one of the big fallases, the storeys-high wood and painted styrofoam sculptures, will appear. I thought we might see some work beginning on constructing them by now, but we’ve seen nothing so far. We will very soon if past year’s are anything to go by.

It was another lovely sunny day - not that warm, according to The Weather Channel, but we don’t trust its reported temperatures anymore. It said it was only 9C when I went out for my fast walk in the morning, but it felt a lot warmer. We were sitting outside on the balcony, baking in the sun in our shirtsleeves, before noon. No wind today. Other than a quick outing for grocery shopping, that was about all we did until late in the afternoon when I finally went out on my own for a wander. Karen was happy to stay home in the sun. At that point, some of the pixel boards were saying it was 24C. We don’t trust them either, though.

Look way up: gargoyle atop Silk Exchange

I biked into the historic centre and wandered, taking pictures. I started off by noticing the gargoyles on the Silk Exchange, the 15th century building where the once thriving local silk industry transacted its business. I’ve photographed the gargoyles before, but they caught my attention again today because the late sun was shining on them. Then I dove into the narrow streets and tried, with only middling success, to get myself lost. I was struck again by how many more people there are on the streets than there have been in years past - even on a Monday - and how many are clearly visitors. Valencia has been discovered. 

When I got home, I was surprised how late it was - after 6:30. It’s staying lighter longer. 

Tuesday, 20 February 2024: The workmen were back early today, erecting more light standards for the festival lighting. We missed this last year because we’d gone back to England by this point. We sat outside a good part of the day, baking in the sun on our little balcony, reading, and watching the workmen in their cherrypickers stringing lights. Some were working less than 20 feet from where we were sitting. They worked fairly quickly and had most of the lights up, other than around the intersections by the end of the day.

A little after five, when the sun had deserted our balcony, we went out for a walk around the neighbourhood to see if there was any sign of the beginning of construction on the fallases. There wasn’t, but we saw other lights going up on other streets, including on Cuba, one block over from us. We remember the lights on that street being fabulous when we were here one year - possibly the first year we stayed in Ruzafa, in 2011. They did a music and light show that was well attended each time it played. We heard another year we were here that they had discontinued that light show for some health and safety reason. We’ll continue to monitor the neighbourhood for approaching signs of Fallas.

A block and a half from our apartment

Shop front pottery atelier

     We walked through the market area over to Regne de Valencia, then looped back to our apartment. I’d love to know the story behind this picture. Somebody had left two, not entirely unattractive oil paintings, unframed, each about 18 by 14 inches, propped in window frames at the back of the church by the market. They appeared to have been left for anyone to take. They weren’t fastened down. There were no signs explaining why they were there. Was it some kind of thought experiment - to see who, if anyone, would claim them? Or just somebody disposing of stuff they no longer wanted? Karen says some of her mixed media art groups are advocating this kind of unbidden donation of art pieces. Maybe it’s a new thing.

Mardi Gras in Valencia

 Thursday, 15 February 2024: Today was going-out-for-lunch day, and that’s pretty much all we did. Well, I did go for a run in the morning - a new route through a very boring district to the south and west of us. It’s all high-rise apartment blocks, some of them not very nice. We get a slightly skewed view of Valencia living in Ruzafa and close to the centre. A lot of this city is pretty ugly, especially the new areas built in the 70s and since.

For lunch, we wimped out again and went to a place we’ve been to a few times before. It’s a nominally Italian restaurant, Geppetto, in one of the prettiest squares in the centre, Plaça de Rodrigo Botet. It’s just a couple of blocks from City Hall square, but insulated from the tourist craziness there, a little oasis. There’s a pretty fountain, which they’ve recently refurbished, yellow-painted buildings overlooking it, and it’s very protected. We sat outside, although it wasn’t that warm a day. It was here, though. 

The €14.90 menu del dia isn’t quite as good a deal as it has been in the past because they now don’t include a drink with it - and charge a steep €5 for a glass of wine. Karen paid a €3 premium to get a steak. I ordered the ribs. Both served with fries and grilled peppers, both good. She had Valencian salad with tuna for starters - which she says was very good. I had quesadillas with Iberico ham, which I think I’ve had every time we’ve come here. We both had the “grandmother’s cake” - a tiramisu-like concoction, but quite nice anyway. Total bill: €42 (about CDN$63).

After lunch we wandered down the alley-like street that leads from Rodrigo Botet to the Ceramics Museum, aka the Palace of the Marquis of Two Waters. I always get a kick out of the fabulous alabaster carvings around the palace’s main doors. They were made by Ignacio Vergara in the early 1740s when the original 16th century palace was being modernised.

Carvings around doors of Palace of the Marquis of Two Waters (2011)

Out of the protection of Rodrigo Botet, it wasn’t that warm. We went in search of sun - often difficult to find in the centre of the city - and found a little in the square in front of La Nau. La Nau is an ancient (1497) building, once part of the defunct Literary University of Valencia, now an arts and cultural centre attached to the University of Valencia. We sat on a bench in the middle of the square and tried to convince ourselves the sun was warming us. It wasn’t really.

Lunch in front of La Nau

We went inside and checked out the cafe, which has a pretty decent-looking menu del dia - maybe for another lunch day out - and nice semi-outdoor seating. There is an exhibit on of art against violence against women in a sort of pop-art style that didn’t do much for either of us. From there, we walked home - or possibly biked, can’t remember.

In La Nau cloister

Friday, 16 February 2024: Fast walk in the morning. Grocery shopping later. Pretty lazy the rest of the day. Until late in the afternoon when I got a little cabin fever and went out for a walk/bike ride on my own. I ended up near the Central Market again and wandered aimlessly, as usual. There were too many people about, though, and too many of them were tourists. Plus, I remembered that Karen and I had planned to face off in a game of scrabble - so I cut my walk short and biked home.

Game 3 of the Winter Season: a win for Karen, giving her the series lead, 2-1. I led for most of the game, sometimes by quite a margin, but then pulled the Q and Z late in the game and couldn’t put much down. Karen came on near the end and went out first, squeaking past me with the points she got from my unused hand. All three games this year have been won by razor-thin margins. And this is the second time Karen has “pipped me at the post.” Rats!

Saturday, 17 February 2024: The first year we stayed in Ruzafa, in 2012, the community began a new tradition with a Carnival event around Fat Tuesday. The neighbourhood has in the past been home to a lot of Latin American immigrants, and it was they, apparently, who pushed for this. It seems to have expanded well beyond Latino expats now - of which, I’m guessing, there are fewer than once because the neighbourhood has been priced out of the range of working-class folk. 

We noticed in the morning that the police had cordoned off the street parking in our block, so guessed, correctly, that the Carnival parade would pass right below our apartment. After lunch, we walked over to Granero Park, where they had craft and food booths set up and a music stage. It was also where they were marshalling the parade. We did a circuit around the park, then went home to sit on the balcony and watch the parade, which was to start at about 5. 

Waiting for the parade to start

That first year, the parade was made up mostly of representatives from the various Latino communities in the neighbourhood - Bolivian, Peruvian, Colombian and so on - dressed in traditional costumes or in wild Carnival get-ups, dancing to marching bands or just trudging along. That parade went on for a long time, but mainly, I suspect, because it was incompetently marshalled. This year’s parade lasted five hours! And it was very, very noisy. The first hour and a half, it was one drum corp after another, some with wailing crumhorns, some just drums. They were interspersed with rag-tag community groups, some in fancy dress, some not, ambling along the parade route. We got bored, then irritated, pretty quickly. 

The good stuff, the lighted floats, costumed dancers and bands with instruments other than drums didn’t come until after it got dark - and after we’d mostly given up on the parade and closed the apartment to keep the noise out. We’d peek out every now and then to see what was happening. But we were never tempted to stay watching for long. Our street by this point was thronged with onlookers. We stayed inside and watched television. My, we’re getting old. It finished up a little after 10.

Sunday, 18 February 2024: One of my favourite columnists in The Guardian is a guy called Tim Dowling, an American who has lived in England all his adult life. He just writes about his life with his family, and about his folk music band, but very amusingly, in a very un-American self-deprecating way. Yesterday, he had a feature in an issue of The Guardian’s Saturday weekend magazine that the editors dubbed “The Luddite Issue.” It’s about the possible need to cut ties to technology. Tim’s feature was “16 Ways Technology Has Ruined My Life.” It’s funny, and pretty much spot-on. 

Way No. 1 is “It’s destroying my concentration.” He finishes this item by saying, “Duolingo in particular pursues me with the persistence of bailiffs – sometimes it interrupts my Italian lessons to remind me to take an Italian lesson, which is why I still can’t order a coffee in Rome after five years.” Ha, ha, I thought. Then I looked at my emails a few minutes ago. Duolingo, which I used last year to spruce up my minimal Spanish, but haven’t used since, had sent me an email reminder, which it does every other day or so, with the subject line, “How do you say ‘quitter’ in Spanish?” When I opened it, the message said, “Sorry, that was harsh. Duo’s only hard on you because he knows your potential. Do a quick lesson now!”

What Tim said. Duolingo, fuck you!

I ran in the morning. In the afternoon, we walked down to the river and sat in the sun reading and watching the Valencians enjoying their Sunday with family and friends. Another day in paradise!

Front of apartment block on Gran Via