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.
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| Carvings around doors of Palace of the Marquis of Two Waters (2011) |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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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.
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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!
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| Front of apartment block on Gran Via |
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