Monday, 12 February 2024: A nice sunny day. No exercise. Didn’t do much except grocery shopping until after lunch-dinner. We walked down the Gran Via to the Turia - admiring the grand architecture along the way - and sat in the sun on the Flower Bridge, reading. Then we rode bikes home. What fascinating lives we lead!
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| Posh apartment building on Gran Via |
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Posh apartment building on Gran Via
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Karen has surprised herself and me by how well she’s tolerating walking and bike riding this year. She’s doing much better than last. A lot of it is the exercises she’s been doing since she went to physio, part of it is the knee brace we ordered for her when we were in England.
I’ve started reading a new translation of Homer’s Iliad by Emily Wilson. It was highly praised when it came out last year - it made it onto a bunch of ‘best books of…’ lists - so I thought I’d give it a whirl. It finally came in on my library reserve. I say I’ve started reading it, but I’m actually still reading the Introduction and Translator’s Note. Which luckily aren’t the usual turgid screeds they so often are in these kinds of books. And the bits of the poem quoted in the Introduction are promisingly accessible. We’ll see.
Tuesday, 13 February 2024: The hottest day of the year! It went up over 25C today, full sun.
I ran fairly early, then we rode bikes down to the beach, getting away before 11. We walked the promenade, found a bench in the sun and read for a while, then walked to where the city proper ends and the next municipality begins. Alboraya, it’s called. (It’s still in the province of Valencia.)
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| End of Valencia, beginning of Alboraya |
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End of Valencia, beginning of Alboraya
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At this point, we probably should have consulted Google Maps. Our plan was to head inland to a tram stop we remembered and take a tram into town past the vast campuses of the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Valencia. We went a little out of our way, though, and ended up walking for a half hour before Google Maps finally pointed us in the right direction.
The tram ride was fine, until we got to the stops in front of the universities. It was just about 2 pm. That’s lunch time for Spaniards and the kids were all heading home for lunch. Hordes of them got on at two stops, jamming the cars. Luckily we had seats. We got off at the Benimaclet stop and hopped on the tube there to get the rest of the way home. I made a hasty late lunch, and we were pretty much done for the day.
Long video chat with Ms. Shelley Boyes in the evening. She is happy to be in Spain - in Seville. The weather there wasn’t quite as nice as here, but nice enough. She now plans to stay on this side of the pond until well into April.
Wednesday, 14 February 2024: Hooray! It’s International Caitlin Blackwell Baines Day - oh, and Valentine's Day too, though the Spanish don’t pay it much attention. It was also cleaning day at 39 Sueca, so we had to clear out of the apartment in the morning. We had a plan for how to fill the time.
There’s a new tube line that goes from the centre out, past the City of Arts & Sciences, to a formerly isolated little working-class enclave called Natzaret. (We learned today that it’s pronounced in Valencian more as it would be in French, with the final ‘t’ silent: Natz-ah-RAY.) It’s traditionally where dock workers and fishermen lived, a sister community to Cabanyal, another rough-and-ready working-class district on the other side of the port.
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| Pretty apartment building on walk to tube stop |
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| Shiny new Ruzafa stop on Linea 10 |
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| Shiny new Ruzafa stop on Linea 10 |
Natzaret doesn’t really have a lot to recommend it. It gets mentioned in in-depth tour guides as a place known for the vibrant ceramic tile-lined house fronts - not that there are very many of them that we could see. But it was someplace different to go that we hadn’t been for several years. It’s still a pretty down-at-heels neighbourhood, but we noticed right away that it has come up market since we were here last. We didn’t remember all the parks for one thing.
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| Natzaret house |
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| Natzaret house |
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| Natzaret house - note ceramic decoration |
Still, the streets are kind of boring: a lot of poor-looking mid-rise apartments and streets with tiny flat-roofed row houses. Some are interestingly tarted up. And there are some quite posh-looking places in one part we wandered into. We spent maybe 45 minutes meandering around, then decided we’d had enough. We grabbed bikes near the neighbourhood’s commercial centre and rode across a causeway over the still water-filled stub end of the old Turia River bed. It got us much more quickly than expected to the marina. It wasn’t a very long ride at all.
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| Where the rich of Natzaret live |
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| Where the rich of Natzaret live |
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| Wall mural in commercial centre |
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| Murals in front of government-run youth centre |
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| Murals in front of government-run youth centre |
We spent another hour or so wandering around the marina. This was an area we explored extensively the first year we came to Valencia in 2011, when we stayed in a flat nearby. But we hadn’t really spent much time here in recent years. We wandered down one roadway with abandoned, open-sided warehouses on one side. They’ve been replaced by the modern-style container port with stacked intermodal containers. These structures were built in the early 20th century in the modernista style, with ceramic borders along the roof lines and stucco relief carvings. On the other side of the narrow road, right on the water, are shiny glass-fronted buildings erected to house the offices of America's Cup sailing teams back when Valencia hosted the event in 2007 and 2010. Some have now been leased out to other kinds of businesses, but a couple appear to have been abandoned. |
| Apartment building at foot of Porto Avenue |
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| Old America's Cup team offices |
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| Marina, old Customs building |
We toyed with finding a place for lunch out down here, but in the end we just walked several blocks up Av. del Port, the major artery that our 2011 flat was on. It was another pretty boring walk. We picked up bikes at the first station we came to and rode home.
We had a very nice birthday video chat with our girl. They had a birthday dinner of sorts in Brighton on Monday - because it was the only nice day in the week - and some birthday shopping at Caitlin’s favourite clothing shop. So on her actual birthday, the woman was planning on cooking dinner as usual. In the end, good man Bobby stepped in and made her dinner. It sounds like her book is going well. She’s still high on her editor. So all is good there.
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