Valencia, last-minute

Okay, so I've got a little bit of catching up to do. I wasn't going to blog about my trip to Valencia, but all of a sudden I decided that I want to. So here we are.

A few weeks ago my friends and I had a trip planned to Barcelona. Then things started going crazy with politics (and attempts at independence) in Cataluña, and we slowly started feeling much less confident in our trip. We were warned of strikes, military intervention, and protests, and were finally prohibited by our program from going. So we cancelled the trip, and I spent the week frantically trying to figure out what else I could do for our long weekend. Long story short, lots of plans came and went and nothing was shaking out for me. Finally, I contacted my close friend Saul who is studying in Madrid with a Carleton program. He told me that he and two friends were going to Valencia for the weekend, and that they had room for one more in their Airbnb. I checked train tickets, and after the usual (lengthy and complicated) purchasing hassle, I had tickets to Valencia for two nights. 

My trip to Valencia was on the AVE train – the high-speed, long-distance train in Spain (also the longest high speed rail network in Europe!) – and the ride took about three hours. The train home was not aboard the AVE train. The train home took eight hours. But I'll circle back to that part.

I had a lovely time on the AVE, writing blog posts and doing work on my laptop and listening to music. I ate a potato sandwich from my host mom.  **Side note: who knew I would ever be at a point in my life where I'd be excited for a potato sandwich?! Well here I am. It's actually made of sliced Spanish tortilla (a very typical, very dense, very simple, frittata-esque potato and egg dish) on two slices of crusty white bread.**  I arrived in Valencia around 10pm, where Saul and (my new friends!) Sylvie and Dallas met me at the train station. 

My weekend in Valencia was surreal in how much I enjoyed it. It was incredibly fun, and I can only describe the weekend as joyful. I have so missed Carleton people. I laughed more than I had in a while, and as I sit here typing this post I'm grinning from ear to ear at the memories.

On Friday we cooked eggs for breakfast! This was such a happy change from peanut butter toast every single morning. In Spain they don't do big breakfasts, and most people eat some variation of bread and coffee each day; I've missed the massive quantity of eggs that I normally consume daily. We put spinach in the eggs, and also enjoyed brie and chorizo and bread. We spent much of the day at the beach. Lucky for me, Saul and Dallas both play frisbee, so we played some lovely Mediterranean Sea frisbee for a long while. Only my belly button got sunburnt (still not sure how that happened.)

Mercat Central de Valencia.

Paella (the famous Spanish rice dish, full of varied seafood and meat) originates from Valencia, so we absolutely had to get paella for our late lunch. All I will say about this is that it was potentially worth going all the way to Valencia simply for paella. (I'm clearly still thinking about that lunch.)

Planning to cook dinner, we arrived at the grocery store 19 minutes before closing, with little plan of what we would prepare. We split up to race around the store and somehow decided that we'd make homemade pizza and salad. In our rush we did accidentally double up on some of the ingredients and forget others, but we found oregano in our Airbnb and everything was so yummy.

Palm trees and cool architecture.

Saturday morning we made more eggs, this time with all of the leftover pizza toppings – mushrooms, spinach, ham, and goat cheese. I was over the moon at eggs for breakfast two days in a row. Pretty soon I had to head out to the train station. On the walk I stopped at the Mercat Central, Valencia's massive indoor food market in a cool domed building. It was absolutely popping on a Saturday morning, and I do love me a good market.

All in all, I didn't actually see too much of Valencia. And normally that would be a bummer for me, but the weekend truly couldn't have been any better. Walking around I saw some of the principal parts of the city, but more than that I saw my friends and had a heart-filling weekend, which was exactly what I needed. 

When I got on the not-AVE train back to Seville, I realized what made it not the AVE. Instead of outlets and trashcans for each passenger, the seats were not in great shape and the cleanliness simply wasn't up to par with the AVE. The real kicker was that the seats were facing backwards for the entire train ride, because I guess the train didn't turn around between arriving from Sevilla and departing for Sevilla; I watched Spain pass backwards outside my window for eight hours.