Spain #2 - Valencia
Check out the images from Valencia, here.
Now, Reet didn’t get her Big City life, that she badly needed from Barcelona, because of the parking situation.
I needed a better parking situation.
They kind of go against each other. You just don’t find any AirBnB in the centre that includes on premise parking in our budget. Now, a bit farther away, like 30 minutes by foot from centre, you’d get the similar solution as we had in Castelldefels.
An hour away by foot, though, was an apartment. A penthouse in a 21-story building with a parking space on premises, in a garage under the building.
Now, to be clear, the penthouse was on the 15. floor, so not an actual penthouse in a classical term, but a penthouse in AirBnB vocabulary. That’s better, though, than the penthouse in the next place, which was a 2-story building (but I think I’m repeating myself).
Anyway, an apartment with
a parking space, Castelldefels didn’t have that
a 15-story high view, Castelldefels had one from the third floor, or fourth if I’d want to go to a balcony for some reason (who would want to go to a balcony that’s so far away)
a third bedroom. Castelldefels had just 2, one for Me and Reet and one for Saskia. And in this new one, Saskia even had a window while in Castelldefels, she was basically living in a closet.
Impressed already? But there’s more. The apartment also featured a doorman and lifts. The previous place had a door and the tightest stairs ever.
a swimming pool. Castelldefels ony had a beach 5 minutes away, but this place had a pool a lift ride away (and had to have it, because the beach was a bit farther away)
A shopping centre 20 minutes away (walking) from the apartment, in Castelldefels, it was 30.
And yes, it was also ~10 minutes away from something that Reet wanted to go to and why we even considered an apartment so far from everything (centre of the town – 1h or beach, again 1h by foot). Castelldefels had nothing like that close by other than restaurants where we never went to other than for Shisha (a mighty good shisha btw) and Ice Cream.
Centre of the town 1h by foot, so no need for a car even.
Get it? Valencia was even better than Castelldefels
We never used our car, that was safely inside the parking garage, because everything that interested us was close by.
We used the pool for a total of a whopping 1h in total over the course of 7 days.
The girls went shopping, I went walking to the beach with Emmi… Twice, didn’t swim, so can’t comment about the quality of water, sorry, but the playground there was nice.
Took walks in the central park, because… what else do you do in a park? Ride a bike? Run? People did that. We… we walk, if you hadn’t noticed by now.
Took a walk to the centre of the city. Was nice, didn’t go to a museum, though. Just went to some restaurant that later turned out to be a fast food chain. Wasn’t very good. And of course Reet bought some earrings and bought some bad food in a local market as well.
Sat on the balcony and just enjoyed the sunsets. Almost every night. They really were nice (well, for a view you don’t have to work for).
Never went hiking, because turns out that 1,5h before and 1,5h after Valencia there are mountains, but Valencia… A nice flat city. Woop! Woop! I didn’t care for a 1,5h drive to get a medicore view (or a 2h drive for a bit better one), on that week for some reason.
But we did go to…
L'Oceanogràfic, the other place and a place we didn’t go to because of Dario
This was the place why we rented the apartment. Only 10 minutes from L'Oceanogràfic on foot. The goal was to get there as early as possible, so we’d be the first ones there and get some awesome pictures from the all-glass tunnel that was under water.
Have I said that the women of our house never leave the building before 11 (when it’s check-out day) or 12 on a normal day. That’s kind of a rule with them (it actually has come down a bit, now it’s 11 on any day, but until that time, this wasn’t the case yet).
But to be first in the L'Oceanogràfic, you’d have to be there by 9:45. I have to give credit to the girls. We were there by 9:52. It did come at a cost, though. The girls were not ready to pose for that one iconic pic. Or rather, this was the day, turns out, when Dario needed take awesome pictures of “real life”, because good pics don’t come from planning and modelling… Blah blah… Ask Reet about that theory. I have heard and read that people first go to a place, take pics with a phone to gather ideas and then go back to pose and do stuff to get their best pics. But I guess those are bad photographer-model combos. Actually I think I ruined the mood for them by constantly reminding them at home that we need to be early at the L'Oceanogràfic. Must learn to keep the delicate balance of being on time and not being a dick about it when not being on time. (read: must say that we need to be there by 9 and then when they’re ready a half an hour later, apologize for messing up the deadline)
In any case, looking back at the pics, sorry, but nothing interesting for You guys. The fish and the tunnel and other sea animals there were okay, though through the lens of my eyes. Worth a visit when you live close by ;).
Now’s a good time to say that we bought a combo ticket.
One was for L'Oceanogràfic. The other for the science museum and the third one to “Dario couldn’t remember what it was”. And when Reet was buying the tickets and… didn’t hear the guy well, Reet asked for Dario’s help with buying the tickets.
Dario of course gladly went to the rescue and said:
“We need a combo ticket: Oceonographic, science and the third thing.”
The man ticketeer replied something like: “Yes, Oceonographic, science and the DAGDSFBGFB. When do you want to go? The science takes about 2 hours and the ASFASDF takes 1 hour.
Dario and Reet are smart. They don’t want to wase time and money. So let’s do all that on the same day, they both said.
Now the man tried to explain a bit, but Dario tried to push the man to give us the Frikin tickets already and so he gave it to us.
One ticket said that we could enter at 10:00 and the other said 11:00.
Now we went to the 10:00 one (science museum) at 13:00 and spent a few hours there until it was coming close to 16:00 when a movie, we decided we want to see after a lot of research on what to do and watch in ADSFASDFASFD place, was supposed to start. We did cut the visit short by about 2 hours, I think. We would have wanted to be there for longer, because, well, even Saskia liked it there and there were games and stuff to try out. Definitely should visit for 3 EURs or less and you have children who understand English or Spanish.
Anyway, the ASDFASDF place was a cinema. And for the cinema you have a specific time on the ticket, turns out. Ours was 11:00, but it was now 15:45. I was royally pissed. Why… no-one told me about a choice of movies and the specific time on the ticket when buying the ticket. Then I realised that maybe the ticketeer, on the previous morning, when I wanted to be first to the museum, but was already behind ~50 people, because others were there earlier than we were, wanted to explain all this to me, but I was in too much of a hurry to listen. And thus we saw no movie. Would have been a 3d movie. We haven’t had a 3d TV for a year already ( and hadn’t watched a 3d movie for 3+ years probably). Would have been nice to see one after a while, but what do you do if you’re unlucky like we are (read: when you don’t care about what people are trying to say, because they probably only want to help you). This had no effect what so ever on what we thought about Valencia. Don’t worry.
How would You summarise it, Dario?
So, how to summarise this week with no hiking and no beach in Spain? I must admit that had we stayed there longer, I would have wanted some hiking (beach I have never cared about) and it would have been annoying to get some good hikes there because of the mountains being far away. But, for a week, it was perfect.
The sunset views from our Penthouse, the green park, the old town, the L'Oceanogràfic, they were just great. But most importantly, we didn’t have to buy our drinking water.
Now, this was the first place where the owner said “tap water is drinkable”, so we had been buying water before. But not here, here we didn’t have to. Not because of the tap water being drinkable. This didn’t taste as good as store bought bottled water, for Reet, but because there were water fountains/bottle filling machines at the park, from which we would refill our large water bottles, because they didn’t taste as weird. Did I mention that the park was 20 minutes walking distance from us? Well, it was. Thank god for Emmi and her stroller that we’re totally using as a shopping cart. Reet would often say that others would think that we’re homeless because of the large quantities of stuff down at the “area you put stuff in”.
Compared to Italy and France, our Spain had been great until now. Of course, the theory is: in Spain we had been staying near large Cities not some random god forsaken places that, maybe in the summertime, on some specific days, would be great. Time to change that. Time to go to another place of “why the ARGQERG are we here” called San Javier.
