Viaje a Valencia y más

Vale, este fin de semana pasado fui con el ISA a la ciudad de Valencia y hablaré sobre esta visita un poco. El sábado nos fuimos muy temprano a Valencia por bus y casi a la mitad del viaje paramos para tomar una excursión en el río en un barco. Entonces, comemos paella valenciana, un plato muy delicioso y típico en Valencia. Paella (si vosotros no sabéis) es un plato de arroz con muchos otros ingredientes como gambas, calamares, y pollo pero puede tener diferentes combinaciones. Después de comer, iban por bus otra vez hasta llegando a Valencia donde tuvimos una gira de toda la ciudad. Luego, dimos un paseo de la ciudad vieja con una guía de turismo y aprendimos mucho del pasado de la ciudad. También, nuestro guía nos mostró algunos lugares buenos para cenar y mis amigos y yo cenamos a un restaurante con comida buenísima. Un poco más tarde había un gran espectáculo de fuegos artificiales (estos también son muy importante en Valencia) muy cerca de nuestro hotel. El día siguiente visitamos el acuario de Valencia que es el acuario más grande de toda Europa y era increíble! Había muchos animales acuáticos como tiburones y peces muy grandes pero también había ballenas, morsas y un espectáculo de delfines. Mis favoritas eran los morsas porque no había ver morsas nunca y eran gigantescos y muy cómicos también. Al final de mi tiempo en Valencia fuimos a la playa y era muy bonita.

Alright so besides talking about Valencia (y en castellano aún!), I’ll try to answer your questions and give you a little more understanding into how the day-to-day goes when studying abroad in Barcelona (I’ll try to answer as much as I can but it’ll have to be a bit from each class).

First of all, siesta: for those of you who might not know, siesta is the daily rest that Spaniards participate in from about 2-5 pm every day. I thought it was pretty widespread here (if you go out during that time it’s pretty rare to find many shops open) but in Valencia there was nearly nothing open during those hours and I’ve heard that in the south most parts of Spain the cities literally shut down during siesta. I personally would love to participate but most of the time I’m either in class or doing homework so I don’t get too many chances.

The night life here, though, is so much different than siesta. It’s a little strange because real “night life,” like clubs and bars and such starts at like 12:30 or 1 am here and usually goes until a bit before dawn. A really popular thing to do is to go out and at about 5:30 or 6 am get chocolate con churros with friends but unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to experience this yet. My favorite thing that I’ve done so far at night was going out during La Mérce, a huge festival where there were tons of free concerts and great stuff to do all night for about four days in a row. I think nights like these generally result in the intense siestas the next days because people still seem to get up at reasonable times in the morning.

On a different topic (question based), I haven’t witnessed too many outright weird things but the weirdest by far was seeing a guy, in the middle of the day, pull down his pants and pee out into the street. I don’t want to give the wrong impression and say this is common but I talked to some other people and I’m not the only one that’s seen something like this so I guess it’s not completely unheard of. Also, you guys asked about my host mom and discipline. Well, there really isn’t any. I don’t have a curfew and I don’t think she could really like ground me or anything but perhaps if I did something awful she could report me to ISA and get me in trouble that way.

Alright this is getting a bit long (which apparently you guys don’t mind) so I’ll have to cut it off here-ish. As far as your other questions, I’m actually having a visitor this weekend and we’re definitely going to places like Parc Güell and the Olympic areas so I’ll devote some space to those places next time. Also, not near the stadium but futbol is huge here and I’ll explain that next time. So bye for now hope you enjoyed the blog and I should have another for you guys by next week.