Valencia is home to a centuries old festival called Las Fallas.

We are going shortly to La Crida, the official opening of the 4 week long event, but in the run up, the city has been getting gradually noisier all day, with periodic loud (LOUD!) fireworks and groups of falleros and their families and friends (and musicians) making their way towards the festival.

Falla is a Valencian word for torch; the essence of the festival is that many elaborate statues are created out of wood, fiber etc., and the best voted on. The best go into a permanent museum collection and the rest are burned in enormous bonfires, and amid huge fireworks displays, at the culminating “Crèma” in mid- March.

Captured a small bit of video of one of the groups :

This is just one of about 10 groups we’ve heard/seen today.

K looking pleased with herself because we found a tiny sidewalk restaurant where the menu del día was both cheap and entirely in Valenciano:

Beer. Sun. And the main courses turned out to be enormous.

There was something quintessentially European about the fact that our table on the sidewalk was wedged up within about 3 inches of two cars, both so tiny that you could almost have parked them on the tabletop.

R deemed his bowl of muesli insufficient for attentive museum going.

Perfect weather and finally less wind. We have both felt extremely tired; one major culprit is the struggle with the infernal Spanish distinction between the pretérito indefinido and the pretérito imperfecto – “the hardest thing in the language” according to la profesora, who is probably only trying to make us feel better. But another culprit is that my “allergies” turn out to be us both having caught colds – me while traveling and K from me. (Last time it was K catching Covid while traveling and me catching it from her. This is better, but still seems to demand 9 hours sleep every night – which I’m getting, and K is trying and failing to get.)(K here. All this is exacerbated by the local heavy use of air freshener and scented laundry detergent, alongside enthusiastic cigarette smokers.)

Lunch was a simple menu del día eaten outside at a local cafe, with our Swiss friend Fabienne.

This afternoon we mastered the bus system well enough to take a 20-minute ride to la playa. Sunny, but a bit of a cool breeze. A few brave people kite-surfing or even swimming, but not many.

We walked a mile or two north on the beach and then all the way back to the residence, about 6 miles through a surprisingly rural area on the edge of the city, followed by modest apartments near the soccer stadium and then a very fancy neighborhood north of the center.

We’ve just stopped at the appropriately named local supermarket, CONSUM, and got ourselves fixings for dinner including a bottle of vermut.

Later – K is cooking something healthy involving chickpeas and spinach, which is a good thing because I’m over here drinking vermut while eating the two delicious local cheeses that the woman at the counter recommended.

Again too tired to write much – a combination of class, homework, walking miles and having a strong spring allergy reaction to something – so this is mainly pictures.

Yesterday a long walk through Parque Turia to the city mega-project that is the Cuidad des Artes y Ciencias. To be explored properly later:

Today between classes I was puzzling over the abundance of interesting street art and the much greater abundance of (some political, mostly not, all pretty ugly and incompetent) graffiti:

For lunch we went to the gorgeous Mercad Central and managed to take away only a few things for lunch, not (as was tempting) everything:

An excellent day, but too tired to think or write much. 4 hours of classes felt – for me anyway (R) – like having a very large new road tunnel built through my head.

The school is in an amazing new building that was built in, on, through and around the ruins of the old “Muro Musselman” that once divided the Muslim quarter from the Christian and Jewish quarters of the city. A beautiful, high-tech, modern facility with lovely interesting classrooms and all the tech you could ask for, but in extraordinary combination with the remains of the old architecture.

After a lunch of last night’s leftovers back at the student residence we did a bit of tareja (homework), then found this corner of el escuela for a sunny reading nook:

Early this evening one of the teachers took us on a windy (it’s been very windy) tour of some València highlights. The city has seven gates and this is the main one:

The sunset colors were gorgeous

Off to bed, but a few bonus pics:

K in the residency kitchen:

These, by the way – sweet laminated pastries dusted in sugar – are fartons:

We crawled out of bed quite late (not used to shutting down bars on Saturday nights!) and made our way outside. Since we’re here for 3 weeks, and spending the first 2 of those in language classes, we decided today would be a non-tourism day to rest and recharge. Started with a traditional Spanish breakfast of tomato, ham, toast and cortado, the top local coffee choice served in a glass.

Walked up to the school building (about 10 minutes from where we’re staying) so we can find it tomorrow when we have to be there early. Then began meandering aimlessly, drifting down alleys, crossing big boulevards, and eventually eating lunch in a small cafeteria. Not brilliant, not terrible, just plain  “milanese” (fried fish / cutlets) served with friendly smiles and patience with our faulty Spanish. Made less serviceable because our waiter spoke Valenciano – “yo soy” sounds something like “shgo jhoy.”

More wandering, this time through the long curving park made from an old river bed that defines the northern edge of the old city. (The river was rerouted decades ago to minimize flooding. A series of huge stone bridges span what are now pools, lawns and bike paths).

Back into the old town, a few grocery stops so that we can manage dinner and breakfast a la casa, and home for naps.

Cooler. Sunshine. The packing puzzle to satisfy Ryanair. Getting to Ryanair. Flying Ryanair. Hello Spain!

Brunch with Clarissa at the Ritz – not that Ritz, but a tiny and very friendly cafe up the street from her house on Chiswick High Street. Students, families, large tattooed lorry drivers, all crammed into a space maybe 300 feet square – it feels like a microcosm of the city. Coffee, eggs with Heinz baked beans, fried tomatoes, toast and bubble and squeak – all for about eight quid, a steal by London standards. No doubt it would have been fifty each, and much less friendly, at that other Ritz. The man who runs the place is so nice, and I want to write a review saying “Is this possibly the best breakfast in London?”

Afterwards, a lovely sunny walk down along the river towards Barnes Bridge.

And then the odyssey of getting from SW London to Stansted, which is quite a long way north of NE London – oy. Long tube ride. Can’t work out where to catch bus. Walk nearly a mile in wrong direction, then back. Still in time, but bus never shows (and is, as we discover later, running an hour late behind an accident). Share an Uber with two equally stranded Chinese women and, having paid in advance for the bus tickets, get to the airport well over budget but on time. Thousands of people packed shoulder to shoulder in the terminal.

Quite tasty food at a surprisingly authentic-feeling Lebanese restaurant in the terminal – at which, ok, our server was Romanian, but funny and sweet – then joined the scrum  waiting to board.

Amazing how many places Ryanair cuts costs–paper-thin seats, no seatback pockets, no free beverage service, extra short seat belt straps, but we made it nearly on time with all our luggage.

Taxied to our student residence hall (lovely) and ran back out the door to try to find something small to eat. At nearly 1am, even Spain was calling it quits, so we ended up with a very light “meal” served by a delightful Frenchman who hugged and kissed us as he booted us out at closing time.

It somehow seemed like an appropriate start to two weeks in student housing.

On the way across St James’s Park we passed Horse Guards Parade just as the guard was changing:

We were headed for the National Portrait Gallery, which is a  favorite place for me (R) and one Kerry really wanted to visit. But first we had to refuel in The Crypt under St Martin in the Fields, and then do a quick stop at the National Gallery – same building as NPG – so that I could visit van Eyck’s mysterious Arnolfini portrait, which I’ve been reading about. Alas a scrum –

but a chance for a quick visit to some other nearby masterpieces like this:

And so to the NPG, and some visits for what feel to me like old friends:

And just possibly my favorite object in the entire place, this astonishing plaster bust of the writer Colley Cibber, done almost 300 years ago now by Benjamin Rackstrow. Cibber was said to be one of the wittiest and most charming men of the 18th century; I can stare at this indefinitely, with the sense that he is on the very point of catching my eye and offering some surprising, mildly acidic comment on the times.

Afterwards we walked back past Buckingham Palace to the Tube, with a chill threat of sleet in the air, and home for dinner with Clarissa, Adam and Ella.

And from K, a few bonus pics

Thursday: an eclectic day, combining visits to the Vagina Museum (yes really), the Mithraeum (the ruin of a Roman temple), and the Silver Vaults.

The first stop involved taking a long Tube ride to Whitechapel, in the heart of old working class East London. There are now large, relatively recent immigrant communities here and it’s immediately striking how many women are wearing hijabs or niqabs compared to other areas of the city. The street markets are also full of delicious fruits and vegetables that we couldn’t identify. Definitely still a relatively poor area but with hints of “bougie-fication” – cafes, hipster clothes shops etc. Down a grotty looking alley under a railway line –

there’s a row of businesses built in under the railway arches, including –

We always try to visit unusual museums and this definitely fit the bill. Its origin is especially amusing for us – see text below –

because we only discovered it after discovering that in Iceland a month from now we’ll be staying near, yes, the Penis Museum that started it all.

The museum is smaller and less robust than we’d expected (it is relatively new, just a few hundred square feet, and relies upon crowdsourced funding), but occupies a place between activism and art. The name itself is activism– as they point out, nearly half of all parents only use euphemisms when talking to their daughters about their genetalia.

Features include an exhibit on menopause and one about how different cultures talk (or don’t) about women’s health. My favorite image was a reproduction of a woodcut illustrating a 17th century poem about a woman ridding their island of a demon by showing him the “wound” her oh so strong and threatening husband could inflict upon the demon. Struck with horror, the demon flees, never to return.

From the activism side, there was a copy of a modern tampon book from Germany. These “books,”  containing 15 tampons, were published to reduce the tax burden of buying period products: until recently, menstrual products were taxed at 19% while books were taxed at 7%.

From here we refueled at an exceedingly hipster sandwich shop (Rogue Sarnies would be completely at home in Portland) and then walked several miles down to the Mithraeum. I (K) really need a bright orange t-shirt that says “tourist” in large letters–I was so busy looking around that I was a complete menace to car and bike traffic.

The Mithraeum, a Roman temple to Mithras, was uncovered during construction of Bloomberg’s headquarter building. It apparently sat uncovered in the car park for years, until they decided to move it into the basement of the building for conservation. Now, partially reconstructed and housed in a darkened room, you partake of the temple “experience” through the judicious use of light shined through haze to create the impression of ghostly walls.

Upstairs there is a wall covered in artifacts uncovered during the construction of the building. It is remarkable to see a nearly perfect shoe worn by a Roman soldier in the first century AD.

Outside the building we admired the art installation evoking the Walbrook River which ran through London during Roman times.

We walked on, through increasing rain, past the Duke of Wellington outside the Bank of England –

to the Silver Vaults. Originally built in the 1880s as a non-bank safe depository for rich people’s prized possessions, it morphed over time into a secure space for silver dealers, especially during WWII as space potentially protected from bombing.

Now it is an Aladin’s cave of all things gloriously silver, from spoons, to tea sets, to menorahs, to elaborate sailing ships. One favorite: special tongs for eating asparagus one spear at a time.

Back out to discover the rain really coming down and decided we should take the bus home rather than the tube so we could appreciate the city views. It was a nice idea that failed – an hour at near walking pace in a not-warm sauna.