la vida valenciana

I have a feeling that weekends here are going to seem very long.  When I woke up on Saturday it felt like Sunday, probably because after being done with classes at 1 pm on Friday I had that entire day free as well.  


I realized that people here go to the beach all the time.  Numerous times I have taken the elevator downstairs with people all excited to spend the day at the beach.  It seems like it will be beach-weather here for a very long time, but as far as I'm concerned my beach-going ended in August.  I'm still on schedule with the Wisconsin seasons, and I feel like it should be fall and I'm done dealing with sunscreen and sand.  I do like that it is pretty much the perfect temperature after about 8 pm here, but during the day it is like July in Wisconsin.  

The Valencian beach was very pretty, and only about a 25 minute bus ride from where I live.  There are lots of little marketplace tents that have an overwhelming amount of jewelry, clothes, beach accessories, watches, and shoes.  Vendors walk around and try to get us to buy massages, sunglasses, or anything that they happen to be carrying.  I probably won't be going there again unless I really can't find anything better to do in the city, which is unlikely.  I tend to just get sunburned at the beach, although the SPF 50 that I got from my host mother seems to be doing its job.  


Friday night our group had a night out to celebrate the start of the program, we went to a place in el barrio carmen (which is where a lot of clubs and nightlife are) called Corona 15.  I walked there with a friend and we had an interesting experience trying to follow my map through the twisty, narrow streets of downtown Valencia.  A lot of the streets are really short and end with one direction for you to turn, and the longer streets change names every block.  So one long street could have like 4 or 5 names, which makes it extremely confusing looking at a map and trying to find the hidden street signs which are on the actual buildings and not the streets.  They are also usually written in Valencian, which is slightly different than the Spanish on my map.  We saw the scariest looking cat perched on a brick wall on one tiny street, it stared us down and followed us with its eyes as we walked by.  

The Club was an interesting place- it had a couple pillars that were designed as trees, and the branches were the ceiling with lights strung between them that changed colors.  They played mostly American music (Spanish favorites such as Lady GaGa and the Black Eyed Peas), but also a few Spanish songs thrown in the mix.  


Back to Saturday, after the beach a couple friends and myself walked back downtown in search of a tapas bar- not a very difficult task in Valencia.  We stumbled upon a beautiful structure called El Mercado de Colón, which is basically a collection of tapas bars inside a structure with a roof but open sides.  We didn't eat there but we did find somewhere else close by that was pretty inexpensive.  I had some type of ice cream that I picked randomly off the menu, but turned out to be delicious.  It had cinnamon and nutmeg on the top and tasted kind of like vanilla, except better.