Study Abroad
Day 62
March 20th, 2006
6:34PM

I am sick. I was doing so well, too. It’s basically inevitable here—a real breeding ground for germs. I blame Danielle, she infected me.

This weekend, as I mentioned before, we went to Valencia for “las Fallas.” We had a 7:00AM flight on Friday morning, so we took the bus to Madrid Thursday night after dinner and made our way to the airport. While it’s really nice that the Madrid airport is connected to the Metro, it still takes a good hour or more to get there. It was about 1:30 in the morning before we were at the airport, checked-in, through security (who laughed at us for being the only ones in the airport) and had claimed our benches to sleep on for the night.

I can only assume that Amy, who never sleeps, got bored at 5:30 in the morning and that is why she woke Danielle and I up to walk the 30 feet to the gate. Truly, I will never know. But in the end, I got only a few hours of sleep, punctuated by the P.A. system yelling at full volume that this airport does not make boarding calls (then why make the announcement???)

The flight was short and smooth. We were off the plane and down the stairs by 8 AM, where we got ourselves a cab to our hotel. Danielle and Amy had booked the hotel online a few weeks ago. The description said “15 minutes from Valencia’s city center.” And it was. If we’d had a car. The cab driver asked us as he drove if we were in town for las Fallas. We said we were. And, when he dropped us off in front of our hotel we realized why he was laughing at us. Our lovely hotel squatted on the side of the highway, surrounded on all sides by factories and nothing else. Not even a grocery store.

Luckily, we were able to check-in to the hotel right away. Because we’d booked a two-person room for the three of us, we had to maneuver a bit to get all of us and our bags in undetected. Either we are really skilled or the hotel guy didn’t care, because we had no problem. Our hotel room was nice, with two pretty big beds pushed together and a beautiful bathroom. We decided it was time for a nap.

When we woke up we decided we had to deal with the problem of our location. None of us were too keen to take an expensive cab ride into Valencia to see any of the Fallas action. Plus Danielle had been sick with suspected tonsillitis all week and wasn’t feeling great anyway. I went downstairs to ask the hotel guy if there was any other way to get into Valencia without a car. I wanted to hug him when he told us that there was a train in the next town over that left for Valencia every 15 minutes. If we could walk there (about 2 miles) then we’d be set. I brought the joyful news upstairs to Danielle and Amy, and we made our plan.

We set out on our walk to find this train station in Benifaio. With map-savvy Amy as our guide, we didn’t even get that lost and got on the train without a problem. Friday isn’t the main day of las Fallas, but there were still a lot of people walking around Valencia. We picked up a schedule and walked around trying to find a place to eat. The place we found was a score—we took advantage of Valencia’s seaside location and ate shrimp, calamari and some sort of whitefish that kind of freaked me out. Someday I will be able to eat seafood without getting hysterical. Somday.

While we ate the weather started to get a lot colder. None of us, in anticipation of the beachy Valencia we’d been promised, had put on a jacket, so we decided to take the trip back to the hotel to get our jackets then come back for the fireworks show that night. We decided to take a rest for about an hour before heading out again, but in the end decided to stay in because Danielle really did need her rest. So Danielle slept and Amy and I tried to find something on the T.V. that we could understand (the channels were in French, German, Portuguese, Gallego and whatever language they speak in Valencia—I still have to look into it). In the end we settled on “Crossing Jordan” in Spanish. Just like the Americans, the Spanish love their crime shows. Their prime time is filled with shows like “Alias,” “The Closer” and such.

In the morning we headed for Valencia on the train again, this time hoping to make the fireworks display. We did make it in time, but discovered there was no way you’d be in a place to see anything unless you’d camped out the night before. So we just allowed ourselves to be swallowed by the crowd in the street and listened to the crashes of hundreds of firecrackers exploding in the main square.

After escaping the mob, we walked around the crowded streets to see what we came to see—the Fallas. The idea of Fallas, we learned, was to comment on the events of the past year. They burn them at the end of the weekend as a symbol of moving on to the next year. They are sculptures many stories high of papier-mâché, I think, and they take up entire squares. You’ll just have to see pictures.

For lunch I had my first Doner Kebab experience. There’s a huge chain of Turkish restaurants here which make these gyro-like things which I now dream of nightly. Danielle says they’re probably the first thing we’ve eaten here with flavor, and I agree. I ate half for lunch and half for dinner. We definitely had a second one before leaving for the airport on Sunday.

Our next order of business, after meeting up with Morgan and Katherine, was to see something we’d watched on the local TV station the night before—the flower offering. All day long the Valencianos dress in traditional costumes and carry big bouquets of flowers to the square behind the cathedral. There are people of all ages, from little old ladies to babies with pacifiers being pushed in strollers. The flowers are then thrown up to men balancing on a huge shell of the Virgin and each stem is pushed into the holes. Over the course of the weekend, thousands and thousands of flowers are offered and they begin to form the pattern on the Virgin’s dress.

Danielle had had about enough by this point, so we said adios to the other girls and headed back to the hotel, where we had a “hotel party.” This consisted of a bottle of Sprite, some CNN and The Simpsons in Spanish, Danielle falling asleep and me reading some more Harry Potter. Good times.

We got up in the morning, checked out of the hostel, took our last 2-mile hike to the train station and said goodbye to Amy, who was staying another day so she could watch the Fallas burn. Danielle and I caught our flight back to Madrid after spending a little too much time in the small Valencia airport, and were back in Toledo, exhausted, in time for dinner. I chatted a bit with the fam on GoogleTalk, discovered quickly that I had caught Danielle’s tonsillitis and went to bed.