I made this blog some time ago mainly because I wanted to keep a “log” (yeah, programmer…) of my World Conquer Status (you can also read this as traveling). Of course, I didn’t manage until now to post anything about my recent trips. I would prefer to state that I was very busy, but the truth is a combination of half-busy, half-lazy, half-me :) On short, I visited UK in late November (this is will be covered in a separate post), and Spain in the Winter Holiday.
I decided to go to Valencia in August. Yeap, this is like 5 months before. Some of you might consider this decision a bit too early, I just considered it way cheaper than booking later. So here we are leaving Iasi on 28 December. Iulia and me we’re in our way to Valencia, and we were lucky enough to share our train experience and airport waiting time with my friends Cristi and Raluca, that were going to Austria. The train experience was something extraordinary. Some curiously looking guy talked (more like screamed) like 4 hours on the mobile phone, calling all the relatives and speaking on the very Becalish tone. At some point I was thinking this is a new kind of advertising for mobile phone companies (I think many people were curious what was the price plan he was using). Anyway, after some walks in Bucharest, we headed happily to the airport. We were just in time, but too bad our plane was not. We left like 5 hours later than planed, and from Otopeni, not Baneasa as planned. I will take this opportunity to offer a generous thank you to WizzAir, which made all this possible. With a lot of luck, we reached Valencia after midnight. The first good sign was the weather, like 20-30 degrees more than in Bucharest. We took a cab to the hotel, and went directly to sleep.
Valencia is a lovely city. They invested a lot in tourism in the last years. There are many attractions to consider, especially the old city, that is full of churches, old monuments and very tall and imposing guard towers. Another very popular attraction is the City of Arts and Science, a very big complex that includes Spain’s biggest museum, an IMAX cinema that resides in a hemisphere, world’s second opera house (as size) and Europe’s largest aquarium. To visit the complex you need almost 2 days, considering you don’t want to read all the plates, or take part in any activity.
We first visited the museum of Principe Felipe. The building is huge, and the concept is the opposite of the usual “Please don’t touch”. You are allowed to touch anything, and you can really interact with lot of stuff there, making the stay really interactive. For example you can play with some pressured air generator to produce waves in a recipient or try to drive a wind-powered boat. The only thing that really annoyed me was some sort of tests to determine if you are good to be a spy – there was some machine that was scanning some brain centers to determine if some photos bring back memories. I don’t know how that stuff worked, but both Iulia and me had a head-ache for some hours after :)
After the museum, we were just in time to watch a movie at IMAX. This was no ordinary IMAX cinema, but one that had the screen on a hemisphere. There was no need for special glasses because of this – basically you were standing like 70 degrees on the back, looking above. We saw a nice movie about the Alps that was truly great. A barely wait to try another IMAX in my trips.
In the second day we visited the Oceanografic. The aquarium is huge, and is divided on geographical areas – Mediterranean, Arctic, Antarctic, Indian, etc. There was also a dolphin show and a bird sector (here I managed to take the World’s Best Picture of a Duck). Walking all the path of the aquarium took like 5 hours – this includes walks in underwater tunnels and the view is great. We only had time to visit a nice exhibition about Titanic that evening.
For the rest of the days we managed to follow all the recommended path in Lonely Planet guide (very valuable resource by the way), and see everything is was to see in Valencia: starting with the Jardins del Turia (some parks made on the old river bed of Turia – now the rivers is redirected to the south), the Cathedral (building was stared somewhere near 1200), the Central Market (one of the largest market in Europe, build in Modernist style) and finishing with the nice visit to the Mediterranean Sea.
Is interesting that Valencia has a huge network of subway trains, which run from center to all the suburban villages, and even to the airport. Also, the people are very nice, food and accommodation is cheap (one typical meal varies between 8 and 20 Euros). Compared to Seville, that I visited last year, the only thing I missed was Sangria, that is seems is not so popular here, as it was in Andalucía. Anyway, I saw a lot of nice things, and get a well-deserved time off.
Our next destinations will include Tenerife (this summer) – Spanish island situated in the Canary Islands, close to Sahara, 1000 km South of Spain, and hopefully in Winter 2009 Tromso, so we can see the Aurora Borealis.
More pictures are
here.
