This past weekend, (March 17th-19th) a few friends and I decided to take a trip back to the Mediterranean! We just loved it so much the first time and we couldn't get enough of it! :)
This time we traveled a little bit further south than Barcelona/Sitges, and we went to Valencia, Spain's paella capital! Every year, Valencia hosts what's called "Las Fallas" (lahs fayas) between the 15th and 19th of March. I didn't know much about this festival before coming to Spain, but I definitely learned a lot once I got to Valencia! Las Fallas is a great celebration in honor of San Jose (Saint Joseph), patron of the carpenters. Anyway, the city of Valencia is the 3rd largest city in Spain, and during Las Fallas, it doubles in population! Let me tell you, there sure were a TON of people visiting for the festival!
Las Fallas - you're definitely asking yourself what that even means. Technically, it translates to "the failures" but let me tell you this weekend and festival was anything BUT a failure. The fallas themselves are grand displays of creativity and talent. They are huge floats, if you will, that people decorate and create out of paper maché, wood, mold-able polystyrene and paint according to a theme they have chosen. They then work on them all year long, starting the day after last year's celebrations end, only to have them be burnt down at the festival. We're talking serious business...some of these fallas cost over 900,000 € and are about 30 meters high! (The tallest was constructed in 2007 and was 32 meters tall.)
Here are some photos of the fallas that we saw this year in Valencia:
Each Falla has a different theme, and some are just made to be fun! Some of them critique society, we saw a few that had funny satirical concepts of them about the social security and some of the financial issues the country is going through. They're really beautiful, and absolutely amazing to see.
This is one of my favorite photos - that awkward moment when you get your braces stuck in something you probably shouldn't have had in your mouth to start with! We've all been there! :)
They're literally placed all throughout the city - on almost every street you can find another falla, especially in the heart of the old city. We stayed in a hostel in a nearby suburb of Valencia called Burjassot, and there were even fallas in our town!
Anyway, now that you get the gist of the fallas, I'll tell you all about our wonderful weekend in Valencia! Well, it started late Friday (the 16th) at night. Three of us took a bus from Valladolid to Madrid that left at 9:30 and arrived at midnight. Our next bus left Madrid at 1am with an arrival time of 5:15am. However, when we got to the buses outside of the Madrid bus station, ready to board, 2 of us couldn't find our bus! It was supposed to be bus #1, but it didn't exist! There was a fleet of about 5 buses heading towards Valencia leaving at 1am, but alas, #1 was no where to be found. After asking countless people, one kind man finally told us our tickets were for Friday (the 16th) at 1am!!! We forgot to take into account that our bus tickets should have been for the 17th at 1am!! (The date changes after midnight..of course! Why didn't we think of that?!) We sprinted to the ticket counter with 5 minutes to spare, managed to purchase new tickets, and sprinted back to the buses to make it on time! Our weekend had already proved to be...exciting, at least!
We arrived in Valencia at 5:15am, after quite the bus ride. My friend Gretchen was on a separate bus, and Katie and I sat next to each other on our bus ride...we got about 1 hour of sleep! So...we all thought it would be really neat to watch the sun rise over the beach! From the bus station, we started walking towards the beach..or so we thought! None of us had maps, so we were walking from bus stop to bus stop, using the city maps mounted on the stops! After about 20 minutes of walking, we realized we were going the complete opposite way of the beach! So we turned around, and kept walking. We found some Fallas yet that night, and also a lot of people just going home from the night's festivities...but after a ton of walking...we found the beach. The only bummer was..it was 10:30am!! We walked for about 4 hours to find the beach! (This did include, however, a stop at a café to get some coffee and a croissant for breakfast, as well as using their bathroom to freshen up!) At this point, the zipper on my pants broke - I figured that it was going to be a day devoted to Murphy's Law...and I was not let down...just wait!
We were all exhausted, slap happy, and ready to lay down for a bit. After romping in the Mediterranean, we layed on the beach. Boy did it feel good to give my feet a rest! We had 4 more people getting into Valencia at 1:20pm Saturday, so we headed back to the bus station (metro this time!) and met them. We decided to check into our hostel, so we took the metro to Burjassot (the suburb of Valencia where we stayed) and attempted to find our hostel. We literally walked around for several hours trying to find this place. We split up, looking for it...it was no where to be found! So one of the groups headed into a bar to ask some people, and turns out, we were literally walking around the block with our hostel on it the whole time. Great! So, it was turning out to be an interesting weekend, to say the least.
Finding the hostel was heaven, because it was the nicest hostel I've stayed in to date. It's right next to a campus, and we think it's a building of dorm rooms, but when they have extras they rent them out like a hostel. We had 7 people in 3 different rooms, both with 2 beds. Each room had a spacious bathroom, a fridge, and a kitchen area! That night we planned Sunday and Monday, and got dinner, and hung out until I fell asleep and broke up the party...leave it to me to fall asleep sitting on the floor leaning up against our closet!
The next morning we explored the city of Valencia - we packed a lunch and headed out towards the center of the city. We saw some more fallas, and lots of the city. We found their Plaza de Toros (bullfighting ring), train station, and cathedral. The city is also surrounded by a sunken park that used to be a river. Since then it has dried up and converted into a huge park, complete with bridges, fountains, orange trees, palm trees, and cherry blossom trees!  |
| Look at the SWEET tree we found!! |
Check it out!
The eye shaped building below is called L'Hemisféric and it holds an IMAX theatre and a planetarium. It was built with the shape of an eye on purpose, due to it's devotion to movies and astronomy!
Here's one more photo of the architecture I think you'll really appreciate!
I plan on printing it and hanging it in a frame when I get home - shoot, I plan on doing that with a LOT of photos I've been taking! Enjoy!
We also enjoyed the beach on Sunday - however it was extremely windy so sand was everywhere..absolutely EVERYWHERE.Well, I'm going to keep writing about my weekend in Valencia, but we did so much, I can't fit it into the blog! It's telling me I'm overloading it with photos and data, so I will finish up my weekend in Valencia in a second blog entry...
to be continued.... :)
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