Valencia I Love You

Plaza del Ayuntamiento, Valencia, Spain

Arriving in Valencia felt like a homecoming to me. This came probably from nearly 2 years of once living in Spain. Baby Girl after all was made-in-Jaén.

Plaza del Ayuntamiento

I have brought too much warm clothing to Valencia. The city was so hot (average 25-27°C) we nearly died of heat stroke in our down jackets and turtlenecks. Anyway Valencia, Spain has become even better since the last time I visited. This city knows how to maintain its old world charms and move forward at the same time. It is even more beautiful than I remembered it.

In the metro

I booked my favourite hotel in the old town : Husa Reina Victoria****. It is housed in an old 1913 stone building just next to the beautiful Plaza del Ayuntamiento, 5 minutes' walk from the RENFE train station and "Xativa" MetroValencia station, and another few minutes from the shopping streets in Colon. From the airport to the old town it took us only 25 minutes on the metro and 1 euro each. What a change from Modena. And the hotel has quite a decent buffet breakfast spread if a bit on the steep side costwise.

Husa Reina Victoria (View outside and from the room)

As the kids are now older, I decided to march them to most places we wanted to visit. There is no better way to visit a city than to walk through it. And Valencia is candy to the eye as the old town contains so many beautiful buildings most of them quite nicely restored. I took pictures as we went along though we stopped short at visiting museums since there was already so much to do and the Babies had priority. It was after all their vacation.

A few buildings in the old city

The Turia river used to run through the city to meet the Mediterranean sea. But after a catastrophic flood in 1957 it has since been diverted and is now a dry riverbed filled with jogging and cycling tracks, ponds, gardens, playgrounds, cafés, climbing walls, football fields, Music Hall...and of course the famous City of the Arts and Sciences. We visited this modern futuristic city over 2 days which meant that the kids walked a total of 4 hours just to visit its wonders. They complained alot, but just the walk through the Turia Gardens, according to me, was well worth it.

General Post Office inside and out

As I had feared, trying to speak Spanish after Italian was tough - at the beginning. But by the end of the first evening it was starting to come back to me and slowly I started to get a bit of the vocabulary and then the verb conjugations back into circulation. It helped that the hotel provided us with free newspapers in Spanish daily and I tried to read 2 different ones (e.g. La Razon and ABC) everyday.

Shopping shopping shopping

The 2 streets near the hotel

Where we were there were loads of restaurants and boutiques though unfortunately the children were not keen on eating the famous paella valenciana and we ended up eating fastfood or taking away empanadillas and cream puffs from the wonderful local bakeries. But I made a mental note to revisit the paella in my own kitchen soon.

Empanadillas and Mini-Quiches from Pastry Shop near Hotel

I have missed having breakfast in the local Spanish bars. You eat standing at the counter and they usually have good sandwiches, cakes and pastries (though still not French standards). My favourite is toast with fresh tomato puree and olive oil. Almost like bruschetta only they have it for breakfast. Or churros the old way.

The Spanish like their Marzipan

Hub goes to Valencia in 2 weeks for Ferrari's Finali Mondiali. This year it will not be held in Mugello and we do not see any point in having the whole family travel to Valencia again just for it. I think I would prefer to travel to Bologna to catch Jimmy Choo's collection for H&M (*wink*). It would be launched worldwide on Nov 14.