Valencia, Pt. II

So the conference ended on Friday. By Friday night I felt like I might be coming down with something, so I bailed on plans to go to Madrid with my roommate. (I had never met her before we decided to share a room. She turned out to be a smart, sarcastic, bossy, hilarious woman who ordered me around all week. Being put in my place by a woman half my size produced a sort of bemused yes-ma'am behavior. I suppose this is informative.)

So I slept, and then Saturday met up with Alex P, now a friend. (I ran into him earlier in the week when he was panicking seriously about his talk, and dragged him to a deserted room for a couple of practice runs – of such thing are academic bonds formed.) So we had Saturday to explore Valencia, as my flight left rather early Sunday.

Neither of us was feeling beach-y, me because I didn't have gear, and Alex because he had too much (a very, very nice camera). So we went through the science museum at the City of Arts and Sciences, which is composed of buildings that seem to be largely empty. The architecture is of interest, but mostly for viewing from outside. The museum is neat.

We didn't even know about Gulliver! I actually recognized him before we found a sign! (What we saw vs. Gulliver from above.) The little ropes hanging off him are climbing ropes for children, and climbing they were, which makes the overall effect very Gulliverian.

Then we went to the center of old Valencia and just... wandered. We saw the central square, the cathedral, and lots of random cityscape. A nice dinner was had, and many photos were taken – unfortunately, mostly not by me. Traveling with someone with a nice camera makes you lazy.

Many of the pictures I did take were just of ornate, interesting buildings. Lots of random apartment buildings in Valencia (and, y'know, the rest of Europe (and Asia)) that would be some historic monument in the States. This isn't even the most interesting face of the cathedral, just the least blurry.

We went to see the Cathedral. It was closed by the time we got there, but there were a number of floats being set up for some kind of festival that weekend, some of them amazingly ornate.

Most of the floats had neither dragons nor eagles, but c'mon, did you really want to see those?

I didn't see flamenco dancers. :-( I wanted to, but it runs very late (as in, the dinner starts at 9pm). Actually, from what I saw, Spain runs very late.  People stay out eating and drinking until 3 a.m. during the week. I don't know when they sleep. Maybe people really do sleep for three hours at midday? The conference schedule was not arranged to make this possible for me.

So that's all I did in Valencia! Pretty boring for how long this post is. Next up:  Back to Munich!