So we're over four weeks and four countries behind on the blogging. Maybe it was all that cheap Spanish wine/sangria that killed our motivation, but now we're back at it and are going to try and catch up with a few mega posts. Here's a breakdown of the rest of our first leg in Spain.
VALENCIA
We liked Valencia alright. I think where we stayed put a damper on the stop, since we mistakenly stayed in the center of town which happened to be the high-end touristy shopping area and was not really our scene (and made finding good/cheap food more challenging). But once we got out of this Union Squaresque center and wandered the surrounding neighborhoods and parks we began to appreciate it a lot more.
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| Plaza de la Reina |
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| Ceiling of the Mercado Central |
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| Mercado Central |
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| Silk Exchange |
The highlight of Valencia for us was the street art. The street art is all over and it was the best street art we've seen so far. Here are a few of our favorites:
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| Stop War Victim’s Wall by Fasim |
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| mural by Escif to the left and Blu's Moses to the right |
Another highlight was Jardi del Turia, which is a narrow and long park that stretches half the length of the city, and has a soccer fields, running track, gardens, bridges, and some amazing playgrounds.
The most amazing playground we'll probably ever see is Parque Gulliver, which is a huge and made in the shape of a giant from Gulliver's Travels. The playground/giant is so massive that you can't get even half of it in a good single shot, and have to settle on trying to conveying it through each of its various limbs.
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| Gulliver's head. See the slide in the hair. |
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| Gulliver's Arm |
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| Poor Gulliver's leg and shoe. |
And although we didn't make it into the City of Arts and Sciences we still got to checkout it's impressive outside.
Valencia is also famous for its food. We made sure that we tried some of their most famous dishes and drinks, including paella, fideua, horchata, farton, agua de Valencia, and of course a steady supply of sangria.
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| Paella - rice, saffron, rabbit, snails, green beans, white beans |
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| horchata and farton |
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GRANADA
Aside from having the most chocolately good ice cream of Joel's life the obvious highlight of Granada was the Alhambra, which we thought lived up to the hype. It is Spain's most visited site and online tickets sell out weeks in advance, so the people that are winging it like us have to wake up super early to wait in an absurdly long line to try and get tickets for that day. We barely got our tickets, but we did get them. So take note: if you ever go to the Alhambra be sure to buy your tickets online wayy ahead of time. And if you don't get tickets before and have to go in the morning like us then don't wait in the super long line: go around the corner and wait in a shorter long line to buy them at the machines.
Anyways we we're pretty burned out when we got to Granada so we didn't see a ton of sights, but here's a photo dump of what we did see in the beautiful city of Granada.
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| That's the Alhambra atop the hill to the left and the city of Granada out below it |
We trekked up to the Sacromonte neighborhood, which is famous for its Giatano community (i.e. Romani, i.e. Gypsy) and the white walled cave homes that they carved out of the hillside.
And then there, of course, was the Alhambra. It's a massive complex with many different sections: palaces, ramparts, gardens, towers, halls, baths, etc. It was originally built as a fortress in the 9th century then abandoned until a Moorish king built it up into a palace in the 13th century. After the Moors were expelled Christian kings made a few additions, until it was again abandoned for another couple centuries and only used by squatters. It wasn't until the 19th century that it was again re-discovered and restored for us to wait in line to see.
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| the tip of the Alhambra with Granada below |
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| Even when you see it in person the detail is pretty hard to comprehend |
And then finally there was that ice cream cone. It was basically a dark chocolate bar transformed into a very generous scoop of ice cream resting atop one perfect cone. I woke up the next day with a chocolate hangover but it was so worth it.
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RONDA
Thanks for this one Rick Steves! We wouldn't have gone to this little city of 30,000 if we hadn't watched that
Rick Steves episode a year of so ago and jotted down the name. But Ronda; how we loved Ronda. We stayed in a great little apartment right in the middle of town, with excellent wifi, and just relaxed for a few days. We watched some tv shows, made some BURRITOS!!!!!!! and drank a lot of wine and Sangria. And when we felt like it we also did some exploring of the magical city of Ronda.
It's a very old city that sits at the top of a scenic narrow
canyon. The canyon divides the city into two sections, the old Moorish
section (with the old city wall, Arab baths, and water mine) and the new
town (with the main restaurants/shopping, train station, and one of the oldest bull
fighting rings in Spain).
Here are some pictures of a long aimless hike that we went on in the trails below the town.
Museo Lara is a cool little private museum of one man's random collection of historic items. It has everything from erotic pipes, to 'mermaids', to torture devices used during the Inquisition.
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| 7 barreled gun, supposedly made for ship captains to stop mutinies |
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| Erotic pipes |
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| This was a terrible inbred man that was so awful that a witch had to turn him into a toad |
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| Iron maiden! |
The Moors used to use chains of slaves to bring water up from way down in the canyon up to the city through these water mines.
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| The gardens at the water mines had peacocks walking around |
Back in the Moorish day people returning or visiting from outside had to bath when returning to the city, so large baths were built at the entrance of the city wall.
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| Arab Baths |
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| Arab city wall |
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| Arab city wall |
And here's the historic bullring, where the modern rules of bullfighting were established.
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| Plaza outside the bullring overlooking the valley |
Orson Welles and Ernest Hemmingway both loved Ronda, and they now both have streets named after them. Welles loved it so much that he had his ashes scattered there after his death.
If you're ever in southern Spain and aren't in too much of a rush then check it out. Easily one of the highlights of the trip for us.
