valencia

welcome to the home of paella. now you know why i came here.  although i gotta tell you, mr. rick (steves) does NOT have any descriptions about valencia in his SPAIN 2011 guidebook which was a big letdown.  i mean, who leaves out the birthplace of paella?  clearly he doesn't have his priorities straight.

pert and i arrived very early in the morning and made our way to the hostel before heading out to explore a little on our own.  we were in a very centrally located part of town which was nice.  we walked to the mercato central which is a market with tons of fresh fruit/veggies/meat for the locals to shop in.  that's the thing i love about their markets here...people actually do their shopping in them.  it's a shame pike place is such a tourist trap back in seattle.  any way, i've noticed that the markets in spain are all very clean which is a nice change from the asian ones.  

our goal for that day was to find good paella for lunch.  not the frozen kind that tourists are often tricked into ordering, but the legit stuff that takes 30 minutes to prepare!  luckily the lady at the tourist information center recommend le riua to us which we walked past earlier that morning and i recommented to pert then that, that looked like a legit place for food. go me!  well, the restaurant didn't open until TWO for lunch (yeah...don't question the spanish), but we held out and had paella valenciana--paella with chicken and rabbit.  the flavors were very simple and clean--i really enjoyed it!

that afternoon we went for a walking tour around the city and met a new friend chris, from denver.  since he had been traveling solo, he hadn't been able to eat paella, so twist our arms, pert, him and i decided to go again for paella that night.  don't judge.  this time we went to a new place and tried the seafood paella which was also very tasty.  you really can't go wrong with paella when you go to legit place!

the next day, we headed to the oceanografic, an aquarium in valencia's bioparc which is essentially a bunch of museums that are housed in futuristic looking buildings.  pert and i rented some bikes and biked along this old riverbed now turned park to make our way there.  the aquarium was a little pricey, but so worth it!  i loved it!  they had a lot of different buildings that broke out the sea life.  my personal favorites were the sharks and arctic.  they had these extremely long tunnels that you could walk under and look at the huge fish swimming above you.  it was awesome.  then in the arctic park, there were two enormous walruses and belugas!! call me a nerd, whatever...i loved every moment.  not to mention they had several souvenir flattened penny machines :)

that afternoon we hit the valencia beach which was very relaxing!  later that evening we returned to the hostel and bumped into anan, a friend we met in seville. gotta love traveling!  it was great seeing him again before taking off that night for...barcelona!