A dream of Valencia

The day (Monday, January 16 ) began with a weird awakening. I’d woken a little after 2 and not been able to get back to sleep. I lay there for what felt like hours, and started reviewing my life, remembering various episodes - you know, as you do in these circumstances. One I kept replaying fondly was first meeting Karen. It was at a highschool football game - we were such a cliché! What I’d never told Karen was that long before that meeting, I often admired her from a distance. And I’d think, “I could never get near a girl like that, she’s way out of my league.”

My locker was near the end of a hallway at an intersection where Karen was often stationed in her role as hall monitor - she was a prefect, the little smarty-boots. There she’d be in her tartan mini-skirt, turtle-neck sweater, knee socks and penny loafers, brimming with confidence and authority, and cute as a button. And there I’d be, loser-boy, the typically depressive adolescent male, standing at my locker, stealing regretful glances at her.

When I told Karen all this later in the day when we were out walking, she laughed and said, “Yeah, I was an arrogant little git!” 

But that wasn’t the weird awakening.

At some point, evidently, I fell back asleep - except it felt like I was still awake, still reviewing my life as I had been. I started remembering a time I hadn’t thought about in years, when Karen and I lived in a commune! I couldn’t remember the other people or the location, but knew we’d had communal meals and done other activities together in a kind of common room. It was a dingy old house with small, low-ceilinged rooms and an oppressive atmosphere. Karen and I had a tiny, spartan bedroom down a long narrow corridor.

Then, I guess, I woke up - but it didn’t feel any different from the dream state I’d evidently been in. I continued to try and dredge up details of this supposed experience of communal living - and managed to come up with quite a few more. It was really as if I was remembering something from my life. Then gradually I woke up fully, and gave myself a shake. No, that never happened.

It’s stuck with me all day - that confusion about dream and reality, sleep and wakefulness. Is this what psychotics and people with dementia experience all the time?

It was otherwise a relatively uneventful day. I did get out for a run in the morning - a slightly different route that took me by the shoe shop on Calle de Sorni that I’d spotted on Saturday. They didn’t have the Camper shoes I wanted. (Yes, I’ve been in the grip of a sort of shoe madness since we got here - it comes over both Karen and I when we visit this place. I took the cure later in the day.)

The weather has turned here - sort of. From highs in the high teens and low twenties and lots of sun through the first week, we’re now getting highs of no more than 17 with a fair bit of cloud. And it will get cooler as the week goes on apparently. There’s a stiff breeze all the time that makes it feel cooler than it is. The Weather Channel warns of a “possible disruption due to coastal event,” which we take to be the onshore breeze we’re in fact experiencing. It’s fairly typical for the time of year. We’ve had this kind of weather here before.

What’s interesting is how quickly we’ve become acclimatized. We find this new weather a little…well, off-putting. It felt quite chilly when I went out for my run in shorts this morning - even though the weather oracle said it was 12C. At home, or in England, I’d think that was balmy. 

We only got out together once today, after our mid-afternoon meal, about 3:30. And it wasn’t a very long walk. It was actually quite a bit nicer by then than we were expecting. We walked down to the Mercado de Colon and sat in a bar in the late sun, sipping wine for half an hour. 

My prefect

Then we ambled over to Calle de Colon and zigged through the shopping streets around it. Back on Colon, I decided the time had come to cure my shoe madness. Karen wasn’t interested in assisting, so went home on her own. I marched back to the Camper store and bought a pair of the boots I’d been eyeing. They may be the most expensive shoes I’ve ever bought, despite being on sale.

I've always liked this building - some kind of military place

On Gran Via de Germanias near Ruzafa: late sun, dark clouds

Now we're in for the evening. What a couple of boring old farts!

We are watching a bunch of pretty decent TV shows on Netflix and Prime, though. (No, not all of them every night.) Treason is a new British espionage thriller about an MI6 agent and his family getting caught up in spy vs. spy skullduggery. Woman of the Dead is a dark, twisted tale set in the Austrian Alps about a woman avenging her policeman husband’s murder. Outer Range, which we’ve just started, is a supernatural thriller on Prime, set among present-day Wyoming ranchers. (The jury’s still out on this one; it could be waste of time or really good. The acting and writing are so far pretty good. We’ll see.) And finally, a big hit from a couple of years ago, Emily in Paris, which we’d resisted until now, but are finding surprisingly charming, if quite silly.

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Today, Tuesday, was cleaning day. Lola, our host, quite unexpectedly, let us know a few days into our stay that she provided free cleaning for long-term renters - every ten days. Woohoo! Today was the day. Adriana, the woman who greeted us when we arrived last week, was to come at 10 a.m. to clean. We figured we needed to kill about two hours, so we had a whole itinerary planned.

First stop was the Estacion del Norte, the main train station, about a 15-minute walk from the flat. There’s an old waiting room at the front of the station, decorated with lovely mosaic panels that has been converted into a some-time exhibition space. We wanted to check it out and see if there was anything new on display. There wasn’t, but we stepped in to look at the mosaics again.

The next stop was an exhibition space we stumbled on several visits ago, at the back of City Hall. It’s a series of small marble-floored rooms opening off each other through arched doorways. The first time we went, it was a very small display of work by local artists. This time there was an intriguing and much larger exhibit about the history and evolution of the City Hall building and the vast square in front of it - from the 14th century to the present day. 

Central panel of triptych from chapel of old City House

The theme of the exhibit is how the architecture, art and contemporary writing about the site and the buildings reflected the thinking of the city fathers about what it means to govern well. There’s quite a bit about a 14th century Franciscan monk who was an early political philosopher who influenced the evolution of the city’s government. His monastery filled what is now the City Hall Plaza. It was only demolished in the 19th century. The present municipal building was erected in the early part of the last century.

City coat of arms designs from 16th century codex

In another sign of how much harder the city and region are trying to foster their tourism industry, all the exhibits - as at IVAM - were labelled in Spanish, Valenciano and English. It makes it so much easier for the language-challenged like us.

Illumination from 1565 codex

The full triptych

Next on the itinerary was a stop at the Mercado Centrale, the lovely modernista (early 20th century Spanish) market building. It’s a big place with scores of stands: butchers, delis, fruit and veg vendors, spice shops, specialists in pulses and jamon, the cured ham Spaniards love, and a whole section for fish and seafood. It unfortunately is a tourist magnet, and that is now reflected in a disturbing trend to local food vendors being replaced by stands selling junky tourist souvenirs. We counted several, all selling pretty much the same junk. I’m sure the locals are disgusted. But despite this, the market is still mostly about fresh food. We prefer the smaller, friendlier, but less architecturally interesting Ruzafa market, though, so didn’t buy anything today.

Next up: tracking down some restaurants in the Carmen neighbourhood that Shelley Boyes had recommended. They wouldn’t be open for lunch at this time of day - 11:30 or so - but we thought we could see where they are and maybe see if they had menus out front. We found them alright, but couldn’t really tell much about them beyond what Shelley had said. We’ll have to go back at lunchtime.

Medieval main building of Catholic University of Valencia

We meandered around Carmen for a bit, with me snapping some of the street art new since we were last here. And eventually made our way home.

Adriana was still here. So we went back out and found a bench at a corner down the street and waited for her to finish. Karen read, I tried to take some surreptitious candids of folks at the bar across the street - with little success.

When we got back, Adriana was just finishing up, but explained there was a leak in the bathroom sink. Lola had messaged initially to say she hoped it would be fixed the next day, but then messaged again to say the plumbers would come today about 3. Adriana would return to tell them what to do. We decided to go out for lunch while they were here. The plumbers came before Adriana, shortly after 2. They were eastern Europeans and one of them spoke quite good English. They also knew the apartment already and went right to work. Adriana showed up shortly after and Karen and I left.

We didn’t have energy to walk back to Carmen to the restaurants Shelley had recommended, so headed over to the Ruzafa Market area to one we’d spotted there the other day. It was closed for some reason, so we walked on, past Regne de Valencia. We found a Japanese place in the vee between Regne de Valencia and the Gran Via. They had a menu del dia with four courses, but no drink. Karen was worried it was a mistake, but it turned out to be really good.

We both had the same four dishes: cucumber salad to start, a very tasty rice bowl with chicken, vegetable crisp rolls and a little dish of steak pieces that tasted good, but more surprising, were quite tender. With a small bottle of cava and a beer for me, it was still under 30 euros - under CDN$40. So we lucked out again. 

That was it for the day's activities away from home. I stopped for chocolate at the Consum and we were in for the evening - even though it was only about 4:45. Such exciting people we are!

*

Today, Wednesday, the big activity for the day is going to the movies. We found a theatre over on the other side of the Turia in the university area that shows movies in their original language. We’re going to go see a movie called Living, starring Bill Nighy, that got quite good reviews. There are a few more English-language movies on at the same theatre. It’s called Cines de Babel - appropriate.

A huge part of the morning was taken up with trying to top up my phone. I got a SIM card and voucher for UK Three from Amazon Canada before we left. Seemed like a good deal: CDN$35 for SIM, unlimited voice and text, including in Spain, and 10Gb of data for one month. The voucher didn’t activate the phone as it was supposed to, though, and I had to call customer service. They were good and apologetic and gave me extra data. 

Today, the “data pack” I’d started with had expired and I went online to try and top up. Catch 22: you can’t top up using a non-UK credit card. We’ve run into this before with British online services. So I tried calling customer service. No dice: not available was the message I got, probably because I’m in Spain - with no minutes left. 

So I tried the chat option. The agent confirmed that I couldn’t pay with a non-UK credit card at the Three site. I would have to buy a voucher from a third-party provider, Ding.com, which charges an extra fee for the service. I did this and then went back to the Three online top-up process. Except now, unlike the first time through, there was no option to pay by voucher. So I went back to the customer service chat. She wanted to ‘validate’ the account by getting me to tell her how much I’d topped up for before. For various stupid reasons, I couldn’t provide the information she wanted. I finally got impatient and asked her to escalate and put me with a manager.

The manager came on the chat a few minutes later and after a brief exchange, told me that there was a system-wide issue with topping up online with a voucher. This is after almost an hour of talking to these people by typing on the tiny phone keyboard! Her solution: try later after they had fixed the issue. Two hours later, I still can’t top up and have no voice, text or data. I’m enraged. Lesson for the future: don’t use this company again.

I went for a run after this frustrating session, a new route: through Central Park, over the pedestrian overpass, up to Estacion del Norte and back along the tracks to the Gran Via and Sueca. I thought it was further than I’ve been running tlll now, but no, it’s not as far.

That’s all for now.