Restaurant fail

Wednesday, February 1, 2023 - I ran Monday in the morning, the usual route, then blogged and  read the paper. Two great long-reads in the Saturday Globe “Opinion” section: an excellent take-down of ChatGPT, and an illuminating backgrounder on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, which the author argues should be as front-of-mind as Ukraine because it has as much potential to create wider regional conflict.

It was a cool day - only 6C when I went out for my run. And the apartment has been cold. It’s most un-Valencia like. Temperatures in Nimes - which we rejected as having too cool and wet a winter climate - and Firle have both been warmer the last few days, at least in the morning and at night. The sun always warms us up in the afternoon here.

I went out again on my own a little after 4. Karen declined to join me, citing the cold. That was unfortunate because it had warmed up nicely by then - to about 10C - and was quite pleasant and sunny with no wind. I biked over to Plaza de Reina, dumped the bike and set off on foot into the neighbourhood to the east of there, called La Seu. It is apparently the oldest barrio in the city.

Side door of Basilica

Cathedral side door, Bishop's Palace

I like the narrow streets and elegant apartment blocks - and the occasional splash of colour from street art. I think it’s a fairly well-to-do area, though, so street art is not quite as well tolerated as it is in Carmen, which it borders. There are also fewer demolished buildings and resulting reconstruction projects with hoarding around them to attract the street artists and taggers.

Santíssim Crist del Salvador

My aim in these walks is always to get lost and find new stuff to look at, and photograph. But as long as I stay between the Turia and the Xativa-Guillem de Castro ring road - which I inevitably do - it’s pretty much impossible anymore to get lost, or find new sights. It’s basically the old city that was surrounded by walls in mediaeval times. The two massive gate towers - Quart and Serrano - are the remnants of those walls. I might find the occasional narrow little street or tiny square I’ve never seen before - or forgotten - and I might occasionally get turned around and not quite know where I am for a few blocks. But it’s all pretty familiar at this point.

Medical museum, poster of exhibit on history of psychiatric care

Of course, I ended up skirting the edge of Carmen before heading home. I can’t seem to stay away from the place. If it’s not older than La Seu, it seems it. It’s certainly grottier.

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Yesterday, Tuesday, was a cleaning day. Adriana, Lola and Borja’s on-the-ground maintenance person, was coming at 10 in the morning. We cleared out of the apartment about then. We had planned to go out for lunch, but lunch here isn’t until 2 or 2:30, so that would leave us with four hours to kill. It was another really cool morning - supposedly only 4C when we set out, though sunny and not feeling that cold. We were concerned, though, about being outside that long. On a warmer day, we’d have gone somewhere where we could sit in the sun and read. But not this day.

So I came up with the brilliant idea - brilliant as it turned out - of finding a library to go and sit in. We strolled for 40 minutes or so. I took Karen on my fast-walk route, through Central Park and across the pedestrian railway overpass to Joaquin Sorolla station, so she could see the wall murals on the apartment blocks across the street from the station. (The route also had the benefit of being mostly in the sun.)  

Central Park - anybody know what kind of tree?

Then we found a great library, the Biblioteca Pública de València Pilar Faus. It’s about a 20 minute walk from here, just on the other side of Xativa-Guillem de Castro, right beside MuVIM. How many times have we visited that museum, including just the other day, and wandered around in the park it’s set in, and not realized there was a public library there - and a really nice one too?

The place has a long and interesting history. The original structure, of which little remains, was erected  in the early 15th century as a psychiatric hospital - one of the first, if not the first, anywhere. The story goes that Friar Joan Gilabert was on his way to deliver a guest sermon at the cathedral when he witnessed children harassing and stoning an indigent lunatic. The mentally ill in those days - much as in present-day Ontario - were left to fend for themselves on the street. Friar Gilabert stopped the abuse, lectured the children, then went on to the cathedral where he delivered such a powerful sermon advocating for an insane asylum that the good burghers of Valencia began construction on it the following year, 1409. It would become the Hospital of the Poor Innocents. 

The present building, with many later additions and renovations was put up in the early 16th century at the time all the hospitals in the city were amalgamated into the General Hospital of Valencia. It was designed in the shape of a Greek cross with four ward wings on each of two floors, and a dome at the centre. That design and most of the pillars supporting the second floor remain. It served as a hospital until 1960. In the 1970s, it was remodelled to serve as the central library in a city-wide system with branches in most barrios and exurbs. 

There are lots of tables for students and researchers to work at, plus chairs to sit and read in. Also, quite nice washrooms, always a bonus. The lounging chairs, at a glance, didn’t look all that comfortable - curved wood with no padding - but were, surprisingly so. We settled in near the front door. Karen had newspapers to read on her tablet, so was likely gone for an hour or more. I started browsing the special display shelves nearby. 

The first thing I picked up was a book called Gran libro de los retratos de animales. I couldn’t immediately figure out what it was. It appeared to be reproductions of old-master portraits of animals dressed as humans. Each was accompanied by serious-sounding art-historical notes. The paintings looked real - you could see the cracks in the paint. It wasn’t until I gave myself a shake, did a little research and looked more closely at the cover that I realized the book was a spoof, the recent work of a Croatian children’s book illustrator, Svjetlan Junaković. (He’s won awards.) I started to twig when I recognized some of the portraits. They’re all take-offs on real old master portraits, including a froggy version of Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” This one, of a rhino, is one of my favourites. The book is also available in English.

I leafed through a few other things, including a book in English about a Japanese woodblock print master. But the one that really grabbed me was a 2016 volume by the American photo-journalist Steve McCurry entitled Sobre la Lectura (On Reading - it’s also available in English.) You wouldn’t think a bunch of photos of people reading would be particularly interesting, but they’re so beautifully made, and so beautifully reproduced - as good as I’ve seen in any photo book - that they really pull you in. McCurry took them over many years in many places, some quite exotic. Worth a look if your library has it.

I eventually got bored and started exploring the library, then taking pictures of it. Then I left Karen to her newspapers and wandered outside to take more pictures. The shelves full of fluted column stumps I always assumed to be detritus from Roman ruins, but I’m now not sure they aren’t building materials from the old hospital. The little sunken plaza by the shelving the stonework is stored in has now been taken over as a skate park, we noticed the last time we were here. On this day, there was only one wannabe skater boy. His tricks were unimpressive.

It was almost one by the time we left the library. Our idea was to try a recommended Thai restaurant over in Carmen, but I noticed when I looked it up again in Google Maps that it wasn’t open today - only Wednesday to Sunday. We went to Carmen anyway, but a lot of other restaurants were closed too, and those we found open with menus del dia didn’t suit for one reason or another. So we walked back over to Plaza de Rodgrigo Botet, near city hall square. And there, we had our first really bad Valencia restaurant experience. 

We chose a place called Bar Transits on a little street leading into Rodrigo Botet. They had a €12 menu del dia - the usual deal: three courses plus drink. We sat outside, the only patrons on the small terrace. There wasn’t a lot on the menu that appealed, but there was a secondo (main) listed as manitas de cerdo. Cerdo is pork. Google Translate gave me “handyman” as the English for manita. The more linguistically gifted may see what’s coming. 

The primeros - cream of mushroom soup for Karen, warm bacon salad for me - were fine, good even. The wine wasn’t chilled properly but perfectly drinkable. The service should have been the first give-away. It was perfunctory, as it so often is in Spain, but also simply disappeared for long periods. We waited for about 20 minutes after finishing the starters - almost unheard of at lunch place here in our experience. Then a different waiter appeared with our mains. Reader, it was pig’s trotter! 

Pig’s trotters are probably my most hated cut of meat. Well, calling it a cut of meat is generous. It never occurred to us that they would serve such a thing in a Spanish restaurant. Pig’s trotters in Canada are bad enough - they at least have some meat there. These had none, nada, zero - just fat, bone and gristle swimming in a gravy that soaked the paltry few fried potatoes it was served with. We were outraged. 

When our original wait person reappeared after another long wait, I told her as politely as I could that we were not happy, that the dish was “sin carne totalmente” - “completely without meat” in Spanglish. She apologized and asked what we wanted for dessert. At this point, Karen broke in, exasperated, and asked for the bill. She just wanted to leave.

A few minutes later, an older woman came out and tried to tell us that “manitas” never had meat - nunca. Then  and why would they serve them? And why would anyone order them, we wondered? We insisted on the bill, knowing full well that Spanish restaurants do not have the same attitude to customers as good Canadian restaurants do and that we would be charged the full price despite our perfectly reasonable complaint. Which we were. So we paid about $35 for a bowl of soup, a salad and two glasses of wine. Mind you, you could easily pay that for the same thing in a Canadian restaurant. But Bar Transits will not get a good review from us on TripAdvisor.

We went home and I made us bacon and tomato sandwiches.

Late in the afternoon, I walked back over to Central Park alone and spent 40 minutes taking silly pictures of flowers and leaves and water - fodder for my multi-exposure experiments. Which I haven’t got to yet.