Month: October 2016

Tourism / Valencia

City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia

A few weeks ago, we went to the Santiago Calatrava-designed City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia. We’ve passed it on our commuter train journey into the city so many times, we thought it was high time we actually get out and look what was there. Besides crazy architecture and nice park space, there is water (fountains! waterfalls!) surrounding all the buildings: A science museum (which we went to this time) A performance space An oceanographic museum (which we will definitely be hitting soon) The world’s fanciest car parking garage It’s a pretty neat space, especially considering this is a

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Burriana

Giant people, aaaah!

We are very proud of our little town’s ability to throw a good parade. We’ve seen two or three so far and there seem to be many more to come. They accomplish in 15-20 minutes what apparently takes four hours in Valencia. As opposed to the Nou d’Octubre celebration there, ours was arguably much cooler and over in just a fraction of the time, while still giving the gist of the occasion. The dancing figures were particularly cool. Thar Be real, normal-sized people under there. You can see them lined up above and in the videos below. We are told

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Burriana / Food

Do NOT give away free stuff to Spaniards

Tuesday, October 11th was a very special day at the local market. Yes, the kind of market where each vendor has a stall. The kind of market I have always dreamed of visiting and buying stuff at. Our town has one, as does every town here; bigger cities of course have several. And I love buying specialty products here. But this Tuesday, as I entered, I noticed a crowd of people that was not normally there. Tuesday is also the flea market in the area surrounding the market building, but this crowd was not here for that; no, their presence

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Burriana / Incidents and Accidents

A mouse in the house

The past few days have been trying. Kudos to Dreamer (seriously) for keeping her sh*t together while we knew we had a mouse in the house. Remarkably calm knowing this info. Incidents like these really help me cement my Spanish vocabulary: ratón – a mouse, also the thing you use to move the pointer on a desktop computer rata – a rat, which is definitely, thankfully, NOT what we had trampa – a trap cola – glue and so on… When I first saw the little grey thing skittering across my office floor into the hallway, I was in disbelief – so

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Burriana / Castellón / Valencia

Spain, where a medieval walled village is just a short bike ride away

Last Saturday Doer and I explored the walled medieval town of Mascarell in our province of Castellón. This tiny hamlet is one kilometer from Nules, the municipality neighboring our own city, Burriana, and we reached it after riding about 25 minutes along a bike path, a route which took us past ceramic factories and orange orchards – the latter are about as common in the autonomous Valencian Community as corn fields are in Nebraska (maybe even more so). We encountered scores of other bicyclists along the way, leading me to safely assume that cycling through the countryside is a common weekend pastime here. The history

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Adapting / Televison

Burguer Cangreburguer…

(no, that is not a misspelling, at least not as far as the Spanish are concerned) What do we watch when Colbert is on vacation? Spanish TV, of course! Kids’ shows are the best: right about at our vocabulary level, and they almost always include subtitles. SpongeBob SquarePants (aka “Bob Esponja”) is a particular favorite of mine that I think I accidentally got Dreamer hooked on. As with Los Simpson, oftentimes I’ve seen the episode before, so it makes following the action a little easier. Things are translated to varying degrees: sometimes a joke crosses cultural boundaries; sometimes, it does not. And

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