Category: Burriana

Burriana / Las Fallas / Valencia

Finding Ninot: Flowers and parades

Many parades accompany the Fallas celebration, both formal and impromptu. Sometimes it seems like you can’t go anywhere in the city of Valencia during Fallas week without running into a panoply of costumed marchers and musicians. Each individual march doesn’t always seem to be a big deal for the participants. Really, sometimes people just seem to be getting from Point A to Point B, like anyone using the road. There was no escaping it. The festive fanfare was never far away, and it frequently interrupted us during our Valencian walking tour, while we were trying to take a break from las Fallas.

Continue reading
Burriana / Las Fallas / Strolling

Finding Ninot: All aboard the Burriana Fallas Train!

Choo, choo! The fallas train is about to depart and take you all around our town’s different displays! Our small city featured a surprising number of fallas during their namesake festival this March. Yes, there was a real “train” that drove through the streets, taking passengers past each one. And yes, we did wait in line for an hour and a half to ride it. Before we get to the train, let’s take a look at what got us to this point: fallas, you’ll remember, are grand artistic monuments constructed in different cities and towns around the Valencian Community and displayed during the weeklong celebration, at the

Continue reading
Burriana / Restaurants

The Fallas are coming!

After visiting the quintessential Spanish city, we returned to Burriana with Dad and Deb to find a lot had changed, starting with the enormous falla that had materialized outside our apartment building during our four-day absence. We will finally get to the Fallas in our next several blog posts, we promise. While the festival did take up a lot of our time during Dad and Deb’s visit to the Valencian Community, we did manage to show them a few non-Fallas highlights in Burriana, so we wanted to get that out of the way here first. Although Burriana is a seaside community, we

Continue reading
Burriana

When it rains, it pours: Flooding in the Valencian Community

Doer and I have been enjoying the winter weather in the Valencian Community. Even on the coldest days, it usually reaches 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or it gets pretty darn close (this doesn’t prevent locals from asking us how we can possibly go about with short sleeves and no coats – but that’s a different blog post). It doesn’t even rain that often here – but when it does, it can become downright torrential. After an especially rainy weekend near the end of January, I rode my bike to one of my favorite places in Burriana – the Clot, a little park

Continue reading
Burriana / Holidays

Three Kings Day: Parades and a special cake

Doer and I admire Spaniards’ spirit of celebration, and we’ve already witnessed a number of holiday celebrations, local festivals, and parades. In early January, Three Kings’ Day (or Epiphany) is widely celebrated, with parades all over the country marking the story of the Magi who journeyed to worship baby Jesus. Though this Christian holiday exists in the U.S., there are many more traditions associated with it here, and it seems to be as widely known and celebrated as Christmas itself. Much like Santa at Christmas, Spanish children set out sweets for the kings and their camels the night before, and

Continue reading
Burriana / Holidays / Valencia

Feliz Navidad – or Bon Nadal – in the Valencian Community

As lifelong Nebraskans, Doer and I tend to associate the holiday season with cold and snow. This year, we traded all of that in for sunshine and orange trees. And lots of life-sized nativity scenes, like the above display, which we came across in the city of Valencia. Though local Valencians have embraced their winter season with warm coats, hats, scarves, and gloves, most days Doer and I walk around in our mangas cortas  – short sleeves – and we’ve come to expect a refrain of, “no tienes frío?” (aren’t you cold?) wherever we go. Feels like spring break. The last

Continue reading