Burriana / Holidays

Everybody loves a good parade

The Burrianenses really seem to know how to throw a good festival. We returned our rental car to the Valencia airport on Wednesday and took a train back here, so we are without our own transportation now. So, of course, we did not make it to the market here on Wednesday, and then woke up Thursday to find everywhere closed because it was a holiday… and the same on Friday, too. Oops. I am pleased to report we survived despite our lack of preparedness with nowhere being open, and the festivities seem to have more than made up for the inconvenience. Here is

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Food / Valencia

Look at Dreamer navigatin’…

This is from our day in Valencia. Dreamer loves the Google Maps app. Really takes charge… Got us to the Central Market in Valencia, where I was able to buy lots of fresh shellfish and have it cooked at a restaurant right outside the market. Oysters from Galicia pictured below, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The rest was simply too messy (read: delicious) to safely get a picture of. Percebes (goose neck barnacles) came next, followed by langostinos, then two giant shrimp. Oh yes, my friends, this is just the first of many dispatches from the Shellfish

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Adapting / Burriana / Getting Settled

Adapting

Doer and I have been expats for just over three weeks now, and we’ve spent a week and a half settling into our new piso in Burriana (or Borriana, if you prefer to speak Valenciano instead of Spanish), and as he already has shared, it is a relief finally to have a home. Although we love traveling, at heart we are homebodies, and hotel life is not for us. And while we like one another quite a bit, one cannot underestimate the importance of two introverts coexisting at home together, but in different rooms.  Before we arrived in Burriana, we

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Burriana / Getting Settled

I was saying, “boo-ooz”

“Are you going to go to a bull fight?” This is the first question I would inevitably be asked anytime I told someone I was moving to Spain. My response to this was always along the lines of, “No, we aren’t going to be anywhere near Pamplona, and that’s where they do that stuff. But maybe if we travel up north, I’ll have to check one out by myself, since I know Dreamer won’t abide that cruelty.” I guess I should have become suspicious when, one day in Castellón, Dreamer was asked to sign a petition to stop the “bous”

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Bureaucracy / Getting Settled

Nesting

After months spent moving out of our house in Lincoln and weeks spent traveling, it feels like our lives are finally getting back to normal. We found a great apartment in Burriana, just down the street from where Dreamer will be working. So, my apologies for the lack of posts, but the past week has been spent in full-on nesting mode, building up our new domicile. The best part for me is that I have a kitchen again! A very close second is high speed Internet. And of course we have both been house drunk on all the projects this

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Spotted Abroad

You guys, seriously…

I am very bothered by how all the stamped metal eating utensils here are stamped the wrong way. They do not feel right in my hands. I’m not sure who in America decided your average cheap metal school lunchroom utensil should be concave on the back side, but clearly this is something I’ve taken for granted all my life… until I came to Spain and found every coffee spoon, fork, etc. to be concave on the front side. Is this a holdover from Franco trying to be contrary or what?   EDIT: Literally the day after I wrote this post, we went

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