Search Results for: fallas

Las Fallas / Valencia

Finding Ninot: Valencia proper

If Burriana offers a more comfortable, familiar Fallas experience, then the capital city, Valencia, provides large-scale wonder. Dreamer’s first visit to Valencia during the festival week with Dad and Deb (poor Doer had to work!) revealed a city completely metamorphosed into a monument to celebration. Little mojito huts had sprung up out of nowhere. We did manage to find one area that wasn’t completely overtaken by Fallas: City of Arts and Sciences, the iconic cultural complex designed by Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava. Still, you couldn’t go far without running into a monument or a parade. When it was time for our visitors to return

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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.

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Las Fallas / Tourism / Valencia

Ninot takes a break: Valencia walking tour

We spent a very long, fun-filled day taking part in the Fallas in Valencia last month, and we will tell you more about that next time (finally… we promise!). Although the festival really does overtake the city, we still managed to have a few non-Fallas experiences while we were there for a very long day. For example, not all of the street performers we saw were dressed in traditional costumes – some were quite unique. Dreamer gave this guy a shiny nickel. Because we’ve enjoyed the experience so much in other cities, we decided to go on a free walking tour. And wouldn’t

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Central Spain / Madrid / Tourism

Toledo: Strange, beautiful mix of cultures

As American spring break approached, Dreamer’s Dad and his wife, Deb, who are teachers, took advantage of this time off to come see us. We planned to meet them at the airport in Madrid and have a fun weekend in Toledo before returning to Valencia to see the start of Las Fallas, our region’s biggest holiday (more about that in coming posts!). We began this journey as many before it: with a commuter train into Valencia. Despite the tardy train, everything worked out fine. We made our high-speed train connection with some time to spare, which is good, because our train car was waaaaaay

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Castellón / Tourism / Valencia

Where good Banjo Boys and Girls come from

We spent the first weekend of March doing some fun activities at home, too, and we managed to stayed just as busy as our previous weekend at home. This time around, we filled our days and nights with a quirky museum, a spa, a parade, rice, pyrotechnics, porcelain figurines, and horchata (sounds like a lot, but to be fair, our weekends are three days – yes, our life is rough).   Saturday: Spa, playing card museum, and a surprise parade Playing card games are quite possibly an even more popular pastime in Spain than in America, and that’s saying something because we

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Castellón / Cooking / Food / Tourism

Onda: Castle, ceramics, and paella

We managed to fit another castle into our schedule last month during an overcast weekend spent recovering near home after our epic trip to Copenhagen. We also visited a ceramics museum and Doer learned some new techniques for making paella – but first, the castle! Onda’s castle once was known as the Castle of 300 Towers, and according to Guía Total de la Comunidad Valenciana (our resident guidebook of the Valencian Community), these towers allowed Muslims in Onda to resist King James I the Conqueror for years, even after the nearby city of Burriana, where we live, was taken in 1233. The Moors built

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