Days 20-24

Hey guys! 

Valencia was hit with a wicked cold front this weekend so I’ve been out of exploring commission for the past few days.  The windchill coming off the Mediterranean dropped the temperature down to around freezing, so I ended up spending most of my time indoors, hiding from the cold.  That being said, I did manage to get out a few times during the afternoon while the sun was out and it was at least bearable.  Here’s what I did:

On Friday we took a group excursion across town to the National Museum of Ceramics.  I know it must sound super lame on your end, but just imagine the group’s reaction when our teacher told us that it was mandatory!  Needless to say, the group was not overly thrilled about it, but our teacher promised that it would be cooler than it sounds.  Fortunately, he was right. 

Not only is the place a museum, but it’s also a PALACE that some famous, old guy used to live in.  A rich, old Count, I think our teacher said.  The official name of the place is El Palacio de Dos Aguas, and the first two floors are still furnished and decorated just as they were when the Count was actually living there in the 18th century.  Authentic to say the least.  Above that, the two upper floors have been turned into the ceramics museum, which is where we started our tour…

As you’ll see in the pictures, these weren’t just any old ceramics!  Each room in the museum showcased a different period of world history and the pot-making technologies used during that time.  One room, for example, showed pots and bowls and plates and jugs and little figurines from Medieval times, another from the Bronze age, another from the period when England’s influence was heaviest, followed by the French, another when African techniques were most used, and finally, an entire room filled with ceramics from as far back as 1000 B.C!  This room was the most mind-blowing because everything was still perfectly intact!  Incredible!  The way the museum was set up, we walked through the showrooms in chronological order, starting with the B.C stuff, moving all the way through the centuries until the final, most modern section on the very top floor.  Because of this, it was really interesting to note the differences in techniques and artistic style in the drawings and paintings and carving.  Very, very cool—way moreso than expected, anyway.    Here are the pictures:

Heisman baby!

Mirror so you could look at the ceiling up close

Lion mauling a horse!

So after the ceramics part of the museum, we made our way down to the bottom floors to check out the Palace.  We started in the foyer and made our way through the rooms in order of how we would have seen them if we had been a guest over to have dinner and visit with the Count: we started in the foyer, made our way to the coat room and then the tea room, then to the dining room, then to the Smoking Room where the men would go after dinner while the women went to another tea room, then to the card-playing room and on to a second smoking room, then to the library and sitting area, then to the “Red Room” which was just another sitting area bumped up a few notches on the extravagance scale, then to the ballroom/music hall, and finally to the dessert and coffee room and back to the foyer…all in a perfect circle.  It was very cool, but all I could think the whole time was, “Wow, this guy had WAY too much money!”  Everything—from the furniture to the decorations to the paintings to the sheer fact that he had TWO smoking rooms just for the Hell of it—was lavish beyond belief, the exact definition of luxury living.  Cool, but very much excessive.

From there, we headed upstairs to the “noble floor” to see the private rooms of the Count and his family.  The rooms were just as extravagant as the rest of the house: the beds were huge and luxurious, the bathtubs and sinks were all made from solid marble, the women had separate “make-up” and dressing rooms, the family dogs had a room, the children had their own rooms and their own separate play rooms, and between them all—connecting all the rooms together—were little sitting areas called “chambers” for their private guests to wait for them.  It was all just so much—it was hard to believe that people actually lived there!  OH and in the “basement” they had on display the family carriages which were absolutely unbelievable!  Here are the pictures, though I can't quite remember what's what:

Foyer 

Smoking Room

Tea Room with an Asian theme

Dining room ceiling

Worship Area

Women's Tea Room

Red Room

Doll house in one of the playrooms

Ballroom

super old guitars

Taken from the Internet because my camera died...

So that was about all I did on Friday.  Going out was out of the question due to the cold, so I stayed in and did some reading and caught up on sleep. 

Saturday was more of the same: overcast and cold.  It cleared up a bit after lunch and I went for a walk and found two pretty cool places.  The first was the public library, which I wandered around in for about an hour, looking for any titles that I might recognize.  I did find one book that interested me very much: The Alchemist, in it’s “native” Spanish.  I really, really enjoyed the translated version of this book when I read it a few months ago, so I told myself that when I finish the book I’m reading right now, I’ll go over and check it out since it will be good for me on TWO levels: rereading a book that I love AND helping me with my Spanish.  Awesome.

After the library, I wandered around a little more and found another interesting place to explore: El Mercat Central, the HUGE market here in the heart of the city.  Everything here sort of looks like it could be a cathedral or a church or some religion-related building, and that’s exactly what I thought this was…except for the mass of people flowing in and out the front door carrying bags of food.  My curiosity got the best of me and I decided to walk in and check it out.  Inside, the place was like a Kroger on steroids!...except not, because everything was fresh and local and as natural as could be.  There were tons of fruit stands selling all the fruit you would find in the states PLUS fruits I had never even seen or heard of before!  The bananas were all really small, the grapes were perfect spheres, and the strawberries were the deepest red I’ve ever seen!  More than the fruit, though, the wall encircling the entire market was just one big meat market, with real, live butchers chopping up the parts right behind the counter, then hanging them up, blood and all, from the hooks in the ceiling!  It was extremely gross but strangely really cool at the same time.  So raw, so natural, so…honest.  In addition to all of that fun stuff, there were a plethora of bakeries and pastry shops, bread stands that served every kind of bread in every kind of form imaginable, little nuts and grains stands, vegetable stands with the most colorful veggies I’ve ever seen, candy stores, an ice cream and gelato section, and then in the wwwaaayyy back—in a completely separate part of the store (I think to keep the smell away)—was the fish house!  The smell was almost unbearable (a bit too natural for me) but the sights were worth the olfactory pain: all of the counters were covered in ice and the fish were just out there for you to look at and examine as you walked by.  All kinds of fish, too—tons and tons of COD (fitting for me, huh?), but also tuna and flounder and lots of squid and octopi and, strangely enough, jelly fish, which I didn’t know you could eat.  But what really got me was the fish parts section, where you could buy just the head or just the tail or just the insides.  It was unfathomably disgusting, but so cool at the same time.  As a non-seafood fan in general, it was the most unappetizing place I’ve ever been, but the place was seething with people, the line reaching all the way around and back into the main part of the market, so something about it must be good!

After doing a couple laps around the whole place, I bought a chocolate and cinnamon covered croissant from a pastry shop and was on my way.  Here are the pictures:

First view inside

So many olives

Candy

The guy from "Up" sells vegetables in Valencia?

Pastries

Nuts

Get ready for the gross stuff!

Rabbits!

 Bacalao = Cod

Squid!

I don't even want to know...

So that was my Saturday.  The cold kept me from a night out again, but I had fun anyway in the game room here in the dorms playing ping-pong and fooseball and billiards with the kids from the group and a few Spanish kids.  Got another full night of sleep and woke up early only to find that Sunday was the coldest day of all…

I spent most of the day inside writing my two essays that were due in class on Monday.  When I finished with those around 6, I was thoroughly sick and tired of sitting at my desk and staring at my computer screen, so I bundled up and braved the cold and headed out into the city.  And since Taylor had reminded me earlier that it was Bob Marley’s birthday, I brought my iPod along and let Bob brighten up the dreary day for me.  What a fine job he did, too!  Right away I found some of the coolest graffiti I’ve ever seen!  Before I show you the pictures, let me say first that Valencia and Spain in general (and maybe Europe too) is absolutely COVERED in graffiti—every wall of every building, every tunnel and every bridge, every bench, every street sign, every playground, every ANYTHING has some form of vandalism inscribed on it somewhere.   That being said, the graffiti here is not just any graffiti like you would see back home—here, it’s definitely an art more than an act of vandalism.  As you’ll see in the pictures, the “taggers” are super creative and do a good job incorporating social criticisms into their work.  Some of them are funny, others a bit grim, but none of them make your say, “What a shame” or “that’s so ugly.”  No—instead it makes it stand in awe and want to take pictures because it’s so beautiful and genuinely artistic.  So, now that you understand that, here are the pictures from my walk yesterday:

Stapler chasing a piece of paper?

His beard is made of snakes and his "commandment tablets" are filled with the Euro and Dollar sign.

Pretty cool, right?  I know there’s stuff like that in the States, too, it just seems more common and more accepted here.  And it’s not called graffiti either—it’s “street art.”  Rightly so.

Anyway, so as I was walking, “Jammin” out to some Bob, I passed this building with modern art structures out front that looked very similar to the ones I passed on the way to the Oceanografic.  Remember? 

I decided to walk in and see what the place was, and it turned out to be the IVAM—“Instituto Valenciana de Arte Moderno.”  A modern art museum!  How cool!  I wandered in and asked the receptionist what kind of exhibits they had and how much it would cost to look around, and as luck would have it, Sundays are free admission!  Yes!

The first exhibit that I found was called “Without Time” by an artist named Zirotti.   The art was a bit too…modern…for me and didn’t make much sense since it was basically nothing more than brushstrokes on paper (the kind of “art” I like to call “cheating”), but it was decent.  All of his paintings had a time of day in the bottom corner, and they progressed through time so that they made some kind of finished product at the end (though it was still nothing more than brushstrokes).  I asked the museum lady in the room if she could explain to me what it all meant and she even admitted that she had no idea!  Ha!  Oh well.  Here are the pictures:

The Artist's Notebook

From there, I went upstairs and found a modern sculptures exhibit titled “Escultura de Proceso” by the artist Arturo Berned.  His work looked just like the sculptures that were outside on the walkway coming in that reminded me of the others.  The exhibit was cool because it was completely dark except for a spotlight on each of the sculptures, which had a neat effect.  Some of his stuff was made from wood, some of it metal, and it ranged in all sizes from the size of a car to the size of my hand.  It was all very cool to look at and examine closely because the architecture and the precision cuts in the wood really were impressive and artistic.  Here are the pictures:

After that, I walked upstairs and found the two coolest exhibits of all!  The first was a collection of work from the INDIGENOUS people of Australia.  The description of the works never actually used the name Aborigines, but I’m assuming that’s what they meant.  Maybe not, though.  Regardless, the work was awesome!  Most of the stuff was painting on canvases using a cool technique using dots and little circles.  It was all very modern looking and a bit psychedelic too, and some of it played tricks on your eyes and looked like it was moving or waving or changing colors.  Very cool.  The descriptions next to each of the paintings explained that each one was, for the most part, about some kind of natural resource in their “world” that they were paying homage to.  One was about the watering hole that they drink from, one was about the animal that they eat the most, one was about the plants that make their medicine, and one was about the ants in the desert that make those really cool, really tall structures from the sand.  It was all fascinating and really fun to look at, and even though I wasn’t supposed to take pictures, I secretly did anyway because I loved it all so much!  Don’t tell anyone, but here they are:

Map of Australia showing where most of the work is from

Personal favorite

From there, I walked across the hallway to the very best exhibit of all: “Tesoros del Arte Taino.”  Taino is an island near the Dominican Republic where indigenous bushmen still live to this day.  The exhibit was a collection of super old cultural artifacts dating back to 350 AD, as well as more modern stuff from recent years.  My favorites were the mini-statues and figurines carved from wood and stone that had a Hawaiian, totem pole feel to them.  Some of them were little men, little warriors, or little “idols” that reminded me of Indiana Jones, while others were carvings of birds, cats, and lizards.  In addition to the sculptures, the exhibit also included some of their native dress and jewelry, which was really, really cool.  Theirs is a culture where piercings are very common and the more you have, the more respect you have, so it was cool to see all the different styles and sizes and to read where they usually “go” (one was the size of my index finger and is traditionally worn all the way through the nose!).  This exhibit was my favorite of all, so I made a point of leaving two or three of the rooms unexplored so that I would have a reason to come back and check it all out again.  Here are the pictures:

Driftwood

So that’s everything I’ve been up to the past few days.  We’re taking our group trip to Barcelona this weekend, so I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures and let you know all about that!  I am REALLY excited!  Until then…

Much love to all.

C