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We decided to spend three nights in (the guidebook said): "Vibrant Valencia, birthplace of paella." Paella, one of two dishes everyone knows from their high school Spanish class (along with gazpacho, chilled tomato soup), is a sort of seafood salad on rice. In Valencia, this means whole, recently passed on but not yet cleaned or shelled, shrimp on saffron rice.
The center of the shrimp-assassination industry is a sprawling restaurant in the vibrant downtown, with smiling waiters holding out three-foot diameter plates of yellow rice and ex-shrimp. The recently expired are placed in the window as an advertisement, so you can marvel at their beady little shrimp-eyes or poke their limp shrimp-antennae, or sing songs, like "How Much is that Shrimp in the Window?"
Not to be typecast, however, this restaurant also advertised another dish: the "Cathedral of Ham." The Spanish have a fascination with ham. In Madrid, there's the ubiquitous chain store, "El Museo del Jamon." In other towns, there were dishes such as the "Palace of Ham." The most popular bocadillo is the jamon y queso. Eric's purple salad had ham. In the markets, there were entire hocks hanging in majestic rows from the ceiling, hooves still attached. The smell was overpowering, and everywhere in the market. It bore a remarkable similarity to mildewing clothes (since Eric's clothes mildewed, he was able to perform very accurate measurements on this count).
The guidebook-recommended hotel (Hostal Moratin) in Valencia did not have air conditioning or a bathroom in the room, although we had a shower (about three feet by three feet) that opened straight into the room. It was rather warm, and hard to sleep, particularly since the Australians in the room across from us were leaning out the window and talking to each other until 4 a.m. Like every other city, the jackhammers started around 8 a.m. There were also two bell towers, one on the cathedral that only did the time, on the hour, and one somewhere else that did a version of the Westminster strike every 15 minutes, in addition to banging out the hour. The two were not synchronized. The second bell started about when the first one ended. Ancient Valencians probably learned the time by counting the number of bell tolls and dividing by two.
Valencia also had a fantastic market that, unfortunately, smelled like ham. We made it there on the last day and bought lunch and dinner. We took our picnic to the Ciudad de Artes y Ciencias, a futuristic-looking museum of science and technology, with an OmniMAX theater. There were three gleaming, ivory-white buildings, each of which grew out of an enormous pool of pale blue water. A small cement footpath cut across the pool and allowed entrance to the theater and science museum. While we were there, a small army of uniformed cleaners was sweeping the bottom of the pool, which was about three feet deep.
