Where's Bertie? He's still in the commercial Aire at El Saler, just SE of Valencia.
Weather: Gloriously sunny morning, but clouding a little this afternoon. Around 21/22 degrees.
A bus ride of just under 30 minutes deposited us in Valencia this morning for the reasonable price of €1.50 each. I'd consulted our guide book last night and marked on Google Maps all of the points of interest I thought worth visiting, so off we set...
Walking down a shady street towards an eyecatching landmark (not on my list of things to see and I don't think we did find out what it was). It was a cool start to the day before the sun got high enough to heat the air.
...towards the first of those: the central market. A bustling market of the sort seldom found in the UK now that our shopping culture has moved almost entirely towards supermarkets.
I failed to take any photos either of the stalls or the impressive building, save for this one of the cupula.
After a coffee break, we only needed to cross the road to get to the Silk Exchange, where I thought we would pay the entrance fee to look inside, but Mick's vote was to take a walk past the other points of interest first and return later if we fancied it.
Onwards then to the Cathedral - a grand building in a variety of styles that can only be appreciated by walking around the outside of the building and viewing it from different angles. As such, it's not possible to capture its nature in a photo. Indeed, it wasn't even possible to get a good snap of the main entrance, due to a MacDonalds and the huge umbrellas over its pavement tables.
The best I could manage capturing both the tower and the tourist entrance
A bit closer, omitting the tower
After a bit of dithering over whether to go inside (€8 a head), the verdict was that we've seen a lot of cathedrals and perhaps our money could be better spent elsewhere.
That elsewhere wasn't Museu de Bellas Artes (where we arrived via the Torres Serranos (a 14th century tower that used to form a gateway in the city walls)), because entrance to the art gallery is free.
We've probably visited as many art galleries around Europe as we have cathedrals and this one ranked as the least interesting of them all (ignoring the contemporary art galleries; we both struggle to see the merit in most of their displays). I'd read a review that said that 99% of the art is religious, but assumed that was an exaggeration. Having completed a tour (an incredibly quick one by our usual standards) of the first two floors, it appeared that reviewer was absolutely right. We knew there was one other set of rooms on the top floor, but failing to find the access to them (even with a floor plan) we decided to call it a day. Fortunately we went hunting for the toilets on our way out and in so doing stumbled upon the stairway to those second floor galleries. The display up there was modest but, in my opinion, was the only section of the museum worth seeing*.
It was 1315 by the time we left and I was in desperate need of both food and drink. Knowing it would take us a while to find somewhere for lunch, and with cake and water in our bag, we headed across the road and whiled away a goodly chunk of time sitting on a bench, soaking up the sun, in Valencia's remarkable park. You can see most of it on this screen-grab from Google Maps:
It's not a very wide park, but it's extraordinarily long, spanning east and north sides of the city.
View from our bench
Weather: Gloriously sunny morning, but clouding a little this afternoon. Around 21/22 degrees.
A bus ride of just under 30 minutes deposited us in Valencia this morning for the reasonable price of €1.50 each. I'd consulted our guide book last night and marked on Google Maps all of the points of interest I thought worth visiting, so off we set...
...towards the first of those: the central market. A bustling market of the sort seldom found in the UK now that our shopping culture has moved almost entirely towards supermarkets.
After a coffee break, we only needed to cross the road to get to the Silk Exchange, where I thought we would pay the entrance fee to look inside, but Mick's vote was to take a walk past the other points of interest first and return later if we fancied it.
Onwards then to the Cathedral - a grand building in a variety of styles that can only be appreciated by walking around the outside of the building and viewing it from different angles. As such, it's not possible to capture its nature in a photo. Indeed, it wasn't even possible to get a good snap of the main entrance, due to a MacDonalds and the huge umbrellas over its pavement tables.
After a bit of dithering over whether to go inside (€8 a head), the verdict was that we've seen a lot of cathedrals and perhaps our money could be better spent elsewhere.
That elsewhere wasn't Museu de Bellas Artes (where we arrived via the Torres Serranos (a 14th century tower that used to form a gateway in the city walls)), because entrance to the art gallery is free.
We've probably visited as many art galleries around Europe as we have cathedrals and this one ranked as the least interesting of them all (ignoring the contemporary art galleries; we both struggle to see the merit in most of their displays). I'd read a review that said that 99% of the art is religious, but assumed that was an exaggeration. Having completed a tour (an incredibly quick one by our usual standards) of the first two floors, it appeared that reviewer was absolutely right. We knew there was one other set of rooms on the top floor, but failing to find the access to them (even with a floor plan) we decided to call it a day. Fortunately we went hunting for the toilets on our way out and in so doing stumbled upon the stairway to those second floor galleries. The display up there was modest but, in my opinion, was the only section of the museum worth seeing*.
It was 1315 by the time we left and I was in desperate need of both food and drink. Knowing it would take us a while to find somewhere for lunch, and with cake and water in our bag, we headed across the road and whiled away a goodly chunk of time sitting on a bench, soaking up the sun, in Valencia's remarkable park. You can see most of it on this screen-grab from Google Maps:
Eventually we dragged ourselves away from people watching and set about finding an eatery. We failed to spot any out-of-the-way frequented-by-locals sorts of a places, which is probably why lunch was a bit of a disappointment. The food was tasty, but usually after a Spanish Menu del Dia we're so stuffed that we don't want anything else for the rest of the day. Today my meal was so light that if someone had put a bag of chips in front of me after I'd polished off my third course, I could have happily chomped my way through them.
Declaring our visit to the city to be complete (by our not-good-at-cities standards, it had been a success), back to the bus stop we headed, pausing at a cashpoint en-route. Banks in Spain now almost universally charge a fee for cash withdrawals and the first bank we tried wanted €1.82, but then rejected my card. The second wanted €2 and also asked if I wanted them to charge my account in GBP. As they were offering an exchange rate of under 1.07:1, compared with the Mastercard instant rate of 1.178:1, I declined. I took the cash, looked at my receipt and was cross indeed to see a clear statement that contrary to my wishes they had debited my account in GBP.
That was effectively a £30 charge for accessing €300 of our own money! I was absolutely certain that I had clicked the right button on the screen (I'd had Mick double check the wording before I clicked) but there was no way I could prove it after the event. We proceeded down the road to the bus stop chuntering about it being an expensive day in the city and grumbling about what £30 could have bought us (two four course lunches!).
Luck obviously wasn't on our side as we then arrived at the bus stop 1 minute after the bus had left and with 29 minutes to wait for the next, but within the hour we were alighting with just a few hops, skips and jumps along the road to take us back to Bertie. Once here, I went through a rigmarole to access my internet banking, where I found that contrary to the cashpoint receipt, I had been charged in Euros. All's well that ends well!
I'll end with the freak coincidence of the day: remember last week we parked next to the same two motorhomes at motorway services at lunchtime on two consecutive days? I'm pretty sure they're parked next to us tonight. Of all the places they could have gone since we last saw them just south of Bordeaux, and of all the timings they could have worked to, it's a remarkable coincidence. Not unprecedented, mind; amongst other similar incidents, on our second trip out in Bertie we found ourselves parked next to Colin (Bertie's predecessor).
(*Mick doesn't agree with my opinion and on reflection he's right. It wasn't that there was no merit in the religious art displays, rather that there was far too much of it in one place. We've already seen vast quantities of religious art in our travels and with the limited subject matters and remarkably similar portrayals across most of the works, my interest in seeing more is limited.)
Would L'Oceanogrà fic have been worth a visit. The building looks worth it, never mind the exhibition?
ReplyDeleteAre you sticking to the coast?
We drove past L'Oceanografic and the whole of the Cuitat de les Arts y les Ciènces both in Bertie and twice on the bus, and it is indeed a magnificent set of buildings. Had it been more handily located (or had we not been too lazy to walk there), it would have been worth a closer look.
DeleteAs for coast/not coast, we have no plan, but on our previous trip to southern Spain we found ourselves zig-zagging from coast to slightly-inland hills so it's possible that we will venture away from the coast every now and then.
On another site, I saw a recommendation for a Monzo debit card to avoid ATM fees abroad. Maybe worth investigating.
ReplyDeleteOur card allows fee-free withdrawals, but the fees in question are being levied by the operators of the ATMs, rather than the card issuer, so they apply to everyone using that cashpoint. There are still some that are free (Liberbank is apparently one), but the branch we tried to find yesterday wasn't obvious to us at the location stated by Google.
Delete