Hola from valencia

Hola!

So I'm a few days late and I'm not actually in Valencia anymore but that's ok.

So we arrived to Valencia mid afternoon, everything was closed for siesta and we made our way in the hot hot weather to our hostel. After a brief look around and a quick lunch our first impression of Valencia wasn't a great one. I'd booked us 4 nights here and we thought it was possibly going to be 2 nights too many! After researching on the net for what seemed like hours and we had no better option that wouldn't cost us a ton of euro we decided on making the most of being in the town and staying the full 4 nights. I'm happy to say that first impressions can sometimes be wrong and Valencia proved me very wrong indeed!

My top tip if I give any is definitely do the free walking tour, I say free but there is a level of expectation that you tip the guide at the end, which is fair enough! Our guide was Duncan, a Scotsman who had come to Valencia as a history buff and ran walking tours, tapas tours and pub crawls. He was full of knowledge and for the next 2 hours we walked our way around most of the old town area. It really is a cool little city with so much history!

After filling our brains with Valencian History for 2 hours we followed Duncan on to the tapas tour. It wasn't the best tapas but we got some free sangria(mmmmmmm so good!) and met some amazing people! It's funny how you can pretty much go anywhere in the world and you will always see some Aussies!! It was the best day and we carried on with the drinking of sangria well after the tour ended with our new friends!

Our next day we met up with 2 of the guys we had met on the tapas tour. We aimed to see more of the old town area. Our first stop was into the town hall which was an impressive building in itself but the reason so many people go to look at it is for the amazing timber ceiling that has been carved. The ceiling is from another building which was there. The whole building had been wooden and it had burnt down. Somehow they managed to salvage the ceiling of this burning building and now resides in the town hall.
Our second stop was to the cathedral El Micalet which was built in the 1200's. It's really an amazing cathedral made up of many different chapels paying tribute to different saints and eras. The most important part of this church is it is said to hold the holy grail. Now I'm a little skeptical on this but they apparently have the most convincing and logical reasons for said holy grail to be in their possession. I thought it would be a little bit more extravagant but there it was. A tiny gold cup behind some glass!

After our history stops we decided to hire bikes and we rode through the park.. Cool story about this park actually.. It was once a river but then once the river overflowed and flooded the whole of Valencia. They then decided to reroute the river and it was turned into a park. So now there are thousands of meters of walking tracks, bike lanes and grass that snake itself around the city. So after riding right down to the port area we headed to the aquarium. It's the biggest in Europe and worth checking out. It was pretty cool.
It was extremely hot by this point and so we headed off to the beach and relaxed for the afternoon. It was great!

Our last day in Valencia was probably a bit of a waste. Mitch was hungover so he slept most of the day while I took myself off to central market, a market full of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and cheeses. I loved just walking up and down last the stalls peering at what they all had. The rest of the day I relaxed too.

So after a deceiving start we had a great time in valencia. It was definitely worth staying there for!