¡Hola desde Valencia!

It’s the end of my first week in Valencia, so now seems like an appropriate time to write my first blog post for all of you.

The story so far…

In June I visited some of you in school, gave you a little presentation about Spain and told you about what I am going to be doing during my year abroad in Valencia. You came up with many questions that I now have to set out to answer, so to give you a reminder, here they are (in no particular order):

1.     How often do Spaniards get takeaway?

2.     What holidays do they celebrate in Spain?

3.     Who is my favourite football player?

4.     What time do Spaniards eat?

5.     What is their traditional dress?

6.     Do they have English restaurants?

7.     How many beaches are there in Spain?

8.     Do Spaniards have deep voices?

9.     Do they have a traditional food?

10.   Do they have a typical activity?

11.   Do they have any special events?

12.   Do they have many crimes?

13.   What do they eat?

14.   What is unique to Spain?

15.   Do they wear a lot of red?

16.   What is the population of Spain?

17.   Are fashion, food and popular culture icons the same as in England?

18.   Are Christmas/Birthdays celebrated the same way in Spain?

19.   What do Spanish people think of British people?

20.   Do Spanish people speak fast?

I will endeavour to answer these questions, and any more that you come up with during my time here. If you have another question, simply write it in the comments, and then I’ll be able to see and, hopefully, respond to it. Feel free to make any other comments as well. It will be really good for me to see if anything I write sparks any interesting conversation! This is meant to be an interactive experience, so I would really value your opinions on my posts or any topic I mention.

My first week:

I arrived on Monday morning after a seriously delayed flight and an apparent power cut in Valencia Airport when I was trying to collect my luggage. My mum came with me, I think she thought it would be a mini holiday, and I’m sorry to say I disappointed her on that front as you will soon see!

We got to the apartment where we would be staying while I looked for accommodation. It’s quite well placed as it’s between the campus where I’ll be studying and the area where I wanted to search.

I tried to add in a zoomed in box of my commute, but I’m not that great at Photoshop and you can’t read it, so I’ll say I’m living in Benimaclet, which is a really popular area with students, and my campus is the Burjassot campus of the Universitat de València*. You can find it on Google Maps.

It would be very dull to report my daily activities, but I have now found a place to live for the next nine months. I am going to be in an apartment really close to a tram stop to get to the campus every day. I am living with a young family and another Erasmus student; a medic from Germany. The parents in the family are students at the moment, with one year of their post-graduate studies to go, so they’re very busy at the moment. Their son is only seven years old and very sweet! Everyone has been lovely so far and today (Sun 30/08/15) is the first day I’ve properly moved in.

Having said that, I have been moving things in and going shopping for more “essentials” since Thursday. One thing to note about this area of Spain is that things are less expensive than in London. There are shops called Chinas, where you can buy almost anything to furnish a house at very reasonable prices, so I spent a lot of time there getting things like drying racks and laundry baskets, because I was only able to take clothes and some toiletries with me.

Tomorrow I am going to sort out my monthly tram pass and go and visit the campus so I can get my bearings and know where to go when I meet my Project Supervisor on Tuesday. 

Last night was the final night my mum was with me, and as it’s her birthday soon, I decided to take her out to dinner as we hadn’t been out all week. We went to a restaurant close to our apartment, and sat under a street lamp, in rather uninspiring surroundings of parked cars. We ordered some sangria, croquetas de bacalao, and paella vegeteriana for two. It would have easily fed four people with some to spare, so I asked the waitress if I could take away the leftovers, which I now have to work my way through before I get to cooking properly for myself!

Croquetas – mashed potato with bacalao (salted cod) which is then shaped into cylinders, covered in breadcrumbs and deep fried.

Paella –  A traditional rice dish of the region, cooked and served in a special paella pan, it was far too much, but so good.

Sangria – a drink, traditionally made with red wine and oranges, it's a bit like cold mulled wine. We soon discovered this one was particularly delicious because each glass had a tablespoon of sugar in the bottom.

Things to come:

This has been a brief introduction to my time Valencia so far, but as you can probably tell, I haven’t had very much opportunity to explore and experience the culture yet. So what I have done is planned a theme for each of the subsequent months which I can use as a scaffold to answer your questions, as well as tell you a bit about my personal experiences of the month.

I will also try to write some of the blog in Spanish for you all to read a bit too!

¡Gracias por leer!

*For those of you who might be a bit confused: “Universitat de València” doesn’t look much like any Spanish you’ve ever seen, and that’s because it isn’t! This is Valenciano, and I hope to cover the variety of languages that there are in Spain in one of my posts this year.