January, 29th 2011
I dont even know where to begin.
i guess i will start at wednesday, when i left on the study journey to valencia. (side note: i did not chose to call this a study journey)... so i had to get up at the crack of dawn, 715 to get to the busses at 815 am right near school to leave for valencia. Little did we know, we were taking a small side trip to a town called taragona. On the bus, the teacher told us that it was a very historic city, filled with ruins from the roman times and other interesting things.
FAIL.
we get to taragona, after what was about a 3.5 hour bus ride, and see nothing but a destroyed town. there was literally NOTHING to do there, i dont know how regular people survive there. So we took a tour, from a lady who literally could barely speak english, in the freezing cold. we were all miserable. we got to climb to the top of a " fortress" which we leared was a place of protection for the city , where guards could protect them from attacks at the small river that ran through the city. that would have been cool if the town had chosen to take better care of the place, buttttt it was not. got some cool pictures from the top, a view of the whole city and river which actually turned out quite nice. Other than that, it was a failure, IES knew it too, so it was sort of comedic by the end of it....
from there we took another drive to valencia, we were alloewd to relax the rest of the night, so a few of us went to get coffee and dessert at a cafe near the hotel. The hotel was actually surpisingly nice ( im sure that fee was included somewhere hidden in the tuition , so thanks) and they provided 2 meals a day for us, which is nice considering we have become scavengers for a cheap meal. After the cafe & dinner, we headed out to an irish pub that we saw on the walk around town earlier. The town of Valencia is gorgeous might i add. It looks much more " european" than barcelona, every building has the beautiful neo-classical look too it, with the rounded corners and huge black decorated windows. It would have been much nicer had it not been raining both days we were there :(. It was interesting to learn that the peopel of valencia, while they speak catalan, decided not to call it that, because of an age old struggle the two cities have with eachtoerher. The city was very beautiful, we visited the local market and saw other interesting buildings liek their church which claimed to house some holy relics--although that is probably not true.
The next day, i got to try Horchata which is a traditional valencian milk drink make from nuts, as well as a typical paella. Lso, we got to go to the science city which was built soley for the purpose of increasing tourism in Valencia, we saw the aquarium and the other huge structures which were very moderm looking
After the tour we once again headed home for some much needed R & R.
That night we jsut had a drink or two in the hotel with a bunch of the program kids and went to bed early..wakeup call was at 7 the next day :(
Today, the last day of the trip we did some more interesting things thankfully. We took a tour of the Torres vineyards, the largest wine producer in spain, followed by a traditional lunch of Calcotadas . A calcotada is an onion that has been planted, replanted, burned and dried out over a long period of time. by the end of it, they look like a very long Leek or sprout type of thing, When they get to the table they are filled with a black charred layer, which you peel off by pulling the skin apart from the leaves, as you would with a shrimp tail if you wanted to take the tail part off ( you know what i mean, how you hold it down and pull...etc) then you dip it in a special sauce and hang it over your head and slowly lower it into your mouth! very fun and messy! Then we had the second part of the dish which is just vegetables and meat. very delicious.
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