Cabanyal

Our outing on Thursday was a bike ride from the apartment to a neighbourhood near the beach called Cabanyal. It’s a working class area that used to be home to folks who worked in fishing and shipping. It’s about a 30-minute ride that took us, part of the way, along the river by the City of Arts and Sciences. The day was mild and, at this point, sunny. It was a good ride.

Cabanyal is another down-at-heels neighbourhood – in places, quite seedy – but lacks the bohemian charm and vibrance of Carmen. The streets are narrow, the houses small. Many of them are single-family dwellings – unusual in this city – but always attached. The architecture is quite different from other neighbourhoods; it’s one of the few low-rise areas in central Valencia. A lot of the houses remind me a bit of the shotgun houses in poorer parts of New Orleans. Most notable about Cabanyal’s architecture is the use of decorative tile work on building fronts. You see it in other places, including on some quite modern buildings, usually very artfully done. But here, it is often the entire front of the house that is tiled, often, it seems, just to cover up ugly exterior cladding. (See pic below.)

We just happened to hit Cabanyal on market day. Six or eight blocks of streets were blocked off to vehicle traffic. It’s not our type of market, more a flea market, with endless stalls selling cheap clothes, toys and kitchenware. You also see folks selling stuff from a blanket spread on the pavement, sometimes stuff picked from garbage bins. We haven’t seen as many garbage pickers this year as we did in 2011 and 2012, perhaps because the economy is recovering a little, but we have seen some.

(As we were walking in a more affluent neighbourhood later in the day, we passed a garbage picker who had just been diving for scrap metal – for which there is evidently a fair market here. A local denizen of the neighbourhood passed us, muttering complaints against the poor fellow. But it’s a legitimate business, and what else are the chronically unemployed supposed to do?)

The Cabanyal market is also known as a place where people sell stolen goods. As we were leaving, we saw a bunch of heavily armed police on the edge of the market. Karen read somewhere that they do periodic raids to catch Cabanyal fences.

We walked down to the beach, but it was getting late and quite blustery, so we decided to bike back to the apartment for lunch. The wind wasn’t quite directly into our faces, but almost, and very stiff. It made riding slow and tedious. The Valenbisi bikes are not exactly lightweight racers that slice through the air.

We rode up Avenida dels Tarongers (avenue of oranges in Valencian), a route we took a couple of times when we were here last time. It’s a broad boulevard with a tram running up the middle and a nice off-street bike path running beside it. The road goes right through the middle of the suburban university zone. The University of Valencia is on one side, the Polytechnic University of Valencia on the other. They’re both massive and modern. There are also parts of the University of Valencia closer to the centre, plus the separate Catholic University right in the centre. (Combined enrollment of the three universities is over 90,000 students!)

After we’d been cycling for awhile, it dawned on us that we were probably starting to go a little too far in the wrong direction, so we cut in towards the city centre and rode along another off-street bike path almost to the river. We ditched the bikes there and walked the rest of the way home through the centre. One thing that struck me again on our outing today is how densely populated this city is. Everywhere you look – except Cabanyal and Carmen – you see these massive aparment blocks. I guess that’s how they fit 800,000 people into a city that is probably smaller in area than London, Ontario.

By the time we got home, we were officially on Spanish time – two is about when people eat lunch here. 

When we were walking home, we felt a few spits of rain, although the sun was still shining through clouds that had gotten thicker all day. A little after we got back, it rained in earnest, for maybe 15 minutes. We had fully intended to get out again, but were both pretty tired from our exertions. I whiled away the late afternoon taking pictures out our juliette balcony windows of the surrounding rooftops in the setting sun. I used the high dynamic range (HDR) technique – where you take three shots at different exposures and use software to merge them to create a final image that appears evenly lit from corner to corner.

***

Today, Friday, was to be a red-letter day: our first meal out in Valencia since we arrived. This may seem strange given that we’ve been here almost two weeks. Part of it is that we’re incredibly cheap, not to mention poor. We don’t go out to restaurants much at home either. But also, neither of us was feeling great for most of those two weeks. And we do have a fully equipped kitchen in our apartment, and grocery stores with good cheap food nearby. We do tend to go out more often when we're here, but rarely more than once a week, and it's usually for lunch, as it was today, when prices are lower. 

Karen chose one of the restaurants recommended by our landlady, and several other people who have stayed in the apartment and commented on it in the house book. It’s called El Perderniz. It’s in a fairly affluent residential district about eight blocks from our apartment in the opposite direction from the centre. El Perderniz gets four and a half stars on TripAdvisor and is ranked number 14 in the city – that’s number 14 of 2,646 restaurants, so it's a fairly high recommendation. 

The restaurant is owned and operated by a doctor (of sports medicine and rehabilitation) who does the restaurant as a passion project. He was there today, a very personable fellow who made recommendations and chatted with us in perfect English. He had done some of his medical training in Rochester NY, and must have spent some time there to learn English so well. He told us he had worked at one point for the Washington Redskins (football team), and that he had been often to Canada.

It’s not our usual type of cheap-and-cheerful Valencian restaurant, with a fixed price menu del dia. It was quite a bit more expensive for that reason, and also because the food was much finer and more inventively prepared. We had two of the good doctor’s recommended “tapas” starters: a melange of quail, rabbit and ham in a kind of paste that you ate with bread, and peppers stuffed with mushrooms and topped with truffles from the region (who knew you could get truffles in Spain?). Both were good, but very rich. This was followed by a shared steak with roasted peppers and frites. The doctor also insisted on gifting me with a sample of his squid and scallops. The scallop was fabulous; I wasn’t quite as keen on the squid. 

We drank a local white wine made from Verdejo grapes, traditionally grown in the Rueda region in northwest Spain, but now, according to the doctor, grown in the Valencia region as well. Crisp and fruity. To finish off, he brought us chocolate truffles and tiny mugs of some surprisingly pleasant dessert wine, also grown in Spain. Pretty good grub. 

Now Karen is resting up before we go out for a walk to try and wear off the effects of our over-indulging. It is unlikely we will eat again today.

***

In the end, I went out on my own. Karen was feeling a little arthritic after a night of restless sleep - either that or she was too weighed down by all the food we ate at lunch.

Near MuVIM

I wandered first over to MuVIM, the Valencian Museum of Illustration and Modernity, which re-opened today. The museum apparently has a new director and staff, and the new exhibit, "La Modernidad Republicana En Valencia," marks a return to the institution's mandate as a "museum of ideas." It's about the figurative art scene in Valencia in the tumultuous period of the republic (when Spain briefly had a more or less democratic government, before the civil war and Franco's take-over) and just after - 1928-1942. I didn't go in, just grabbed a brochure for later.

Church near Mercado Centrale

From there, I meandered through the centre into Carmen, looking for things to photograph - and found some. It was still very mild, although heavily overcast - at home, you would think rain was inevitable and imminent, but not so here. I was walking very fast. By the time I got back to the apartment an hour and half later, I was quite overheated.

I thought these two favourites from last time - Snail Cowboys and Scary Yellow Guy With Balloons - had been painted over, but here they are