Happy Restaurant Day III (IV?)

A lazy couple of days. On Thursday, after lunch at the apartment, we walked over to Rusaffa for our daily check on Fallas preparations. The work continues, frustratingly slowly, on erecting the lights along Sueca and Cuba. My goodness, what a project! We counted five cherry pickers with workers putting up lights on one block of Sueca alone. It must cost a fortune in labour and equipment rentals.

There is still no sign of the Fallas statues. Anywhere in the city. We’re wondering if they’ve changed the rules, and the community groups are not allowed to jump the gun anymore. In 2012 when we were here, they were building the statues on Sueca and Cuba for well over a week before the official festival opening. The statues typically arrive at the site on flatbed tractor trailers, wrapped in plastic, on wooden pallets. Big ones – and the two at those corners are among the biggest – come in sections. They have to be assembled on site by the artists and then patched and sometimes repainted.

But this year, so far, nada.

The good news: churro stands are sprouting all over the city. Churros – very fresh and delicious Spanish-style donuts, often dipped in chocolate – are available year-round in a few places, but at Fallas, they erect stalls at every other street corner. We haven’t had any yet, but we will. Think Krispy Kreme.

After our walkabout in the neighbourhood, we found a bar and sat in the sun to have a drink. The first place we tried had a curious idea of service: nobody came near us for 15 minutes, although there were two wait staff working the outdoor tables. They studiously ignored us, even when we hailed them. One seemed mostly intent on nattering with his buddies at another table. In the end, we got up and walked across the street to the bar on the opposit corner. It still took us almost ten minutes to get served. What is it with this neighbourhood? They don’t like foreigners maybe?

We sat and watched the electricians string lights on the multi-storey wooden frames across the street. Modern cherry pickers are fascinating to watch. They allow the workers in the basket to adjust height and angle themselves from a control panel. The base below – in the case of the nearest one to us, it was a truck raised off the ground on jacks – is completely unattended. They elevate the thing three or four storeys sometimes, and swivel and pivot to position themselves.

We saw them go up with strings of LED lights – something like Christmas lights, only bigger bulbs – which they were attaching to the wooden frames. At one point, they came back to street level, and the one guy headed into the cerveceria where we were sitting for a quick pincho (small glass of beer). Or maybe it was just for a pee. Karen noted that although they have harnesses, which they’re presumably supposed to tether to the platform, they weren’t tethered. They were wearing safety helmets, though. So no problem: if they fall from four storeys up because they’re not tethered, the helmet will save them. Sure.

After 40 minutes of watching men at work (one of Karen’s favourite pastimes since the building started across the street at home), we grew tired of the constant beep-beeping from another, older cherry picker down the street and hightailed it out of there. We wandered around in the Rusaffa market area, looking for likely Friday restaurnats, but didn’t see anything terrifically compelling.

I went out on my own later in the afternoon, to photograph the Calatrava bridge in the afternoon sun, and check my shoe store. The outing was a complete bust. Or almost.

I grabbed a Valenbisi bike at the nearest station to us, a few blocks away on the other side of Guillem de Castro (the major thoroughfare at the end of our street), and rode through the centre to the bridge. I had completely missed the light. The bridge looked quite prosaic in the gloom cast by nearby buildings. However, the triumphal arch in the traffic circle around the corner had some nice late afternoon sun on it. Ditto the immense fig tree in a park across the street. (I could spend hours photographing fig trees – and probably still come away frustrated at not getting anything that really shows how fantastic they are.)

The shoe store was also a bust. The boots I was interested in turned out to be Campers, the mid-to-high-end Spanish brand I like. But when I looked at them closely, I didn’t like them as much. The shop had other on-sale Campers too, but they’re not as well made as the ones I bought a few years ago and have worn out. The newer ones are made more like fashion shoes, with cheap, super lightweight plastic soles, and the uppers glued, not sewn, to the soles. Not worth the $130 or so for sale items. And non-sale Campers are priced from €165 or so ($250). Way too rich for my blood.

So I rode home and cooked Karen a delicious dinner. Well, a dinner.

I haven’t said anything about the TV we’re watching. Karen thinks we watch a shameful amount. I don’t think 90 minutes or so of an evening is too much – although it is pretty much every evening. We’re watching exclusively Netflix Spain, which has an even smaller selection than Netflix Canada, and much of it Spanish-language fare that doesn’t appeal.

The best thing we’ve seen (but finally finished last night) is Narcos, a ten-part mini-series about Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord, head of the Medellin Cartel of the 1980s and 1990s. It's also about the Colombian and American government forces that fought him, sometimes in pitched battles. It’s a chilling portrait of a psychopath. It manages the trick of humanizing the man without making him any less detestable – in fact, possibly more detestable for having a wife, mother and children he professes to love, while murdering and destroying anyone who gets in his way without a twinge of remorse. The series, a Netflix original, is very well done.

We had to scurry to Wikipedia last night to remind ourselves how the real Escobar ended, because the series finishes before Pablo does. As I thought I remembered, he was tracked after escaping custody, and killed in a gunfight near his home turf in Medellin province – or, according to some accounts, put a bullet in his own head to avoid capture. This was in 1993.

The other things we’ve been watching are far less serious. Reign, for example, is an absurd costume drama set in the French court in the 1500s, focusing on a young Mary Queen of Scots, who has come to marry the future King of France as part of a Catholic alliance against protestant England. What’s absurd about it is the anachronisms – quite deliberate – and the fact that most of the characters are played by ridiculously beautiful young British actors, dressed in ridiculously fetching outfits, especially the girls’ frocks, based only very loosely on the real styles of the period. One of the exceptions to the casting rule is our own Megan Follows, who is merely comely, in a nice turn as the middle-aged French queen, Catherine de Midici. She’s a scheming, amoral hag, but one overflowing with mother love. It’s really too much!

And then there are the absurd implausibilities. Why is the French court, for example, based in a lonely gothic castle apparently far from Paris? With forests all around it, filled with fanatical pagans devoted to a cult of human sacrifice? If you saw A Knight’s Tale, the Heath Ledger vehicle of a few years back, you have some idea of the cheerful disrespect for historical accuracy and plausibility. As in that movie, at points of supposedly high emotion, the sound track swells with throbbing, contemporary pop music. It’s too stupid! But the eye candy and an enjoyable sense of outrage at it keep drawing us back.

It was still early when we’d finished our ration of TV, so we had a late Scrabble match. I don’t know whether I’ve gotten much better suddenly, or Karen has lost her mojo, but I won again, and have won most of our games this trip. Perhaps my devotion to cryptic crosswords has helped. Or more likely, I’ve just had an incredible run of luck.

Yesterday, Friday, was lunch-out day, and another beauty: mostly sunny and heading for 22°C. We left the apartment about one o’clock with the idea of exploring the little side streets between here and the central market. When we’re not actually looking for a place to eat, we see all kinds of restaurants that look great, with interesting menus. When we need one, we can’t find any that appeal. We wandered for over an hour, first in the area we planned, then further afield, over towards the main squares in the centre, and then further beyond still, into Carmen.

Typical Valencian streetscape encountered near central market on way to lunch

Meanwhile, the centre is filling up with people come to watch the mascletas, the lunch-hour fireworks in the city hall square. We needed to find a spot before they all came streaming back, looking for places to eat and drink. In the end, we failed utterly in our avowed mission to find another typically Spanish menu-del-dia restaurant with a sunny outdoor patio, and returned to Casa Paquito, the first place we discovered near Plaza Tossel in Carmen.

Casa Paquito dining room

It was another good meal for very little money (by Canadian standards – under $40 at the current exchange, rate for three courses each, three drinks, bread and service.) I had a small plate of paella invierno to start, winter paella, a variation on the dish invented here in Valencia, this one with a whole roast artichoke, chicken and rabbit. Delicious. Karen had a dish with flat green beans in a tomato and ham sauce, also good. For mains, Karen had roast chicken -  a little too salty for her taste, she reported – and I had very tasty and perfectly cooked, but chewy, lamb chops. Desert was ice cream for Karen, and for me, baked calabaza (pumpkin) that wasn’t sweet enough to satisfy my very sweet tooth. And lots of the quite pleasant house white wine. Again the clientele was predominantly Spanish, although there was one other tourist couple.

Shop window spotted in street near Central Market: no idea what this is about

On the way home, between the market and Guillem de Castro, we stumbled on another long wall of brilliantly done street art in an out-of-the-way square. I’ve completely reversed my early assessment of the quality of the current crop of street art. It’s true there is less of the edgy, transgressive, Banksy-style stuff that first attracted me, with its sly, usually anti-establishment humour and quirkiness. But a lot of the newer pieces are, in their way, more accomplished. This is possibly a function of a more tolerant attitude towards street art by city officials. The artists now have time, and license, to do more than stealth stencilling.

One thing I’ve been noticing and enjoying is the subtle kinds of collaboration among artists, sometimes intended, sometimes not, and the layering of work. Look at the shot above of the classical statues, the way it merges smoothly into the quite different expressionist painting beside it, by another artist. And the way it appears to have been painted over some earlier tagging, in a way that deliberately lets the tagging show through underneath. Or maybe the underlying tagging was part of the main artist’s work? Hard to say, but either way, intriguing. The wall in this series looks to be the work of three or four different artists, including the ubiquitous Julieta, whose signature is the anime-style doll figures.

Seynor de la Seda: Mr. Silk - looks like a mummy with silk worms crawling out of him

I know, I know: blather, blather, blather, street art, blather, blather...

This guy - part zombie, part cyborg? - was a sidebar on a nearby wall

On Guillem de Castro: the kind of architectural flourish you start to take for granted in old European cities

We whiled away the rest of the afternoon and evening back at the apartment with the balcony doors open to the mild fresh air (and, unfortunately, traffic noise), reading, working on photographs – and ultimately watching TV. We ate little. Other than chocolate, of course. 

View down Calle Pare Joffre from our front balcony, twilight