I arrived at Valencia in the evening on a saturday night and had to scramble for a hotel. Saturday evenings are NEVER a good time to arrive in a city without a reservation. I guess that probably goes for anywhere.
I finally found a great hostel called "Home". Home was probably the nicest hostel I have stayed. It is really funky (cool, not smelly) inside and there is a great lounge for hanging out and meeting other travellers, a full kitchen, and a library of music and dvds. The Home hostel was probably the only thing keeping me in Valencia more than a day.
Valencia is on the coast of Spain, and I thought would be a good resort-ish place to hang for a couple days before I went north and partied hard in Barcelona.
I was wrong about it being a resort town. It is a very big city, but paradoxically has not much to see and do. It also has a "beach", but the only thing I saw was a huge swath of concrete and lukewarm dirty bathwater with almost no waves.
The only thing that I thought was really cool is there is a tower in the middle of town where the holy grail supposedly resides. I was always fascinated by King Arthur stories, so that was pretty cool.
On that subject, "Excalibur" is one of the best movies ever made. The scene at the end where the knights of the round table leave the castle to face Mordred with Carl Orff playing in the background and the cherry blossoms falling on their heads is absolutely perfect!
Anyway, I'm at a loss to talk about anything in Valencia.. It was a bummer because I wasted two days there when I could have been in Barcelona with Dan and Kelso. Because of an error on my part I thought they were coming to Barcelona on the 20th, and they actually came on the 18th.
There's a park where they have a bunch of kind of cool modern buildings with not much function but to look cool, but was weak compared to the Park Moderne in Lisbon.
I did have a phenomenal dinner in Valencia-my best meal in Spain-with a bunch of random people from the hostel. The people turned out to be great company as well. There were 3 very funny and canadians from Montreal, 2 great girls from Italy, 1 U Texas student, and a haggard looking french guy. It was just a tremendous dinner. We had a ton of sangria, and most importantly two beautiful paella dishes. Paella was actually invented in Valencia. We had one meat and one seafood. The meat had chicken and pork, and the seafood was just incredible with Shrimp, fish, clams, calimari, and octopus. It was wonderful. The restaurant is called 'El Rall' and is one block away from the Home hostel.
Anyway, bottom line, don't go to Valencia (for that matter, the surrounding resorts, Benidorm and Alicante -CHEESY!). I wouldn't go back. A cool hostel hardly seems like a reason to visit a place..
Barcelona by train tomorrow, thank GOD.