Valencia at Last

OMISSIONS FROM FRANCE:
Fun Facts about Paris
1) The arc de Triumph (12 lanes of traffic in a roundabout) is the only pace where French car insurance isn´t valid, too high risk. Although I didn´t see it, and my reference is from London, I couldn´t help but think everytime I heard about it: look kids big ben, parlaiment.
2) If you spent one minute looking at each piece in the Louvre consecutive, it would take you 250 straight days, no sleep, no food, nada.
3) The grand hotel (i forget its name) houses the winner of the tour de france for the weekend in their suite (about 10,000 Euro a night). They also fly the winner´s home country´s flag for a week instead of the French flag. So that´s right, for seven consecutive years there was one week where the TEXAS flag flew instead of the french. Bit of a technicality actually since Texas was its own country for a brief period.

MY FIRST FEW DAYS IN ESPANA
Although I was quite relieved to not be living out of a suit case for the next month, I have to admit I was a bit let down upon my arrival in Valencia. It doesn´t help that I was coming from Paris, which could make city might look like a nursing home compared to a fraternity house, but I happened to arrive at the exact wrong time. 8pm on Saturday is a quite hour as things don´t start going until around 1130pm here. I was too tired to stay awake, but Sunday wasn´t much better since that´s truly their day of rest: everything is shut down.

When I picked Valencia was looking for something off the beaten bath: big but not touristy. You asked for it, you got it! There are really almost no americans here, but a few other types of Europeans that frequent here since the beaches are so nice.

I´ve been doing a lot of adventuring around the city and it seems pretty cool: very historic. I got a chance to see the port which was awesome since Valencia just got done hosting the Americas Cup. It´s the big yacht races and those ships are amazing. One other really cool cultural thing I just happened upon is something called CAPOEIRA. I heard this drum beat and saw these people congregated and decided to just sit down and watch. It´s kind of a combination of music, singing, dancing and martial arts. People form a circle and take turns ´fighting´and playing instruments while everyone sings. Although the fights aren´t too fast and there is little to no contact, the motion is very fluid and some of the moves are incredible. There´s no set chain of events, it seems one person áttacks while the other defends then counters. If the person opposite reads the attack from then there is contact or just awkwardness, but if they do it right it looks like a fight scene rehearsal for the movies...pretty neat.

Ive met a few local: a bar owner and his regular, Jose and Roberto respectively. They´re nice enough and I´ll usualy stop by for a beer. I also found a bar that does english and spanish conversations on monday nights so I met a few more people there. In the mean time I´m just trying to soak up as much cultural knowledge as possible, in addition to my spanish of course.