Weekend in Valencia

We are having a low key weekend (for us anyway) with just a little adverturing here and there...resting up for next week.  On Tuesday we will head south to Andalusia and the Costa del Sol.  We plan to spend time in Granada, Gibraltar, Seville and Cordoba.  There is much to see in Spain - that is for sure.

Yesterday, we lounged and caught up on mail, the blog, etc and then set out by bus to find the port and the beach to check it out and hopefully, grab a bit of lunch.  The beaches are quite wide here and not nearly as appealing as the ones in France, but that certainly didn't keep them from being quite crowded.  The primary difference is the sand that gets churned up into the water, making it look cloudy and brownish. Plus the beaches are very, very shallow for a long ways out - quite the opposite of Nice where you were over your head almost immediately upon getting in the water.  They fly flags at all the beaches in France and Spain indicating the water quality.  Green is good - that's what we saw in France.  Here around the city they are all yellow (swim at your own risk, use caution).  We understand that further away from the city there are 'green' beaches.

We had a nice lunch along the beach promenade - paying more for our sodas than we did for our sandwiches. We suspect that beer would be cheaper than Cokes but we haven't bought into the whole siesta thing and beers would definitely lead to that.  In general, however, things are much cheaper here than they were in France, especially than in Nice.

We are still tryiing to figure out what the Spanish eat - and when - and where. There are many different kinds of places to eat and it seems they eat about 5 times a day - two breakfasts, lunch, tea/snack, and dinner, and that doesn't include the tapas they have when they are drinking before and after dinner.  Phew.  That's a lot of food.  So far, what we have eaten has been good, but we aren't very brave as we prefer to eat things we can recognize and we prefer to know what we are eating, both are limited factors.

Today, we opted to drive back up the coast just a little ways to visit the town of  Sagunto.  On top of the mountain, there is about 1/2 mile of fortification built by many different groups (Moors, Romans, Visigoths, etc, etc.)  There is also another roman theatre which I was curious to see after enjoying the one in Orange, France so much.

It was a hell of a climb to get up to the top but we made it and the views of the countryside were marvelous up there.  It was a big rocky out cropping right in the middle of a large, very flat plain.  It was a couple of kilometers from the sea. The town of Sagunto was mostly surrdounded by fields, mostly orange groves.  (As you look at these pictures, keep in mind we climbed UP to the top of this hill from the plain below. (Well, I was impressed.)

The ruins were interested but completely unlabeled and it was difficult to figure out what we were looking at.  You could, however, see that  multiple groups had built on the site using different materials and techniques. 

 The problem with ruins is that they have been ruined!  On our way back down the hill we visited the theatre.  It was similar in structure to the one we saw in Orange, but much smaller.  It has been pretty much distroyed somewhere along the line but has been restored - apparently quite controversially.  It is obviously in use today, which is wonderful.

I wonder what of our habitat will remain two thousand years from now.