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A week after the fact, and I think we’re finally recovered from the long weekend in Valencia. It’s a great city to visit for a few days — really manageable size, nice people, and plenty of toddler-friendly attractions.
We only ran into one problem, which stung us pretty bad: the whole idea of ‘lunch at 2:30, dinner between 11 and midnight’ doesn’t mesh well with a strictly-sleep-scheduled baby who naps promptly at 2 and needs to be in bed by 8. We wound up foraging a lot of cold tapas and chocolate & churros, which ain’t half-bad, though the foodie in me quietly wept a few times. (Comment from Azure: “Quietly? I don’t know if you can use the word quietly…”)
‘Twas also a learning experience about what to expect from a kid at attractions. Valencia has a pretty awesome aquarium (L’Oceanografic) and a small zoo in the city gardens, and Az and I were both super-excited about taking Em to these, since she loves animals so much. (Without exaggeration, I’d guess that 40% or so of her current vocabulary is animal names.)
Yes — Emmie had a good time at both the zoo and the aquarium, no doubt. But while Azure and I had debated whether Emmie would enjoy the penguins more than the giraffes, etc. etc., we hadn’t anticipated that the show-stealing attractions would be the aquarium’s crowd-management equipment, and a particular 3-inch-high curb outside the zoo’s Primate House. I mean, Emelyn seemed to like the fish, and all, but it became obvious that she’d have been even happier in a room full of retractable belt barriers and their rope-and-post brethren. As for the curb, well, it was sized ‘juuuust right’ for Emmie to step up and down, and down and up.
This is all on tape, of course. Here’s a video — click through to Vimeo for HD:
Anyhoo: there’s a ton of stuff to love about Valencia — the noise of Las Fallas, the Syd Mead stylings of the City of Arts and Sciences, the constant availability of freshly-fried churros, and so on. My favorite, though, has got to be the Parc Gulliver in the river gardens. Pretty much the coolest ‘concept playground’ I’ve ever seen, it’s a gigantic Gulliver that makes all the children playing on it perfectly Lilluputian in proportion. The folds of Gulliver’s coats are slides and steps; the ropes tying him down are made for climbing up, etc. Genius. (Here’s Emmie and I on it, and here’s a satellite view from Google Maps.)
The Turia river gardens are great, overall — apparently the old river Turia flooded in 1957, nearly destroying the city, so that the city fathers wound up diverting the entire thing elsewhere, and created this long, narrow, meandering park in its place. The landscape changes every few blocks — different fountains, little orchards, bike rental shops, grassy knolls and cafés as you stroll along. Urban planning done well, which you rarely see.
And that’s pretty much it. I suppose it’s worth noting, just for our own memory’s sake, that we actually did run into another major problem, and one which didn’t relate to restuarant opening hours. Problem was that Emmie didn’t sleep. Something about being out of her crib, or hating the hotel’s playpen, I guess. It seriously felt like raising a newborn again — we were up almost every hour to console and coax her back to sleep in our bed. (Although when she was a newborn, she just mewed or cried, and didn’t start jumping up and down wildly in bed.) Hence the quip in the opening line about being ‘recovered’ from the trip.
posted by Jason 2:00 PM
