Life: Idiotropic

If you ask me where I'm from I'll say, Portland because for most of you if I say Mulino, you'll give me the deer in headlights stare and have no clue what I'm talking about.  I might as well say Puzol which, at least until last summer, would envoke that same blank stare.

So ask me where I live now and I'll say, Valencia.  No, I don't live in an upscale flat looking down upon something historically interesting where at any given moment something culturally amazing is happening below.  I live in Puzol which is the Mulino to my Portland, a 30 minute train ride to Valencia.  And while there are moments when I think it would be nice to wake up and be in the middle of something happening - what ever happens to be happening that day, it is nice to sit back in the quiet of my neighborhood and watch the fireworks in Valencia from a distance.

However, as nice and quaint as my little village is, when people come to visit, I'm not going to take them to Puzol.  Ok, that's sort of a lie.  I did take my mom to the Puzol market and my favorite coffee shop, but that's not really a tourist thing.  Today was the day for my mom's first visit to Valencia, i.e. my standard whirlwind historical downtown tour:  Plaza del Ayutamiento, Mercado Central, the Cathedral, and a bunch of stuff in between.


Today I learned that as the sun shines brighter, the crowds of obnoxious camera toting tourists grow bigger.  I also learned that Mondays are the absolute worst day to go to the Mercado Central.  There is a huge outdoor market looping around it with cheap shoes and clothing, but at least a third of the vendors take off and the fish market is completely empty.  I asked the guy at the Greek shop and he said that the rich vendors don't work on Mondays.  So, no phyllo dough for me today, but I did get a huge bunch of basil for just a couple euros.

Another new discovery (because there is always something new to discover here) is another location of the infamous, yet Tiffany-untested Parisian bakery.  The owner of this delicious chain lives in my neighborhood and is rumored to bring breads back in the evenings for neighbors who place their "orders" earlier in the day.  She has 3-4 locations downtown, but I didn't realize how convenient.  So across the dug-up road that will be a new Metro stop, we found ourselves sipping Cafe con leche and nibbling one of the best quiche lorraine that I've ever had.  We split a chartreus green pistacio muffin that bordered on too sweet and made mental notes on everything else that we'd like to try if/when we made it back.  Oh, I will definitely make it back!

Our slow zig zag towards the Cathedral brought us by a huge blue ceramic domed church and a nice park with pidgeon topped statues, walls of graffiti both beautiful and strange, and the Plaza Rotunda where we found the velcro we needed and over-priced pottery that we didn't.

Went back to the pottery shop that I discovered on my first trip to Spain in 2007 and made our mental list of everything that we "had to have" when we went back.  Circled the Cathedral to see the Plaza de la Virgen, listened to the choir boys singing in the Basilica de los Desamparados there, then stopped for pinchos at my favorite pinchos bar on our way back to the train station.