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Rachel's Eurotrip
This weekend I was in Valencia, Spain for Las Fallas....Possibly the biggest party in spain (actually sevillas april fair might top it, ill let ya know!) It was great! Las fallas is a festival of fire basically, fallas mean fire in Valenciano, which is what they speak there (similar to catalan). There are hundreds of papermache and wood effigies that all different associations make and display all over the city. Some we saw were HUGE, like 3 stories or more high. And then some are small, but the small ones are so pretty because they are decorated very intricately.
The falls basically poke fun at things going on in the world, spain, and Valencia...so clearly I didn't understand what most of them were making fun of. But most of them were caricature like with exaggerated features etc etc. very cool to look at. I will hopefully get pics of them. We were too scared to carry our digital cameras around at night because some of our friends got theirs stolen at careval which is similar in that everyone is in the streets and its crowded and its easy for a pickpocket to take, so we bought disposables and will get Cds to upload pics.
So, when we blar this little fiesta was, but we soon realized it was HUGE because EVERY hotel and hostel in the area was booked solid! We finally found one in an outlying neighborhood and took it for lack of anything else. It definitely made our whole weekend a bit more interesting--it took us about 3 hours each night to get home because there were NO cabs and then we got the bright idea to take the metro the first night and when we got off we were about a 45 minute walk to our hotel with no cabs in sight. Luckily we made friends with somebody on the metro and he gave us a ride. The second night we vowed NOT to take the metro, but after standing on the street for an hour and half trying to no avail to get a cab we DID take the metro, but only to a different part of town where there weren't a million people trying to get a cab (only about half a million ha). We did eventually get cabs after a verrrry long time, im not even going to tell you what time we got back to the hotel...
But, despite all these travel woes it was a great night. Saturday night was probably my most fun night so far. We went to the city in the evening to look at the fallas and have some traditional Valenciano paella. Too bad most restaurants don't start serving food till 9pm and we were starving at 6! So we ended up in some Chinese restaurant that served paella...which wasn'tin some Chinese restaurant that served paella...which wasn't half bad. Then we walked around, and looked at all the lights and fireworks and fallas some more.
Later, we stumbled upon a wedding like tent and somehow or another we ended up hanging out with the people there, there were a bunch of kids around our age (Valenciano of course, not american) and they were sooo fun and nice.. We hung out with them for the rest of the night, they were so fun and inviting to us Americans it was great!
Now we are on our second round of exams, boo. They arent hard just annoying to study for, at least the weather isn't that nice so its not as tempting to be outside relaxing. Adios!
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