Paella Valenciana

From Almería I rode a slow bus half way up Spain´s Mediterranean coast to Valencia. With my vacation winding down, I didn´t have much planning or reading to do, so the ride was a bit on the boring side. The movie on the bus was "The Killing Fields" about US and Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia. The movie was dubbed in Spanish and had Spanish subtitles, but the two translations were very different, and I enjoyed noting the multiple ways to say the same thing in Spanish (a feature of the language that sometimes causes difficulties for foreigners).

The bus passed through Benidorm, a coastal resort town filled with high-rise hotels and apartments. I have successfully avoided mmost of the Mediterranean coastline in my travels, a part of Spain that many Spaniards don´t consider to be Spanish at all. Valencia, while also on the coast, did not have the feel of a resort town. Its beach was far from the heart of the city, and I saw very few tourists in the two days I was there.

Valencia is the birthplace of paella, and many Spaniards told me to try it there, because some of the ingredients (including the water for boiling the rice) are unique to the region. This mission proved more difficult than I first anticipated. I arrived in the town in the late afternoon, and arranged to have dinner with the French girls I met in Madrid a couple of weeks before. However, when we met, it turned out they were not in the mood for paella, and most restaurants required a minimum of 2 persons to prepare it. I had to settle for tapas, which were admittedly good, since we went to a less touristy area of town. The girls were mostly from Paris, and were studying in Valencia as part of a semester-abroad program, so they had a couple of months to scope out the nicer and cheaper restaurants. Incidentally, it seemed to me that Valencia was full of students, even more so than Salamanca, and it also seemed that the vast majority of the students were female (a statistical fact confirmed to me by several Spaniards).

The next day, I ventured out in search of paella on my own, and ended up trying it at a rather touristy spot, where it wasn´t particularly good. However, by that point, I had worked up quite an appetite wandering around the large central marketplace, and the food quality no longer mattered that much. To digest the oily paella (Spain produces half of the world´s olive oil, and, from the appearance of most dishes, olive oil also accounts for half of the calories in a Spanish diet) I wandered along Valencia´s enormous dry riverbed, which has been turned into a beautiful park, winding its way through the entire city. The river, I was told, has been diverted to a new course a long time ago, so there was no chance of it suddenly flooding back over its original course.

In my second evening in Valencia I finally tried an authentic Valencian paella, thanks to one of the French girls who joined me for dinner that night and took me to a much better restaurant than I could have found on my own. In addition, I got to try "Agua de Valencia," a local cocktail made from fresh orange juice, champagne and vodka. Satisfied that I had gotten the best of the city, I packed my bags for Tarragona, my last stop on the way back to Barcelona.