We will go there by train and as far as I understand the journey takes about an hour; according to Google Maps it’s around 80km.

Utiel is to the west of Valencia and it is an old historical town. We will visit a honey museum, get a tour through the pitoresque center and visit a bodega (vineyard)!
After all the sightseeing we will go to have a traditional village lunch including wine! And then I guess it’s time for siesta.

See the Whole Map on Google with pictures and more.

Late afternoon we will return to Valencia and we will probably try to discover the club scene…

I look forward to a nice day out and will have pictures upon my return!

You probably also have noticed posts with links coming in every day at 4am. No, that is not me being still awake (although sometimes I am), it’s delicious posting a feed of my bookmarks of that day.

Soon you will also find a similar feed of Twitter, which I joined last night. So even though I have no news to really write about, still every time I bookmark sth interesting on the web and every time I place sth short on Twitter, you’ll find it back here. Hardly any of my friends is on Twitter it seems and if you can’t pull them in it, you’d better bring it to them

Had quite a nice day. When I woke up to my alarm clock today, the sky was a blue blanket! That helps to put a smile on my face! Went to check some language schools for Mia and myself today. First school was nice, run by a single guy it seems, His English was ok, though heavily accented. The second school was much more professional, in the historical center of Valencia, just east of “Placa de la Reina“.

Just finished a 40-page WordPress-CMS Tutorial (links to PDF) this weekend and still in the writing mood, I made an as objective as possible brief for Mia; she is the one that has to study the longest time after all.
Now the choice has been made, fortunately for the 2nd school, so the wheels are set in motion. I start on Monday with my 12 weeks intensive course and Mia’s target date is to start on November 17 with her super-intensive 20 weeks course followed by 3 weeks preparation of DELE Superior, which should enable her to study an MBA in Spanish for the next two years.

I have not been able to find any Chinese ingredients here, or resembling for that matter. And although I still don’t have a real craving for Chinese food, which is weird in itself, I wouldn’t mind scoring some real chillies and soy-sauce (jiangyou).
This evening I found a reasonably compromise. In another supermercado than the one next door I found “semi-picante” peppers and “soja sauce”, it’s sweet and has no resemblance whatsoever with the real stuff except the colour! It’s more than Dutch “ketjap” than anything else!
Anyways I cut a few peppers up and mixed them with chicken, threw a bit of salt over it and quite a lot of red pepper powder (it says picante, but it’s definitely not chilly). Fried an onion in the pan, added the chicken-mix, added some long beans and added a tomato and garlic as well as some salt and fresh-ground pepper.
And it actually tasted quite good! So for now, if I need my spicy-fix, I know what to do!

Valencia airport is tiny, similar to Aruba, and in the arrival hall I headed to the tourist-info. As there was some kind of fair going on in town, I had not been able to book a hotel in advance, but fortunately there was a nice hotel available for the next five days right in the centre of town, the Sorolla Centro on Convento Santa Clara, a pedestrian area near de railway station and the Plaza del Torro.

After putting my things in my room I went out, bought a phone card and left for some city exploration.

A couple of days earlier Rene had showed me photos of their visit to Valencia and within a few minutes I arrived at a spot, near Plaza del Ayuntamiento, that he had described as a very beautiful one, funny.

The great thing about the historical centre of Valencia is that everything is walkable and there are so many lovely cathedrals, squares and other buildings to be seen!

One thing that caught my attention is that many women here smoke on the street, even when they are walking. Always hear from women who smoke that such is not done. In Spain this doesn’t seem to matter…

I had a lovely dinner at a tapas place near the hotel.

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