World Travel Guide Online

Port to Ibiza
Valencia, Spain

This was my first visit to Valencia, Spain’s third largest city, half way up the Mediterranean coast. Aside from the usual offerings of countless churches, cathedrals and a ripping Old Quarter, Valencia also has the distinction of being the closest and largest port to Ibiza, the island where Spring Break never ends. My plan was to cover Valencia in my usual manner (heavy drinking, miles of painful walking and being resigned to the fact that I would be lost about 50% of the time) and then sort out the cheapest way to get my ass to Ibiza to see if it was truly as naked, booze-soaked and generally unhinged as the E! network would have me believe. For the sake of posterity, of course.

Puerta del Mar

By the time I had found a pension with an open bed, I had toured about three quarters of the city center and had enough conversations with the desk clerks at the full hostals to know that Valencia was in a region with a super screwed up dialect. Most of Spain, and Spanish speakers around the world, myself included, speak “Castilian” Spanish which is the main, root form of the language. But just like English, every place you go can have anywhere from a minor accent change to a full-on independent dialect that barely resembles the original language. Spain has four. Valencian, Catalan, in the north-eastern part of the country (Barcelona, being the regional capital), the ancient Basque language, native to the north-central part of Spain, which truthfully has absolutely no resemblance to Spanish or any other European language for that matter and finally the lesser known Galician, from the northwest region. Valencian appears to be so close to Catalan that the two dialects barely need their own distinctions.

Despite having a decent grasp on Castilian Spanish, I am virtually helpless when trying to converse with someone who only speaks a dialect. Fortunately, those situations are very rare. Everyone in any decent sized city speaks Castilian in addition to their own dialect. By and large, dialect-only speakers are only found out in the country or in tiny, rural towns. Still, the accents and vocabulary adjustments that come with speaking to someone with a dialect as their first language can be enough to bring even a simple conversation to a screeching halt. At first, as I lumbered through Valencia in my hopeless quest to find a room, inching through slow and labored conversations with one person after another, I just thought I was having a bad Spanish day. Just like people have with hair, but with worse consequences. As I wandered around I eventually began to notice that, among other things, the streets signs were written in both Castilian and the Valencian dialect. The realization that all the mis-communication I was experiencing wasn’t entirely the fault of my Spanish language skills made me feel a little better, but still did not help to ease my pursuit of a bed.

This is just wild conjecture, but Valencia may have more square meters of public parks and gardens of any city center in Europe. A large portion of this space is comprised of the dried up Turia riverbed that snakes around the north and eastern parts of the city center which has been transformed into one, long sprawling park. Then there are the countless, massive public gardens, the botanical park, the squares, plazas and boulevards all landscaped and ready to be enjoyed by people of all ages for walks, picnics and public dry humping.

Plaza

Being my first non-resort town Spanish destination on my current tour, I was treated to yet more reminders of long forgotten innate Spanish customs and tendencies while I was in Valencia. The most entertaining of these activities was the overt and unabashed public displays of “affection.” Though the Spanish take this practice to a whole new, naughty, R-rated level. The motive behind all this public mashing is the fact that, other than when they are away at university, the Spaniards tend to live at home until they get married, whether that be at age 22 or 42. Since the boys and girls don’t have their own private apartments to retreat to when they are feeling randy, they simply find themselves a grassy knoll, a bench or even just wall to lean against and they start getting busy in full view of unaffected, dismissive passersby. Parks and the beach are primary locales where you can look in any direction and see deep, sloppy, French kissing, gyrating and groping taking place in broad daylight with horny abandon. The witnesses to these demonstrations just go about their business as if these couples were just sitting there playing checkers. Parents don’t cover their kid’s eyes and grannies totter by (assuming it isn’t the granny of one of the participants) as if copious body fluids weren’t being exchanged right in front of them. I hadn’t seen minor, public sex acts this overt since Iceland and even then, it was happening at the relatively anonymous hour of 3:30AM, in dark night clubs where people were so drunk that they probably couldn’t recognize their own reflections much less distinguish who was doing what to whom else over in the corner.

The one and only serious quibble I have with the Spanish is that if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that there was a law dictating that every man and woman between the ages of 14 and 35 must smoke. Despite their otherwise healthier than average lifestyle, the anti-smoking campaign has not taken off in Spain. “No Smoking” signs are posted in some public places seemingly just for fun, as they are routinely ignored and no one takes it upon themselves to walk around policing the offenders. The only thing that has kept me from proposing marriage to dozens of women while I have been in Spain has been the unfortunate discovery of a goddamn cancer stick clamped between their fingers during the brief moment that I was getting ready to propose when I would look down to make sure that I wasn’t about to kneel in something gross. Upon seeing this gargantuan mood-killer, I would have to quickly cover for the gesture by pretending to tie my shoe.

Botanical Statue

Unfortunately, bull-fighting is still a monster sport in Spain. This unfair, public butchering couldn’t be more underhanded and crooked if the bull had his hooves tied behind his back. If you aren’t well versed on bull-fighting, the basic routine begins when they parade the bull into the ring and then a bunch of pansy-assed chicken-shits ride in on horses and repeatedly stab and cut the animal, so the bull is already half dead before the first “heroic” matador has the ‘nads to step foot in the ring. By then, the bull has lost so much blood he’s seeing dead relatives, so the courageous matador is not-so-surprisingly able to tease and confuse the woozy bull into repeatedly charging and missing him while he continues the massacre by goring the bull with spears. Needless to say that this “contest” would end with the matador in a body bag within the first 30 seconds if things were started on even, uninjured ground. Finally after three matadors have had their chance to perforate the bull into collapsing to the ground, the crowd showers the “valiant” men with flowers. Woo hoo. Sadly, this national treasure is so deeply intermingled into the historical Spanish way of life that starting an argument about how unfair and spineless the whole spectacle is would only succeed in getting your ass run out of town into the nearest desert, blindfolded and strapped to a deranged horse.

In Valencia Saturday night is wedding spectacle night. It’s almost impossible to take a picture on a Saturday in Valencia without getting a wedding party somewhere in the frame. There’s a church on almost every block and each and every one of them has a wedding party swarming around it. Spanish weddings are done in huge fashion, putting the already overly-extravagant U.S. wedding practices to shame. Every single wedding has a fleet of specially decked out rental cars, massive decorations adorning the churches, a small but impressive fireworks display and a full-on professional media team, that includes a minimum of two still photographers and three video cameramen following the couple through every step of their day from the moment they wake up in the morning all the way through (if it were up to me) to the consummation of the marriage.

Once I felt that I had the courage for the walk, I ambled the considerable distance down to the port to look into getting on a ferry to Ibiza. My main concern was that once I got my ass to the island, the only accommodations available would be the nauseatingly over-priced resorts. Then I ran across a few seasoned Ibiza veterans who let me in on a secret. Not only is one night of crazed Ibiza partying enough to eradicate the urge from your system for about six months, but during that one day/night/following morning you probably don’t spend more than 15 cumulative minutes in your hotel room. So, to avoid the sticker shock of the resorts, these women were just going to carry out the excursion to Ibiza as one long, crazed day trip, departing Valencia in the morning, taking the four hour ferry ride to Ibiza, spending the day on the beach and then heading straight for the clubs where they would party like maniacs until 8:00 the next morning and jump on the first ferry back to Valencia. Econo-partying at it’s finest! That was before I got a taste of the ferry industry’s gouging of the Ibiza-goers. The round trip price was 105 euros (US$117). When you added that to the other expenses of a day in Ibiza – food, club cover charges (30 euros/US$37.50!!!), booze, 12 count box of condoms – that 24 hours was easily going to set me back US$200. Screw that! I’m sure Ibiza is the Disney World of parties, but for US$200 I could party like a college freshman for four nights straight in any other city in Europe! As much as I wanted to see the debauchery that Ibiza had to offer, there was no way that I was going to drop that much coin for the experience, so I was sadly forced to strike it from my itinerary.

Huge, scary tree

Although I was more than happy with the sangria, I nearly disintegrated into a frothing tizzy trying to find someone to serve me “Agua de Valencia” (Water of Valencia). According to the locals that turned me on to the drink, it reportedly consists of orange juice, Champaign and vodka; as refreshing and potent a drink as I could ever hope for, but I went into at least 10 bars and to my raging consternation none of them would make it for me. I eventually gave up, thinking that this was possibly a bait-and-switch practical joke the Valencians liked to play on alcoholic tourists.

My refreshed anti-tourist inclination still had a firm grip on my attitude while I was in Valencia, keeping me away from nearly every guidebook attraction that the city had to offer. I passed up the very cool sounding, but the not very Spanish-like Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias – Valencia’s planetarium, IMAX theater, science museum and aquarium – as well as the cathedral, knowing that much larger, brain-stalling cathedrals awaited my unsullied attention in Italy. My lifelong, inexplicable under-appreciation for painting ruled out the Museo de Bellas Artes and although the sculpted exterior of the Palacio del Marqués de Dos Aguas (Marquis of Two Waters Palace) was impressive enough to keep me lingering for 15 minutes, my earlier trek to the port and back had incapacitated any cravings that I might have had to enter and view the Museo de Cerámica (Museum of Ceramics).

Ultimately, I was content to spend most of my time in Valencia walking around, taking in the city scene and the aforementioned array of parks, gardens, squares, plazas and boulevards before retiring to a bar for the evenings and randomly accosting locals over several sangrias. A very Spanish schedule

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