We  love our apartment and especially its location.  Situated Far From the “Maddening” crowd, we love that we get to experience life as it actually happens in Valencia.  Walking down our narrow street with cars parked on one side and barely enough room for another car to pass, we have to get up close and personal with the  building if we meet someone coming towards us to make room to pass.  Old ladies with their two-wheeled carts filled with groceries, people of every size and shape out walking their dogs, delivery vehicles dropping off their goods at various stores early in the morning, and groups of people visiting and conversing in their oh so loud voices, all contribute to the ambience of the community.  Children play in the streets, tom cats howl, babies cry and scooters toot their horns making a cacophony of sounds all day long. After midnight, garbage trucks do their pickups, clanging and banging and disturbing the peaceful night.  We have decided that it’s a bit cooler for them to work and they don’t block the narrow streets for long periods, holding up traffic as they would during daylight hours.

Greengrocers reside on almost every corner, selling their fruits and veggies from stands outside and inside along with various bottles and jars of anything from olives and juices to oils and honey and maybe a few bags of chips and crackers.  Phillipe has become our favourite vendor as we find his produce fresh and fairly priced.  He speaks little English but always tries to talk to us and yesterday while we were there, he greeted each of us with a hug and the double cheek kiss that Europeans are known for.  Then he gave us a nice bunch of grapes and declared “free”, one of the English words he knows.  Our fridge is very small so we tend to shop every day for fresh produce and meat but we look forward to our time in our neighbourhood. It’s become part of our routine.

Our larger neighbourhood chain store is Consum and we find almost everything we need there that isn’t at the greengrocer.  Items are laid out much differently than we are used to.  Finding salt and pepper sounds easy, right?  Not so easy!  The salt was at one end of the store and the pepper at the other.  Milk is not found in the cooler section but on a shelf in  tetra packs.  Huge legs of cured ham sit on shelves, hooves and all.  If we buy something by weight, we need to weigh it and tag it ourselves.  Each item is given a number and we set our bag of goods on the scale, punch in the number and a tag pops out to tape to our plastic bag.  We were buying tomato sauce one day and weren’t sure if we were buying sauce, paste, salsa or crushed tomatoes as they all look the same and the language barrier didn’t help us.  Out came my phone with our much loved Goggle Translate and we got what we were looking for.

We made a second trip to the old town yesterday on the bus and while Joey checked out a couple of churches, I checked out some of the stores and found some wonderful souvenir items.  I bought a cute little demitasse cup and spoon and Joey bought an apron with the recipe for Paella, a traditional rice dish that we must try, and a fridge magnet depicting all the historical sites.  We finally bought some olives from the Centrale Market as well as Tumeric or Curcumin as it is named here.

I bought a cheap watch for $6 that looked like a Rolex with all its buttons and I thought it was cute. The instructions on how to set it and all its functions were in translated English so were a bit hard to follow but I finally got it.  I had to push button A 3 times, then button B once, then C once and then B and C together and finally A again…something like that.  What was I thinking? In the middle of the night, the alarm began beeping every 10 minutes and in my groggy state, I just kept pressing every combination of buttons to make it stop! I was just about ready to take it off and drop it in the drawer when I realized it hadn’t beeped for some time.  I must have inadvertently set it to go off at 3 AM.

It’s been a week today that we left Canada and have enjoyed our journey so far as it flies by.  I’m loving my journalling here and with the help of Joey, we remember all the little things that happen each day so we can laugh about them in years to come.