September: Update
Hi all! Speedles here :) Sorry it’s been a while. Daniel and Katherine have agreed to do some guest posting over here on the blog, so you’ll probably hear from them in a bit, but for now, it’s just me. 🐢
I wanted to give an update of our last month, ‘cause we’ve already been here that long! Crazy, I know. A few quick spoilers: we found a house! but we’re currently living with D+K’s VERY KIND friend Chris :) He’s pretty cool.
So, what have we been up to?
Well, we spend most of our time around the Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias, or the City of Arts and Sciences. It’s one of the newest large-scale constructions in the city of Valencia, and is a huge tourist attraction. The four main buildings house a science museum, aquarium, opera house... and then there’s Berklee. Daniel thought that the opera house building was actually Berklee, so he was pretty disappointed to discover that the school is actually in a wall (literally, it’s a wall) off to one side. But now that we’re all used to it, it’s a nice wall to hang out in :) Looking at my pictures, I’m just now realizing that we don’t have any of Berklee itself, so Spikey and I will be sure to take a selfie there ASAP! Until then, here’s some of the opera house and science museum (as well as a random building that doesn’t seem to have any particular non-aesthetic function). Well, actually you can kinda see Berklee. It’s the wall on the right side of the first two pictures.
The opera house. What animal does it remind you of?
One of the best things about Valencia is the Jardin del Turia, which is a huge park-garden complex that runs the entire length of the city. Many years ago, the river Turia flowed there, but after a particularly deadly and damaging flood in 1957, it was re-routed and the Jardin planted in its place. We’ll have to do a special-edition post about the garden later, but until then, here’s a view of the opera house from the other side of the garden:
For our first two-and-a-half weeks in Valencia, we stayed at an AirBnB with a wonderful Cuban woman named Elda and her dog Happy (see below!).
Elda lives in a quiet, very un-hip neighborhood called Mont-Olivet, a ten-minute walk from Berklee. It was a great place to start, partly because we really dig the un-hip vibe (hehe), but also because there’s hardly any car traffic, no nightlife, the shops are simple and reasonably priced, and there’s lots of little cafes where grandmothers and grandfathers drink their morning cup of cafe con leche together. Elda was the consummate hostess, even making us TERRIFIC Cuban gumbo and calling real estate agencies for us while we were desperately apartment-hunting.
Unfortunately, Elda’s place is pretty popular, so it was booked until January after our few weeks were up. But God worked through our friend Chris, a fellow SFTV (Scoring for Film, TV, and Video Games) student and Christian, who invited us to stay at his place until we found an apartment. Berklee is in the Jardin on the eastern side of Valencia. Elda’s flat is below the Jardin, and we moved up above the garden to Chris’s flat, about a 15-minute walk from Berklee.
Albors, our new neighborhood, is a little busier and bigger than Mont-Olivet, but it’s a lot easier to get around. Valencia has a bike-sharing program for €30 a year, which is a pretty good deal. Sometimes it’s hard to find a bike when you want one, or a station when you need to drop a bike off, but it’s been super helpful in getting to school quickly. There’s a bike station right around the corner from Chris’s flat and one right next to school, so it cuts the transit time down to three minutes (when Daniel and Chris are late for school :P).
Some pics: Here we are, with all of D+K’s stuff, in Chris’s hallway (sorry for the blurriness--it’s hard to take selfies that far away).
Here we are watching K make dinner in Chris’s kitchen:
We’ve enjoyed getting to know all of Daniel’s (really super) classmates, and we’ve also gotten to know the staff and students with a group called En Vivo, a Christian campus ministry at the University of Valencia/Polytechnic. When D+K were first thinking of coming to Spain for the year, Katherine applied to be on staff with En Vivo, but she and the team ended up deciding that it would be best if she worked on a volunteer basis for the year.
During our second week in Valencia, D+K met with Jesse and Sophie, the En Vivo team leaders. Not only did they have lots of work for us to do (yay!), but they also offered to help us with our housing search (more on that later). The work was sanding, priming, and painting the interior of a property that En Vivo will use as their “campus house” for student events, weekly meetings, and as a place to chill. K+D have spent the last three Fridays there, getting lots of paint on themselves and some on the walls ;)
Hallway before primer:
Hallway after primer:
It’s amazing even what primer can do to brighten a place up!
Jessie and Sophie (and their family) are the kind of people that, when you’re around them, make you feel totally at ease and cared for, as well as give you the sense that there are still good things in this world, after all. No kidding, but actually.
Our (second? third?) weekend here, we were invited to a cookout in the mountains with En Vivo staff and students, to kick off the school year. It was WONDERFUL to be out of the city: the air was clean and cool, and the mountains were beautifully wild. It’s a place that seems to be incredibly dry and incredibly fertile at the same time: you see dusty slopes filled with prickly shrubs and cacti next to orange and olive groves, or stands of pine trees with short, vivid-green needles.
The cookout was at the summer home of a student’s grandmother--a sort of vacation-home with just the bare essentials, almost like a personal campground. There are many such houses in the mountains around Valencia, and can range from a concrete floor and some walls to pitch a tent under to a fully-equipped house to spend the whole summer in. This place was somewhere in between, with a yard to play Viking Chess (look it up--really fun) and an outdoor fireplace built into one corner, where we built a pine-log and -needle fire to roast racks of pork ribs on. The yard was also the favored habitat of hundreds of snails (the kind you eat, I think), and Katherine and the staff kids had a swell time making little habitats for them and finding them juicy grass to eat.
Playing Viking Chess:
The cooking fire!
Yummmm, barbecue ^-^ This was probably the first really filling meal we had in Spain :P
Just hangin’ out:
[Well, if you’re still reading, you’re a trooper ;) I’ll try to cut it short, and will ALSO try to write more often so you don’t have to stretch your attention span so far hehe.]
While in the mountains, we explored a little trail that led from the house to... TRENCHES! MORTAR NESTS! BOMB SHELTERS! But actually, these mountains were used as a military encampment and fortress to protect Valencia during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). As far as we know, the trench and bomb shelter-cave system was never used in battle, but it was crazy-cool to get a glimpse into that part of Spanish history.
Part of the trench system:
A cave dug (into almost solid rock) as a bomb shelter. These were spaced every 200m or so along the trench, and went back only a yard or so from where you can see. Some seem to have been blocked up at the end, so we wondered if they were connected at some point?
I’d better wrap it up, if only because Daniel will have no dinner otherwise (turtles are actually quite good cooks, if you didn’t know).
Among other things, we have been very blessed by our church, both the community and the Word preached. God has spoken very clearly through the sermon each week, and we’ve gotten to know some other young internationals that we eat lunch and talk with afterwards. Here’s the main room of the church:
And here we are hanging out afterward! Also eating black rice (colored with squid ink).
Other fun things we’ve done:
-- Sleep in late
-- Sleep in late
-- Go play volleyball at the beach with friends
-- Pick pomegranates from a pomegranate tree in the Jardin, and make pomegranate molasses
-- Sleep in late
Also, we found a sand castle at the beach:
Lastly, we have a picture with the ubiquitous breakfast, lunch, and dinner food: TOSTADAS!! (aka toast; we eat it with mashed tomato and oil, sometimes sardines).
Allllllright! That’s it, folks :) Hope you enjoyed hearing of our adventures, and look out for a guest post from the *one and only Daniel Hwang* about God’s provision for a HOUSE for us!
Also, maybe more pictures next time ;)
With all the love of a turtle,
Speedles 🐢
P.S. Spikey gives his love too, but he isn’t sure how much love hedgehogs have, so he says just double whatever turtles have (also, I can’t find a hedgehog emoji). 🐢 🐢
