I'm so happy to be back in Valencia. Even though it was harder than ever to leave the U.S. after two wonderful weeks at home, I'm excited to have six more months to work with my students, to learn valenciano, and to travel (upcoming trips include the Canary Islands, London, Vinarós for Carnaval, Pamplona and San Sebastian for the Fulbright mid-year meeting, Sevilla / Granada / Amsterdam / Brussels for the long Easter break…). Leigh flew to Spain with me and got to visit for two weeks, during which time we explored Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid, and had more fun than ever. Highlights included visiting the aquarium (Europe's largest!) in Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences, discovering Gulliver Park and playing for a really long time like Lilliputians (see photo), and eating some of Valencia's best paella at a restaurant on the beach in 70-degree weather.
However, as much as this feels like a beautifully surreal year-long vacation in Spain, I'm still reminded about the real-life problems that will find you, no matter where you are - specifically, the joys of living in an apartment. More than anything, these stories are comical, but they're also a real pain when you're in a foreign country and don't know how anything works…
When Leigh and I arrived in my apartment after nearly two days of travel (flight to Atlanta, layover, 8-hour flight to Madrid, lose 7 hours in the time-zone switch, wait in the bus station, 4-hour bus to Valencia), we were greeted by a shattered window in the door to our living room. My flatmates were all traveling still, and no one had warned me, possibly because no one could offer an explanation. I wonder if our apartment is haunted.
Then, I was looking forward to a quiet first weekend in Valencia since before Christmas. But on Saturday night, my flatmates and I were all woken up at 3:00 a.m. to the sound of our doorbell ringing furiously. We all jumped out of bed… to discover that water was covering the floor of our entire apartment. The lady who lives below us, a 60-year-old woman who can't be more than four feet tall, had come to yell at us because water was dripping from her ceiling and onto her bed. Here we were, standing in two inches of ice-cold water in the middle of the night in our pajamas and with uncombed hair, completely unable to comprehend what was going on. Then Chelsea informed us that the police were downstairs; but since our doorbell hasn't been fixed yet, we have no idea how long they were down there, trying to get in. oops. The two police undoubtedly noticed the plastic bags taped over the window in our door (to keep the heat in), and in addition to our general inability to communicate articulately in Spanish at that point, I'm sure things really did not look good. To us, though, it was so bad that it was hilarious, and we had quite a good laugh about the whole thing.
It turns out that a pipe had broken under our kitchen sink, and that's where the leak came from. Luckily, there's a way to turn off the water just to the sink, so I found that right away and now we're only without water in the kitchen sink. The rest of the house is fine. We have one mop in our apartment, and an old and mostly useless one at that. We all grabbed our bath towels, because we don't have extra linens, and even the extra sheets and the table, to soak up the water. I calculated that we dumped out at least 20 gallons of water that night. There was water in every single room, all down the hallway, and it was even flowing out of our front door and down the stairwell. It took us almost two hours to clean up the standing water.
(p.s. One of my flatmates made a particularly hilarious and well-documented blog post, if you want to see photos and read more: http://chelseainvalencia.blogspot.com/2011/01/la-inundacion-de-2011.html?spref=fb)
But other than that, I'm happy to be back! Many more blog posts to come...
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