It burns, burns, burns

Las Fallas means 'The Fires' in Valencian.* Translation: They burn stuff. That, some restaurant recommendations, and the address of our hotel was about all the information my friends and I had when we showed up in Valencia on Thursday. My friend had asked for directions to our hotel when she made the reservations; they told her it was really hard to explain over the phone and she should ask at the bus station when we got into town. So we asked at the bus station's information booth. No information there. We decided to take a cab; the cab driver had never heard of the place or the address and had to call for directions. The hotel was allegedly in the market, which in Spain usually means a large and somewhat centrally located building where you can buy cheap produce and live chickens. A weird place for a hotel, but it was the only place we could find because there was, after all, a fire-themed festival taking place. Anyway, after much confusion, several phone calls, and a toll booth, we finally got to the "hotel" and found out why the cab driver and bus station information desk were so unhelpful: We were staying in a truck stop. Who takes a bus or a cab to a truck stop? (Insert punchline: Three blonde-ish blue-eyed American girls walk into a Spanish truck stop....) Turns out by 'market' they meant more 'shipping depot.' Or something. There were a lot of shipping containers. And a lot of Spanish truck drivers. And a lot of pornography, both gay and straight, in both magazine and DVD form. It was fine, really, and we got a lot of laughs out of it. You know what the sad part was, though? The bathroom in the truck stop hotel was magnitudes better than the bathroom in my apartment which, as of Thursday, still had no available shower. Our truck stop shower had nice hot water and tons of pressure, and was part of a full-sized bathtub so you could actually move in there. It was the best shower I've had since I left New York, and it was in a truck stop. Sigh.

Anyway, the festival. I think it started out as some sort of pagan thing (am I the most half-assed Fallas-goer ever, or what?) but now lines up with St. Joseph's Day. They make these big floats which are displayed all over town for a week and on the last day they burn them. We missed that important detail because we had to get back to Barcelona. Whatever. (One of the floats was a giant Virgin Mary made out of flowers. Do you think they burned that one, too? I'm not really in the know here, but that seems a little sacrilegious....) During the whole week of the festival there are marching bands parading through the streets, accompanied by women and girls in fancy dresses and Princess Leia-style side buns. And fireworks every night. And firecrackers all day. I'm an anal American, and it all seemed a little unsafe. There were kids setting off firecrackers in the streets. And they're really loud; what if someone started shooting? Would anyone even notice? I'm a stick in the mud, I know. And the mild undercurrent of anarchy was kinda cool, if a little scary. And no one really seemed to be overdoing it. Still, phrases like "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" don't seem to exist here.

The festival seemed pretty geared towards locals; we spent a lot of our time there feeling a little out of place. We were trying to think of US equivalents: Would a group of foreigners know what to do in Boston or Washington on the 4th of July? We weren't sure. Still, they burn stuff and that's fun, even if we didn't get to see it. And the fireworks were good and we saw a really good Caribbean-sounding band one night. And we had good paella. And Valencia has a great modern art museum that had a fantastic Braque exhibition (I am such an art whore). So it was a good trip.

Friday was St. Patrick's Day and I felt obliged to find a pub and drink a Guinness. (My mom says, not all that seriously, that I shouldn't drink Guinness because the English used it to enslave our people. But the Irish are doing pretty well for themselves now so I figure I can drink what I like.) I had seen an Irish pub and a few Guinness signs before I started looking for them; once I started looking, though, they were nowhere to be found. It did feel very Spanish to be looking hard for good beer and only finding red wine, though. It's not that you can't get beer here, it's just had to find good beer. Barcelona has tons of English and Irish bars; Valencia, not so much. Eventually I settled for Bailey's and called it good. No Guinness for me.


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*Valencian might be a dialect of Catalan. Or a different language. Or the same language. I'm not sure. To me Valencian and Catalan seem indistinguishable, but what do I know? Valencian is definitely less prevalent in Valencia than Catalan is in Barcelona. There were a lot more Valencian flags than Spanish, but I don't think anyone's arguing over whether Valencia is a nation. Here's something infuriating, though: The street signs are all in Valencian, but the maps all have the Spanish versions of the street names. You can figure it out, but who would think that's a good way to make a map?