We Found the Holy Grail!

 Our second stop on our family summer tour of Spain was Valencia.  This was a city Larry and I both agreed we had to see - me, because the guide books I read raved about it, and Larry, because it was the subject of the first chapter of a long (goes without saying?) James Michener book he read called Iberia.  Never heard of it?  That is because it is not a very good book, and it was published while Franco was still in power in 1968, so although it is described as a "travel" book, you would be hard-pressed to recreate Michener's experiences in Spain.  Also, Michener wrote this book after 40 years of visiting Spain, and in all that time he didn't seem to find very much he liked there.  He has a lot to say about how bad the flamenco is, for instance.  Larry, however, is nothing if not tenacious, and he listened to the entire 37 hour audio version of Iberia (at 1.5 speed).

So I traveled to Valencia prepared to enjoy the paella and the beaches and the aquarium, but I was not prepared to find the Holy Grail!! (more on that later)

We took the train from Barcelona to Valencia (because you can do that in Europe, and why can't we have a high-speed train from San Francisco to Los Angeles?) and checked in to our Airbnb.  The apartment was one of the highlights of Valencia for us - it was in a building across the street from the Pont de les Flors bridge over Túria park. It had 4 bedrooms with big beds so no one had to touch each other at night, and 4 bathrooms so everyone could post up in the bathroom for as long as they wanted, and a big furnished outdoor deck.  And it was only $500 a night!  Try finding that in San Francisco.

We set out to find dinner, and Larry and Susan and Amy were very excited to find an oyster bar.  Ellen and I do not like oysters, so we continued to another café.  I asked our waiter if there was a vegetarian salad, and the waiter said "Oh, yes, yes, I will bring you the salad that all the vegetarians they like very much."  Which turned out to be large chunks of tuna smothered in mayonnaise.  Either "vegetarian" in Spain includes seafood, or the waiter and I were just having a failure to communicate.  The tuna salad was gooey and unappealing.  So once again I had Gin Tonic and bread.  At every café I had a flicker of hope that I might find something like a quinoa-avocado power bowl, or at least a green salad not smothered in ham and cheese, but I so rarely did.  And the bread isn't even good.  I have been fortunate enough to travel to France, where the bread was Amazing, and Italy, where the bread was Pretty Damn Good, but in Spain, the bread was Indifferent.  It was a lot like the Safeway store brand baguettes, if you know what I mean.

Ellen and I wandered around the area around the cathedral, which is old and stone and charming and full of buskers and families.  

Here we are admiring the Arco Barchillo, a very old footbridge that connects the cathedral to the Archbishop's palace.  There was a lot of excited signage here because when the municipal authorities were inspecting the bridge recently, they found a second-century Roman tombstone in the wall.  Also, the 18th century architect used a design by Michelangelo.  (It still just looked like a very small bridge.)

We decided to try one of the local specialties, churros with chocolate sauce, at the city's oldest (200 years?) and best known Horchatería, Santa Catalina, on one of the plazas around the cathedral.  The churros were pretty good.  I no longer remember why Ellen looks so fierce in this photo.  We also tried the horchata, natch.

My children grew up in California and we thought we know what horchata was - a delicious beverage made of rice and condensed milk seasoned with cinnamon.  But that is Mexican horchata.  The OG Spanish version is made with - wait for it - tiger nuts.  What is a tiger nut?  Here is what the internet has to say: "Tiger nuts are tubers, or the bulbous root of a stem.  They grow underground and provide nutrients to a grass-like plant called yellow nutsedge."  It's hard to imagine who decided it would be a good idea to dig up this grass and experiment with eating the nodules on the roots.  They must have been pretty f#$*ing hungry.

In America, yellow nutsedge is considered a pestilential weed, and there are lots of web pages devoted to helping you eradicate it.  But in Spain, they grind up the nodules and make a beverage out of them. Go figure.

Amy developed a theory over our time in Spain: Mexico took a lot of Spanish things and made them better.  Horchata, for one.  Tiger nut milk is Not Very Good, and Mexican rice-based horchata is Delicious.  Mexico also vastly improved the Virgin of Guadalupe (more on that in the Cáceres blog entry, yet to be written).  Spanish tomato sauce is basically just tomatoes, but Mexico offers spicy hot salsa.  Spain will serve you a small bony fish but in Mexico you can get fish tacos and not have to pull all the bones out yourself.  A tortilla in Spain is a heavy egg-potato dish and not a delicious circle of fried masa.  I was however, very grateful for Spanish tortilla because it was one of the few things I could order and be fairly sure of what I would get.

There was a great coffee shop near our apartment that I went to in the mornings.  Spain had pretty good coffee and pastry (if you could find some with no ham), come to think of it.  This was my favorite corner in the café.  Isn't that a cool chair?

This is me in the chair, being annoyed that the waitress always spoke to me in English before I even opened my mouth.  I'm not sure what gave me away as American - the damp hair?  The gold handbag?  The combination of culottes and athletic shoes?

The day had dawned clear and bright so we took the bus to the beach (pretty cool that you can take a city bus to the beach in Valencia).  We had some paella at a pretty seaside restaurant.

And we really enjoyed the beach.  The thoughtful Airbnb owners had left us beach towels and we spent the day napping and swimming and reading.  The water was clear and warm and not rough at all.  Perfection.

Towards the end of the day, Amy made a disturbing sand sculpture of a disembodied head.  

Taking the bus back to our apartment, we noticed a lot of bat symbolism around town, which is kind of metal.  The story goes that in 1238-ish, King Jaume the 1st was camped outside Valencia, preparing to seize it back from the Moors.  He was awakened by a bat just in time to realize that the Moors were approaching his camp with ill intent, and was able to rouse the troops in time to repel the Moors.  So now there are bats on the city's coat of arms and sprinkled around its monuments.

We spent most of the next day in the cathedral, which was fascinating.  It was built on the site of a Roman temple, later a Visigothic church, later a Moorish mosque, and now a Catholic cathedral.  We purchased the audio tour, and I'm so glad we did, because that is how we learned that the Holy Grail is IN THE CATHEDRAL.  That's right, folks.  Not everyone agrees that the agate cup in the Valencia Cathedral is, in fact, the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper, but here's the thing - YOU CAN'T PROVE IT ISN'T.  That is the argument of the Valencians, and it's pretty genius.  The cup is the right age, the right shape, the right type, etc. and it might very well be the one Jesus used, and until you can prove it isn't, they will keep telling you that it is.

They keep the grail in a side chapel in an elaborate reliquary in a niche.  This is the best photo I could get.  The Grail part is the little brown cup inside all the gold bits.

But that's not the only holy item in the cathedral - far from it!  Here is a poster showing  *some* of the other relics in the cathedral, with a very skeptical Ellen.

Here is a partial list of the relics displayed in the cathedral:

1. The Holy Grail (obviously)

2. A Spine from the Crown of Thorns

3. A piece of the True Cross (natch)

4. A piece of the Sponge from which Jesus drank vinegar on the cross

5. A fragment of Christ's Tunic

6. Coins from the time of Christ (you can't prove they weren't the ones given to Judas)

And the arm of St. Vincent the Martyr.  Coincidentally, that is the patron saint of Larry's parents' parish where we were married.  Here it is, folks, the uncorrupted arm! (Uncorrupted is a fun adjective often applied to dead saint's body parts.  It implies that the saint was so holy that their body parts are perfectly preserved.  IDK that arm looked pretty dried up to me.)

There were many odd religious paintings in the cathedral, but this one was my favorite:

Here is a better view of the painting, completed by Francisco Goya in 1788, titled "San Francisco de Borja asistiendo a un moribundo", or "St Francis Borja at the deathbed of an impenitent".

If you look closely, you will see the cool gift granted to St Francis Borja (whoever he was): he can spray holy blood from his hand-held crucifix, presumably to cast out demons.  But although the impenitent looks extremely uncomfy, the demons don't seem bothered, just vaguely interested.  It reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the movie This Is The End, in which a demon has possessed Jonah Hill.  Here is a link to the clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UIsMjBnV9E

Jonah's friends try to exorcise the demon by holding up a cross and saying "The power of Christ compels you!", but the demon just laughs and says "Guess what, it's not that compelling."

Another impressive item in the cathedral is an enormous gold and silver monstrance used to carry the blessed sacrament. If you've been in a Catholic church, you might have noticed a monstrance on the altar.  It's what is used to display the eucharistic wafer that represent Christ's body.  Here's Pope Francis with a typical monstrance.

Now, here's the one in the Valencia cathedral.

Pretty impressive!  They claim it is the largest processional monstrance in the WORLD.  It took from 1936-1950 to construct and contains 600 kilos of gold, 5 kilos of silver, and 750 grams of platinum.  It's nickname is "La Custodia de las Pobres" (The Monstrance of the Poor) because all the townspeople of Valencia *voluntarily* contributed their jewelry to melt down to make it.  Here is a picture of it in the Corpus Christi parade.

Another excellent display in the cathedral was the reliquary of San Tomas de Villanueva.  It is a creepy silver statue of San Tomas with his *actual skull* on display inside his robe and his some of his bones in a crystal box below.

San Tomas grew up in a city called Villanueva but ended up as archbishop of Valencia.  He was famous for his charity to the poor and great sermons.  And - Villanova University is named for him!  Now you know.  And I've seen his skull.

Another fun chapel contains this statue of the Virgin Mary, which was carved in 1465, called Virgen del Buen Parto. Pregnant women believe that if they pray to her and walk nine times around the cathedral (nine because of the nine months of pregnancy), they will have a good birth.  As you can see, pregnant women bring Mary flowers.

One image we kept seeing in the churches of Spain was a grouping of an angel, a boy, and a fish.  Thusly.

I mean, this set of characters was everywhere we went in Spain.It's not a story that's popular in America, but the Spanish seemingly can't get enough of it.  Tobias (or Tobit) is a book from the Old Testament of the Bible.  A short version is that the Archangel Raphael came down from heaven and appeared as a man to a boy named Tobias, who had a sad blind father and a sad spinster distant relative, Sarah, who lived, possessed by a demon, in the city of Ecbatana.  Tobias and Raphael traveled to Ectabana on an errand, and along the way, Raphael instructed Tobias to catch a fish, gut it, and preserve the heart, liver, and gall.  When they reached Ectabana, they met Sarah and Raphael told Tobias to burn the fish heart and liver to drive out Sarah's demon.  It worked! And they got married.  When the happy couple got back to Tobias' father, Raphael instructed Tobias to rub the fish gall on his blind father's eyes, and the blindness was cured!  The blindness was caused in the first place by a bird defecating in the dad's eyes, so I guess it makes sense that fish gall would cure it?  

I think a cute couples' Halloween costume would be the Archangel Raphael and Tobias.  And I just happen to have a large cardboard fish, a brown tunic, a halo, and wings.

Susan pointed out that this statue of Jesus bears a startling resemblance to Jonathan Van Ness, the grooming guy on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Since we can't get enough of churches, after the Cathedral we toured San Nicolás y San Pedro Mártir, a little jewel box of a baroque church that is completely covered in frescoes painted between 1690-1693.  The frescoes are colorful, beautiful, and very well preserved.

There was a nice Tobias niche, natch.

And several statues of San Pedro Mártir, known in Italy as San Pietro Martire, or Saint Peter Martyr in English.  I looked him up, and he's pretty problematic.  Mostly he was famous for persecuting a Christian sect called the Cathari from 1232-1250 AD.  The Cathari eventually got so fed up with Pedro that they bludgeoned him in the head with a sword before stabbing him in the heart with a knife.  Here are a painting, a statue, and a stained glass window depicting Peter, who is somehow still alive with an sword in his head and a knife in his heart.  Another Halloween costume??  I think I have a fake scimitar and a fake knife in the attic.

We strolled over to Túria Park and saw this excellent defunct restaurant on the way.  I can't imagine why no one wanted to eat there, there's no tuna like old tuna, I always say.

The town of Valencia grew up around the Túria River.  There were periodic floods over the centuries, but then there was the Flood of 1957, which inundated 75% of the city.  The next year, Valencia began re-routing the river to the south of the city, which left a five-mile greenway right in the middle of the city.

The Túria Park is a great place to explore.  It's sunk about ten feet down from the rest of the city and full of gardens, skate parks, playgrounds, cafés, and walking paths.  Here are some photos we took in the Park.

In the last one, Larry is making the "Kangaroo Power" sign.  One very cool part of Valencia is the City of Arts and Sciences, a section of Túria Park that has been developed from 1996 until today.  The most famous part is the aquarium, the Oceanogràfic, but here are some of the other structures you can visit.

The Hemisfèric is a planetarium and IMAX theater.  I watched an interesting film about the Hadron Particle collider, and I didn't have to try to translate the Spanish, because they passed out cool headphones that provided translation to a bunch of languages.

The Museu de Ciènces is an enormous hands-on science museum with soaring interior spaces.  It's supposed to look like a whale skeleton.  Here are some artsy photos I took inside.

The Umbracle is a sculpture garden full of native plants and parrots.

And - the crowning glory, the world-famous Oceanogràfic.  As you might be able to tell from this photo, it was blazingly hot for our City of Arts and Sciences day.  I had forgotten my wallet back at the apartment, so I bummed 10 Euros off Amy and ate nothing but ice cream all day since I kept losing track of the family.

The aquarium is justifiably famous.  It is absolutely huge, and contains a bunch of underground tanks, above-ground bird and reptile displays, and a big dolphin pool.  Here are few photos.

The absolute best part, and I think anyone who has been there will agree with me, was the SHARK TUNNEL.  It is a long underwater tunnel that connects two tanks full of sharks and rays and it is so, so cool.  I watched the sharks for nearly an hour.

After our day in the newer part of Valencia, we spent another day back in the older part of town.  We ate at one of the covered markets.  There were, of course, many food stalls full of ham.

But we found a little vegetarian cafe (actual vegetables!) tucked into the corner of the market and very much enjoyed ourselves.

We toured the Llotja de la Seda, or the Silk Exchange.  It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a group of late Gothic-style buildings built between 1482-1533.  I love this photo Larry took of us watching a video.

There was an upstairs room with a beautiful gilded ceiling, where Ellen decided to lay down to get a better look.

The most famous room is the Sala de Contratación, a huge trading hall.

We made our way over to the Palacio del Marqués de Dos Aguas, another 15th century Gothic building.  (The two waters in the family title are the Túria River and the Júcar River.) The palace was renovated in the Baroque style in the 18th century, but still has some Gothic elements.  In 1949 the Ministry of Education bought it from the Dos Aguas family and it is now run as a house museum which also showcases a famous ceramics collection.  We had a little trouble finding it.

Amy, who knows about these things, was impressed by the flex of the Dos Aguas family surrounding their front entrance with alabaster statuary, which would have been incredibly expensive at the time.

The palace is lavishly decorated; we especially liked all the stucco sculptural elements on the walls, such as these hunting scenes.

This ceiling fresco is important, I forget why, but I like this photo.

Here is Susan, giving Vanna White as she showcases the Salon Rojo.

This is one of the ceramic tiles in the museum; it depicts Saint Rocco, who is always shown with a dog, an open sore, and some bread.  Saint Rocco suffered from the plague, but overcame it, through the help of a dog who licked his wounds (yuck) and brought him bread.  So now Saint Rocco is the patron saint of contagious diseases and dogs.  Saint Rocco and the dog turn up a lot in Catholic churches.

After the palace, Amy and I became separated from the group and found this charming old sign, which of course we had to follow.

It led to a one-room "museum" in the atrium of the Church of the Patriarch where we encountered El Dragon del Patriarca - a stuffed alligator mounted on the wall.

The legend goes that the alligator lived in the Túria River and was terrorizing the townspeople until a brave young man killed it.  What actually happened is that the viceroy of Peru sent the alligator to Spain as a gift in 1600.  In 1606 the alligator died and was stuffed and hung on this wall.  The other story of the dragon is what mothers have been telling their children for hundreds of years: "Si parla a la pancha vindreu", which translates as "If you talk, you will be in the belly", implying that if you speak in church, the dragon will hop off the wall and eat you.  I wonder if that myth has ever worked on any eight-year-old boy, ever.

On our last night in Valencia we decided we had to eat at the Jamón del Medio, a jamonería next door to our apartment.  We were seated directly under some hams.

Behind Susan in the photo below is the waiter carving our ham using a special ham-holder.  You can't quite see it in the photo, so I have included a better photo from the website of Jamón del Medio.

If you're interested, I think you can order a ham leg from Spain that comes complete with the holder.  We really enjoyed our time in Valencia.  It's a very beautiful old city that doesn't take itself too seriously; there are lots of families, and the beaches, and museums, and plazas.  If Trump gets re-elected, you can find us there, living the ex-pat life, watching the sharks in the tunnel and downing many gin tonics.