We have successfully lived in Valencia for just over a week now. This is really our first experience ever living in any large city and relying on walking & public transit to get where you need to go. It is a good reminder for me because I take care of many patients who are also in the same situation however many of them lack the financial resources to use the bus system and ours in Dayton is not as extensive. The institute is about a 30 minute walk from our apartment. Dustin found a co-working space that is about a 2 minute walk from our apartment, and a CrossFit box that is a 30 minute walk as well.
The Spaniards start their days a bit later than we do typically, so Dustin can’t head to the co-working space as early as he would like. I’ll let him blog himself about the people he is meeting and his international CrossFit experience later! At the institute my students are taking a Spanish for Medical professionals course which I am sitting in on. I have quite a few Spanish speaking patients so it’s nice to know a bit to communicate with them better. Since two of my students are fairly strong in Spanish and two are newbies he is doing a bit of review of the basics as well. Then I teach my two courses, one is a course created by one of my amazing colleagues called Health Behaviors and Beliefs, the concepts in that course fit so well with my Holistic Diabetes Management elective. My students have such unique backgrounds and it’s be really fun learning from them!
The whole city basically leaves work to have lunch with their families, kids come home from school, parents come home from work, then everyone goes back to work/school after lunch. My favorite part of my walk to work is seeing all the dad’s pushing their kids to school on scooters! Some have a hand on two kids backs moving them along.
Since the school shuts down Dustin and I come home, make lunch, then he heads back to the co-working space and I find a cafe nearby with faster wi-fi. It’s much more efficient than walking another 1 hour round trip to go back to the institute.And a lot of times it doesn’t re-open until 4 or 5.
Ashley and K hang out in the apartment, go to the nearby park and today they took a walk to the Mercado Central for bananas, if you know K, her favorite food is most certainly a banana! Every time we go to the store she calls it the “Banana Store.” The Spaniards typically work late and then eat dinner round 8:30 or 9pm. Since we like for K to get 12 hours of sleep, we are still operating dinner on a normal 6ish schedule and then I work again after she goes to bed.
On Friday night we walked the Río Turia, the river is famous for its floods. The flood which occurred on the 14th of October 1957, known as the Great Flood of Valencia, flooded a large part of the city of Valencia. To prevent this from happening in the future, the river was divided in two, and the old part of the river has been turned into a green space for the city, which is know as the garden of the Turia.
We walked all the way to the “City of Arts and Sciences,” these buildings hold an aquarium, IMAX Cinema, planetarium and laserium in addition to many other arts and cultural buildings. On our walk back we ate dinner out at Gordon’s which his an Argentinean Steakhouse.We had dinner there on our brief stay in Valencia last year, and were happy to return. We are going to go to the aquarium in a few weeks with the students one afternoon. (Group discount!)
Overall week 1 in Valencia was good and we are getting into a rhythm!
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