jueves, 23 de mayo

Plaza de la Virgen

After a long night of fun with friends, it was back to the daily grind of classes for us.  We had an altered schedule and had a day of adventures ahead of us.  As every other day we began with our Spanish songs that are now permanently stuck in our heads.  We only had our Spanish class all together and a short meeting of what we were going to do for the day.  My Spanish class gave a short presentation on El Tribunal de las Aguas, which we were going to see.  After all was finished all of the class began our walk to La Plaza de La Virgen to see the Tribunal de las Aguas.  It is a group of 8 judges who regulate the distribution of water to the 8 districts of farm lands in Valencia.  They meet in front of the Cathedral every Thursday at 12 to discuss any cases that may be brought up by farmers and discuss them on the patio.  It is all in the Valenciano language and nothing is ever written down.  A man announces the 8 districts names and if someone has an issue they come forward.  Usually, cases are very rare but we lucked out at got to see one!  From what we could hear the man was mad that another farmer took water when he was not supposed to.

Judges area

During the cases

After that, we walked on to La lonja and el Centro Mercdado.  La lonja used to be a place of commerce and silk trade in the 15th century and I have never seen such a fantastic building.  There were large spiral columns throughout the building with giagantic doors on every wall.  We explored the area a bit before heading over to el Centro Mercado, a large scale supermarket.  Anything you could ever imagine was located in this market.  There was everything from fresh baked breads, spices, and meats that included every, and I mean everyyy part of certain animals.  We were all starving when we first when in and after we were done exploring...many of us weren't very hungry anymore.

La Lonja

La Lonja y me

Mercado Central

Cow heart

To continue our never ending day, we took the tram bus to the beach for a little relaxation.  The beach was beautiful as always and the temperature was finally very nice.  Us and two other girls met up with the rest of the group at the beach and were greeted with wind and lots of sand blowing...again.  The sand ended up covering our towers within the first 30 minutes of being there and we were shaking sand out of our hair and ears during the entire time of "relaxation."  When we were finally fed up with all of it we stopped at a small pizzeria for a little pick me up before heading back home.

Beach at Las Arenas

We arrived back home around 6 and had to turn right back around to go to the Institute to attend an English Conversation class with Spanish people learning English.  I talked with 4 different people for about ten minutes each and it was very interesting to "be on the other side" helping with English.  After an hour of that class we met with our intercambios for una cervesa and tapas.  I had the absolute best fresh mozerella and tomato with basil on a piece of bread.  I will definitely miss having the yummy cheeses here.  We spent half of our time talking in English and the other half of time speaking in Spanish.  The intercambios are so easy to talk to and are very nice.  We really lucked out and got intercambios we can relate with!  We plan to meet up with them Tuesday with Jake and John and their intercambios as well. 

After our time of tapas we finally headed home to work on homework.  We talked with Gemma for a little and told her we had a ton of homework to work on.  About thirty minutes later Gemma served us our dinner to our room and a tray of patatas fritas and ketchup, my favorite :)  We had a bocadilla (sandwhich) that was toasted with chorizo on it and cheese.  It was veryyy good but we were already so full and could not finish it.  We felt very bad and didn't want her to think we didn't like it, so we resorted to plan B...

Patatas Fritas con Ketchup y Queso con Breadsticks

Bocadillo with Choirzo and Queso

Jen ripped her sandwhich a little to make it easier to transport, and we put the pieces of the sandwhich in a plastic bag and put the bag in Jen's desk drawer...we told her it was very good when we put the empty plates in the kitchen.  About ten minutes later Jen opened her desk to get something out and all we could smell was sausage...and we didn't know what to do so casually we waited for Gemma to go to bed and we were going to dispose of it.  Jen refused to touch the food so I had to put my hand in the bag and seperate the chorizo sausage from the bread...nasty.  When I separated it all we figured out the best way to get rid of it was to throw it out the window into the run down neighbors yard...haha oopsss.  I chucked the stuff across little by little while we both kept scanning the area for people watching.  Needless to say it was one of the funniest moments ever.  We kept the bread in the bag and hid it under Jens bag until we could throw it away when we left for school the next morning...Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Once again a day we won't forget!