Random posts on living in Spain
….and the city wins.
We have decided we are not quite yet ready for a relaxing quiet life out of the city – we have had too much time in Milton Keynes – now we need to have life!! :-D
So we will move into the city apartment and have to cycle to see the views (about the width of Walnut Tree) and be on the beach – hardly a hardship!
The plan is still on for the first week of May – this evening we go to sign and pay the deposit.
Valencia here we come!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So we have spent the entire day looking at properties around Valencia with Mairead who has done a fantastic job of searching for properties for us.
We are now at the end of the day and faced with our decision between two properties.
One in centre of Valencia:
 |  |  |  |
And one on the outskirts by but the beach – infact 8 floors up with a great view of the sea in one direction and the plains of Valencia and the mountains in the other:
 |  |  |  |  |
What’s the problem – why not just go for the great views? well it feels like it could be quite remote and we will have to work there everyday in addition to living there. What is the problem with the city centre apartment then? It is quite small – and also it is hard to imagine living and working there.
After a sleep hopefully all will be clear to us……..
Tomorrow we fly to Valencia to start a long weekend and on Thursday we have lots of flats in and around Valencia to see.
It is quite exciting – but it will also be very rushed – it will be hard to make a decision in one day – but for this reason we hope to only sign a 6 month contract.
Will post more details once we are back next week.
They do things different here – don’t you know!
Firstly the bars all shut at 9pm on New year’s Eve – reopening at 00:30 the following year!
At midnight youPensando nisso, criei uma lista com alguns sites legais que disponibilizam sons e toques polifonicos claro grátis para celular, além de outros recursos. have to eat 12 grapes, one on each dong of the bell.
They set the fireworks off 14 hours into the new year – during the day – see below.
All said though highly enjoyable and great atmosphere!
Whilst we are here we are touring around on our bikes and trying to work out which areas are which. We have looked at adverts for flats to rent in estate agent windows and also in the local newspapers and have seen various areas advertised and now have a rough idea of the prices for the areas, but we also wanted to be able to see the areas.
Yesterday we went for a cycle down the coast about 10-12 miles, we are staying in a village to the south of Valencia called Pinedo which is just inside a national park. The Park is there because there is a large freshwater lake and the land around this lake is used to grow rice, this agriculture and the sand dunes are what the park is protecting.
The cycle south was lovely, we were curious to see what two of the villages / towns were like at the other end of the park (which is about 12 miles long). The village we are in is very nice – but it has one thing that spoils it – the port of Valencia which is to the north. The port spoils the view in a few ways – the lights are always on and this mucks up the sight of the stars at night, if you look to the north the cranes of the port are always there and if you look to the south in the distance on the water you can normally see a few boats queueing to get into the port (huge cargo boats that must be about 0.5 km long).
We were interested in seeing if the villages further south were that bit nicer without the proximity of the port.
The cycle was really nice, through the sand dunes and on a newly built path that was part of the improvements to Valencia that were made for the Americas Cup this year. Eventually we reached the first village, El Saler, this was nice but quite a way from the sea – then we saw lots of huge apartment blocks, with the sand dunes around them. The strange thing was there was no one there, this was before the siesta so there was no reason for it to be so quiet. The setting of these tower blocks was actually in the sand dunes and there was lots of trees between each block so the lack of noise and people seemed quite appropriate.
We cycled on, at one point we stopped to put on sun cream and watched a team of park rangers who were being taught how to use a Segway which I thought was really interesting, but most of the cycling was through the dunes and park land. We then arrived at El Perellonet and then the park evaporated to be replaced by lots of tower blocks and the odd set of smaller houses.
El Perellonet was one of the places we had seen adverts for and were interested finding out more about – it sounded nice in the national park and also not too far from Valencia. What we found was not what we had expected!
The tower blocks and other houses were all deserted – there was no one there. We had heard that people in Valencia had places to go to at the weekends but did not expect them to be on this scale. There was block after block after block and then some smaller terraced houses and more blocks – all within about 150 meters from the beach – and all seemed to be empty. We must have cycled 3 miles along this area near the beach and all of it was covered in property, but we only saw about 30 people!
The shame is we took no pictures because I think it would have explained it better than I can with words. We are very glad we went though as it would be awful to live in one of these villages in the winter or maybe even just in the middle of the week. The next time we are likely to visit El Perrellonet will be in May and I am sure it will look a lot different then!
Here is a little video we shot on the beach when the weather was not so good on Sunday:
To explain where we are in relation to the city I took a photo of this map yesterday, I’ve added a couple of arrows to show where the important parts are. It takes us about 35 minutes to cycle from Pinedo to Valencia.
One interesting thing about Valencia is that they moved the river (Turia) in the 1950s because it kept flooding – the old course of the river has been turned into a park that you can see on the map – that follows the path of the river. The park is at the level of the old river and therefore much lower than the rest of the city this makes it quite quiet. All of the bridges that crossed the original river are still in place so the park seems very detached from the rest of the city – which is nice.
Below is the Google Maps satellite view of our apartment – you can use it to zoom in and out and see the area around us – the beach is just to the right off the screen.
I never knew that! Outside our window is a paddy field – in fact for about a mile in front of the window there are paddy fields.
As soon as you start to think about it – suddenly paella makes sense – but still a bit of trivia I did not know!
Apparently the Valencia region is the best rice in Spain (but they would tell me that wouldn’t they!).
Other farming trivia I have found out – they have three harvests a year here – and it seems almost everything can be grown here. I had honestly never thought about agriculture in Spain – but apparently they are one of the largest agricultural producers in Europe!
That is the end of “Farming Today” from Spain.
So we arrived two days ago and I guess it worth talking about my first impressions of this part of Spain.
First of all the airport – we landed through cloud and fog and then they had to park the plane for a few minutes. The pilot announced that unfortunately there was still a plane in our space so we would have to wait until it was moved somewhere else. After 10 minutes or so we were taken to our slot then we had to stand there for 10 minutes whilst they brought the landing stage over and connected it to the plane – much confusion with the cabin crew and the ground crew.
Once the landing stage was brought over we disembarked from the plane and were then directed to use the steps down the side of the landing stage to get to the tarmac – not use the nice corridor into the arrivals area of the airport – there was a woman there frantically talking on her walky-talky – who seemed quite surprised that a plane had landed at the airport. We wandered across the tarmac to a backdoor of the airport and then went through passport control.
This all lead to me feeling that life in Spain may not be quite as organised as the UK and that there were somethings I would need to get used to. Writing this though has made me realise that we probably had to enter through the backdoor as we needed to go through passport control because the UK is not in the Schengen Agreement. The surprised lady and the plane in our space could have been related and I know that planes go to the wrong places at Stansted so on reflection my initial feelings were probably a little harsh.
We got picked up at the airport by the woman we are renting the apartment from, she is German and so apart from the small talk Nicole had to do all the talking with her. As soon as we left the car park (and for the next 30 minutes) it became clear that complaining about traffic in the UK would fall on deaf ears to anyone who regularly visits Valencia airport – chaos! Not only were there just queues on all of the roads – frustrated and impatient drivers zoomed up the inside lane to push in ahead – which was making the queues much worse! I asked when was a good time to fly into the airport of Helga (our landlady) and she said it doesn’t make a difference what time – even 2am there are problems!
So my first impressions of Spain / Valencia are disorganised and chaotic – the first may be harsh but the second so far seems fair comment.
We have been talking about it for a while and now we have decided to just do it!
The excitement and the speculation that lasted for months earlier this year about whether we might get an opportunity to go to Stuttgart with Nicole’s work and then disappointment of the eventual bad news that the deal never got signed left it’s mark on us both. One conclusion we had once we had the bad news was that if we were to leave the country it would be better if it was a decision that we had made and were in control of than if it was in someone else’s hands.
So back at the start of November we had a chat about our future options and decided that we would like to leave the country and do it based on our own decision. We decided that we would take some risks and just leave, try to make money from the various on-line work I am doing and just see what happens. In the worst case we decided we would end up back in Milton Keynes again.
So here I am only 7 weeks later – Nicole has resigned from her job, and we are in Valencia, Spain on phase 1 of our project looking to see if this is the place for us.
There are so many things to comment on at the moment – but I will leave my reflections on Spain for the moment and mention a little more about our plans.
Nicole’s notice period was 3 months – so this means that she will finish working for her current company on the 19th February 2008, and our aim is to leave the UK on the 1st of March to then spend 2 months in Nicole’s village in Germany (Serrig). After that we are going to move on to warmer places and Valencia at the moment is the place we plan to head for.
Between now and March we have a lot to do – fix up the house for renting out, rent it out, buy a new vehicle, sort out all sorts of legal and tax issues and throw out loads of the junk we have accumulated over the years. It is our aim to get the essentials bits and pieces of our lives down to a small enough amount that we can fit it all into a van / people carrier (possibly with a trailer) and then if we don’t like Valencia, we can try Barcelona, if we don’t like Barcelona try Madrid etc – without it being too much hassle.
That’s the plan though …. but stay tuned to find out what might actually happen – more news as it comes