Merry Christmas from Valencia
Dec 25th, 2007 by Al Briggs in amusing, leaving-uk, spain, stuff, valencia
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
I responded to an email this week about advice on how to build a website and I thought it would be worthwhile to reproduce it here as the facts are pretty useful to anyone.
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Cost Effective Websites
The first thing you need is a domain name . To get a domain should be cheap I really recommend using : http://www.domainmonster.com – £2.95 per year for .uk and £8.89 /year for .com – they are cheap but also their customer service is excellent ad they have a very helpful site and useful tools also.
Once you have a domain registered you need make a decision if you are going to go DIY or use a design company to build the site.
If you go for a design company then you will only get realistic figures from them – I hear a lot of nice things about http://zero-now.com/, I have never used them but they are based in Milton Keynes so great if you live near me.
If you go the DIY route you will next need a hosting company – I recommend http://www.nativespace.co.uk – you can get very good hosting with them for £3.99 a month which is reliable and flexible, there are other alternatives around but you need to make sure that you don’t comprise quality with price.
Next you need to sort out a content management system (sounds more complex than it is) – I recommend wordpress – free and one of the most popular on the web – if you choose nativespace they have a simple wizard that will install wordpress for you – quick and easy!
Finally you will need to get a design – there are a lot of free wordpress templates or you can pay for one – or commission one to meet your exact needs from a designer.
If you suffer from techno fear then this may sound complex – but I think you will find the process fairly painless and there is lots of help on the internet, and when you think you could be up and running with a good hosted site for less than a £10.
There is an even easier way and that is to use the wordpress.com site where they provide the hosting for free – and so you don’t have to install anything – there is a limited set of template designs already available – and if you want your domain to point there you just pay them £7.50 per year and they will allow you to use your domain. This is the the simplest and cheapest option but you have more restrictions – value for money is fantastic – for a .uk domain you have got it all sorted for a year for just over a tenner!
One of the great things about trying it yourself is that it helps to play around with ideas on content and what you want to do with the site – before you approach the professionals – the £10 is worth it for these reasons alone – even if you have low expectations of what you might actually create.
Good Luck
We it is finally out of beta and we have launched version 1.0 of uHavePassed – our new service to help students practice the driving theory test on-line and on their mobile phones.
We started today to offer 30 day subscriptions for the service – you can find out more about Mobile Phone Driving Theory Tests.
We think we have created a great new way to engage students in the content of the driving theory test – and help them get through the 1000+ questions that could come up in their real theory test.
It has been interesting working with the Driving Standards Agency to get the approvals needed to launch the test – but we are now there.
We now have a huge list of things that we want to add on to the service – but our first priority is to get out and promote the existing software and service.
How more British can you get – two abandonded ducks that were found swimming out at sea – have a new (slightly smaller) home in a tea cup!
This is only temporary as far as I can gather.
The abandoned ducklings raised in a teacup | the Daily Mail
We are now just about to start on the hardest part of a project – getting the General Public involved.
We’ve just launched the website uHavePassed.com to help 16-20 year olds pass their driving theory test.
It has been hard work getting everything ready for this as we are using some new technology we have created to allow us to synchronise data between mobile phones and the website.
If you want to see how you can now practice your driving theory test on your mobile phone then pop over to the site and have a look.
We are actively looking for beta testers – so if you are based in the UK then please register to beta test our driving theory test software.
I am normally quite proud of what I consider to be quite a load clap – great for making people jump! :-)
There is a man in china though who can clap as loud as a helicopter!
I am not sure if this sort of thunderous clap counts as a god-like power – be I wonder if he could turn this super-power to better purposes? Is this what the world needs now? Clap-Man?