Valencia

My good friend Fernando Gea proved to be an excellent host when I arrived in Valencia, frantically driving a couple of hours from his parents' house to show me the city and let my friends and I sleep in his apartment.  

Valencia has everything, including bumping nightlife, a medieval city center, the ultra-modern city of arts and sciences designed by native born Santiago Calatrava, a dry river full of palm trees, beautiful beaches, and even it's own language, (don't let anyone hear you calling Valencian a Catalan dialect).

My two American friends and I spent the days oversleeping and sight-seeing, Gea providing tours in Italian, which were informative and hilarious.  When we arrived at a nearby restaurant  around 10:30 p.m. it was deserted (too early for a Spanish dinner), but all of the tables were already claimed by parties arriving later.  The sympathetic host was so helpful that he called another restaurant on our behalf, and five minutes later, I found myself drinking endless sangria and eating like a king at a table that read "Fernando."  

The one thing missing from my Valencia visit was the real Paella.  Gea had warned me not to try the famous rice dish in Barcelona for, as he claimed, I would only be able to find the true version in his city where it was created. Unfortunately, all of the good Paella places were closed for Holy Week. "No problem," Gea insisted, his mother also makes a great Paella, and she only lives two hours from Valencia; conveniently enough, on the way to my next Spanish stop, Granada.

I snapped the picture above after a rainstorm, and it might be my favorite from Europe so far.