Fear a bargain

There was a great deal here at the Hilton in Valencia. An amazing deal for one of the highest rated hotels in the whole city. Five star luxury for only 70 euro a night. Unbeatable!

Me after a day of warm Valencian sand (and some sun.)

What I should have asked is why.

Why so little for such spectacular lodgings?

In answer to that question, let me share some of the alternate titles for this blog:

Greetings from The Outer Limits

Deep Space Nine and Ten are really pretty interchangeable

Who knew Timbuktu was in Spain?

Affordable luxury in no man’s land

Everybody knows this is nowhere (although I felt like I’d used that before)

The World’s Most Expensive Internet Access Any Time, Any Place, Anywhere, Ever.

How much, you ask?

Are you seated?

Are you ready?
Are you seriously ready?

Are you without a doubt seated and ready?

(And, again, this is not Dubai or Tokyo or Antarctica or the moon)

$20 Euro an HOUR

Me in front of the fountain in the main square in Valencia.

Try $17…all thanks to Lucky/Dr. Buzzard and Brad and their ‘buy me a beer’ contributions. (And THANK YOU!!!! Dr. Buzzard and Brad!)

Speaking of which, we are bearing down hard on the first year anniversary of this blog. An entire year of blogging. To think, just a year ago this seemed like such a good idea. Or a fast ticket to fame and fortune. I so had no idea what I was getting myself into…

In other news, I’ve logged a few hours on the beach both in Valencia and Barcelona. The beach here (Valencia) is incredibly deep and soft, and the sand is so warm I just want to roll around in it. I almost wish my towel were thinner so I could suck the delicious heat up better. It’s unspeakably wonderful.

Scene in the lovely Valencia square.

In Barcelona, you are approached every three minutes by someone selling beer and potato chips and Asian ladies carrying pictures torn out of anatomy books offering 15-minutge massages for a mere 5 euro. Here in Valencia there are just the massage givers and some African guys selling sunglasses, and they’re much fewer and farther in between.

I’m baffled on many levels by the beach-side masseurs.

Why are they always – without fail – tiny Asian women?

Where are all these ladies coming from?
Why is it you never see any Asian people anywhere in Spain, and then you get on the beach and the place is teeming with these masseuses?

Is it some kind of black market slavery ring?

They abduct you from your home and make you sell foot massages on the beaches of Spain?

And seeing as you never see a single person take them up on their offer, how are they making a living and eventually buying their freedom back from their captors?

And if you, as a sunbather, did succumb to the considerable pressure (this one chick WOULD NOT leave and kept touching me until I actually started to get mad), would they just straddle you right there on your beach towel, temporarily borrowed from the cheap but faraway Hilton? Ride ‘em cowgirl?

The other excitement at the beach was my fellow sunbathers. Today I saw a man – who had to be at least 80 – wearing an orange string thong. String. Two pieces of floss in the back and a small satchel in front. Which is not something you see every day. Thankfully.

There was also a woman bathing totally nude. And sitting Indian-style for the bulk of it.

Actually, I kind of admire their willingness to shake their groove thang without the slightest concern for personal modesty or good taste.

Speaking of good taste, I’ve hit my Spanish food wall.

I’ve had enough.

Minus the olives stuffed with anchovy paste (which I am ridiculously in love with), I’ve had my fill of ‘tortilla’ (the potato omelet thing), ham, cheese plates, shrimp with their heads on, paella, dry sandwiches, and oversized calamari for the time being.

Especially the calamari.

When I think of calamari, I think of little tiny, itty bitty squids all fried up nice and crunchy and miniature octopus-like.

Instead, they keep bringing me a plate covered with battered “Livestrong” bracelets. Not what I had in mind…

Nonetheless, the tapas and I will not be for much longer, as tonight we board an overnight train to Paris, and then it’ll be all baguettes and brie and escargot and cassoulet and coq au vin and whatever the hell else they eat until I get totally sick of it or head home on Saturday, whichever comes first.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but since getting here, I have slept an obscene amount.

Me at Parc Guell in Barcelona

The first night – and thirteen HOURS of sleep later – wasn’t so shocking, as I’d slept maybe nine hours in the two day prior. Obviously I was paying off a sleep debt.

But last night? And the 11 hours I slept then? Until 1:30pm? And five feet from the super noisy, mopeds screaming by at 120 kmh and at all hours? How is that possible?

Tomorrow it will not be possible, as we have to catch a 10am train to Valencia. And need to leave the apartment by 8:30 am. And have a dinner reservation for tonight at 11pm.

I think that’s the only thing that makes getting up so ridiculously late in the day seem less wasteful…knowing you’ll be eating dinner in the middle of the night. It’s sort of like the Spanish have skewed the entire day forwards four or five hours.

No wonder they need a two-hour siesta in the middle of the day.

If you were up eating dinner until well past midnight, you’d be tired too.

As for me? I like to combine my sleep and my siestas into one long, uninterrupted Sleeping Beauty-esque slumber.

He's a bold little fellow.

In other news, my cat Siddhartha is missing.

If your first reaction to that statement is “You have a cat?” then you are probably not alone. He doesn’t get much press coverage because he doesn’t tend to open pantries or ravage countertops or eat poison or do much of anything to give me a heart attack…apparently because he’s been waiting the nearly five years of his life to pull a real doozy (a.k.a. disappear for four days) and give me a possibly fatal heart attack just for show.

It started Tuesday night when he missed dinner. Sid loves to eat and has missed no more than a single meal in his entire life, so the sight of his still-full food dish Wednesday morning before I left was upsetting. Since word from home is that he still hasn’t appeared, and I can still see the food dish in my mind’s eye… it’s still upsetting.

See? Remember the egg thing I was talking about? Why can't they do this in America? Take the guesswork out of it?

It’s times like these I wish I was a pet psychic (or knew a pet psychic or cat dowser or a feline empath or any kind of far-out resource of that kind), as the worst part of a missing pet is wondering if they’re still alive. I’m vacillating between thinking positive (he wandered into someone’s garage or basement or shed and is stuck there, and they just haven’t figured it out yet) and extremely negative (a hawk grabbed him).

In the net, and as I’m both a believer in positive thinking and unsettled by the idea that anything painful would ever befall my furry kids, I’m choosing to visualize that Sid is currently wearing a velvet tuxedo, a large purple Mad Hatter top hat, and eating tea and krumpets and sharing a hookah with Alice and the Caterpillar, while the White Rabbit anxiously urges him to hurry up, as he’s now been sitting there for four days.

And knowing Sid, that’s not entirely impossible.