Tuesday, January 8, 2019 – Yesterday (Tuesday) started
well enough, but ended not so well. Sort of like Sunday.
We had wanted to subscribe to the city bike rental
service, Valenbisi, which we’ve done every other time we’ve been here. The
trick is to pay for an annual subscription. For seniors, it’s only €24 ($37.50).
That gives us, in effect, unlimited access to bikes for our entire stay, and is
much cheaper than buying six weekly passes. The service has hundreds of bike
stations around the city. In the past, we’ve gone to the Valenbisi website and
ordered the cards to be mailed to us – or to our landlord’s address. But since
we did it last, they’ve changed the process, and I couldn’t figure out the
website. So we decided to walk to the Valenbisi office, which is on the other
side of the river, about 25 minutes away.
Karen claimed to be fully recovered from her illness, had
had eggs and bacon for breakfast, and was raring to go. It was a lovely
morning, sunny but cool – at this point about 8C. So off we marched. We found
the Valenbisi office tucked down a side street and the very nice young woman
there, who spoke a little English, immediatedly cleared up our confusion.
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| Enroute to Valenbisi office - Bridge of the Custodian Angel (that's not him) |
You
don’t get a dedicated Valenbisi card to use the service anymore, you have to start
by getting one of the city’s all-purpose smartcards that can be loaded with
trips on the Metro, bus or commuter train services – and your Valenbisi
subscription. To get one of these, she explained, you have to go to a
Metrovalencia customer service office. The rest could be done online. She told
us where one was, in a major downtown Metro stop, and off we went again.
But we didn’t really understand that it was a separate
office we needed, thought she just meant the manned ticket counter. We didn’t
see the office, and the gruff guy at the ticket booth couldn’t explain what it
was we needed to do. Such are the frustrations of living in a place where you
don’t have much of the language. So we walked home and did some more research
online.
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| Ruzafa street scene: tropical planter and decorative orange tree |
There is another customer service office at the Metro stop by the main
train station, about 15 minutes away. After lunch, we walked over there, found
the office, bought the cards from a helpful guy who spoke English, went home
and ordered the Valenbisi subscriptions online. Now all we have to do is take
our new Mobilis cards with the Valenbisi account number and activation code we
received by email to any bike station and have the cards activated
for Valenbisi. Theoretically.
All good. In the meantime, Karen anounced she was done
for the day, feeling a little weary. Hardly surprising. So we sat around the
apartment, Karen reading, me doing photography. I didn’t have many new pictures
from Valencia, but I did have a bunch from Bute I hadn’t yet processed. I
present them below. I’m calling it Louis
Robert Blackwell Baines (aka Cutest Baby
Ever), Plus Friends: A Portfolio. There is a case to be made for black and
white for portraiture, I think.
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| Eddie |
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| Will |
Along about 4:30 or so in the afternoon, I suddenly started
feeling decidedly punky, providing the first glimmer of the truth about Karen’s
illness, that it wasn’t food poisoning, as we’d assumed, but a bug. Now I had
it too. So far, it hasn’t been as bad as Karen’s case, but I suspect she got
over the worst of it quicker because her body is really good at expelling bad
stuff. I did puke a couple of times, something I do only about once every 25
years, and I did spend a lot of time lying down, burping. (Sorry about the
bodily functions, Caitlin.) This morning, I still feel bilious and tired. And
Karen has had a slight relapse. We won’t be doing much today, maybe take the
Metro down to the beach in the afternoon and sit in the sun reading. It’s going
up to 20C today. Whoop!
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