Sunday, 20 January 2019

Walking Valencia

Sunday, January 20, 2019 – Friday was a walking day. We walked a lot.

I also ran in the morning, back in Central Park. While jogging on a nearby street, I discovered another way across the tracks, a pedestrian and bicycle overpass. Since we’re usually headed for the centre when we go out, it’s not that useful, but good to know it’s there if we’re ever headed in that direction – over to the other railway station, for example, to meet Shelly Rowe when she comes from Seville.

In the morning, we walked back to the Camper store on Avenida Colón. Karen had noticed the day before that the receipt for our shoes showed mine as costing €105. “I thought you said they were €90,” she said. I did, they were, they’d overcharged me. How it happened is difficult to fathom. Their website says the shoes are on sale for €90. The sticker on the shoe in the store said €90. Still I was charged €105. So back we went.

I didn’t take the shoes, just the electronic receipt they’d emailed me. Karen went window shopping while I went in. Luckily, the sales clerk spoke a little English. She studied her computer for some time, clearly flummoxed, then said I’d have to bring the shoes in. Why, I said? Here’s the receipt, it says I was charged €105. Here’s the shoe from your display, it says I was supposed to have been charged €90. Simple. She finally said she’d get her manager. Another woman came and went through the same exhaustive examination of receipt and computer screen before finally agreeing to refund the overcharge.

On the way to Camper, we’d walked up the street where Shelley and Shelly will be staying when they come to Valencia in February. It’s a much posher neighbourhood than ours, but could be noisy as their place is only a half block from Avenida Colón, which is a major artery with a lot of traffic. After the Camper errand, we walked back in the same direction on the next street down and zig-zagged through this high-end downtown neighbourhood. At one point, we turned onto Ciril Amarós, a street on which we often find ourselves. It’s lined with posh-looking apartment blocks and chi-chi shops selling designer duds, interior decor stuff and children’s clothes. The latter I call abuela shops, places where grandmothers (abuelas in Spanish) can spend exorbitant sums on designer clothes for their grandchildren.

We ended up at Mercado Colón. Built in the early 20th century in the modernista style made famous by Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona, it was once a real produce market. In recent years, it has been brilliantly restored and is now mostly filled with upscale restaurants and cafes. The last time we came here, there was very little on the below-ground level. Now there are some new businesses, mostly more restaurants, but also a fishmonger that wasn’t there before.

Our general impression is that the economy in Valencia is improving, purse strings have loosened – witness the new Central Park. Two record years of tourism will have helped, but the Spanish economy in general has been improving too.

We started back towards Ruzafa from Mercado Colón, walking along streets we’d never been on before, guessing at the turns, and ended up exactly where we needed to be. We know this city – or the centre of it anyway.

After lunch and a little siesta, we sallied out again about four. The sun, was already low in the sky. We walked through the centre over into Carmén, the bohemian nightclub area (but also a lower-middle-class residential area.) I always like wandering in this area because it’s the heart of the very active street art scene in Valencia. 

An old favourite: a zombie, now, appropriately, mouldering

We found some great new (to me) street art, and some old favourites, including the bucking horse led by snail cowboys. A couple of good ones have disappeared – the sad cat with burnt tail on the restaurant just off Tossal Square, for example. But it's been painted over with something just as good, by Disneylexya, a new name (to me). We wandered for an hour, then realized how late it was getting and scurried back through the centre by a slightly different route.



Work by Disneylexya near Plaza Tossal

Yesterday we set out in the late morning with the idea of walking to the Centre del Carme, the convent-turned-art gallery in the main square in Carmén. (Carme is the name in Valencian, the Catalan-like local language; Carmén is the Spanish. The autonomous region of Valencia is officially bilingual.) The walk took us right through the centre – City Hall Square, the Central Market, the Silk Exchange. A sunny Saturday, the place was humming, tourists – mostly suburbanites probably – clogged the streets. The gargoyles were brilliantly lit on the front of the Silk Exchange. The sun was making all the old buildings look lovely.  

St. Joan of the Market - church next to Central Market

We walked down different streets in Carmén and found lots more interesting street art, some signed, some not.

Carmén street art: unusual in being in an abstract style - most is closer to illustration

Carmén street art: psychadelic iguana(?) by Dasoiking, a Chilean artist living in Valencia

Carmén street art by Sea162, a Madrid-based grafitero

Carmén street art: I'm watching you

We’d been to the Centre del Carme a few times on other visits. At least part of it had been nicely restored, but exhibit space was limited and there weren’t always exhibits on – it seemed a bit hit and miss. The place has been transformed. It’s now the Centre del Carme – Cultura Contemporània. They’ve restored much more of it. There’s now lots of exhibit space, and multiple exhibits on all the time. We looked at two.

One was a show of paintings by young Polish artists. I thought it was impressive that a provincial museum in Spain would bother itself with fairly obscure art from a distant country. I can’t say I was terribly impressed with the art, though.

Centre del Carme: Polish exhibit - water colour by Basia Bańda

The other exhibit was a major retrospective of work by a Spanish artist, Daniel García Andújar (1966-). I’d never heard of him, but he seems to be a pretty big deal here. He’s a conceptualist, but one with a sense of humour. His specialty is elaborate fakery. We particularly liked “Leaders,” a room papered with fake posters of famous world leaders in unlikely poses, created with a lot of Photoshop wizardry. Mao wearing Kiss makeup. George W. Bush buddying up with Fidel Castro. Karl Marx getting a haircut. My favourite was one with Saddam Hussein as an apparently repentent abusive husband in a poster supposedly from some Swiss government department. Headline: “If your partner turns out to be a tyrant.” The humour reminds me a little of Banksy.


Centre del Carme: "Leaders" project by Daniel García Andújar 

By the time we’d finished with Andújar, it was almost one, so we went home for lunch – and somehow never made it out again.



Carmén street art: at Plaza de Carmén

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