Valencia

Buon giorno!  Caroline and I have finally come back from Malta and I'm ready to update the blog starting from Valencia for your reading pleasure :)

Before even coming to Italy it was decided that one of our number one trips to go on would be Barcelona.  Caroline and I went to Spain last year, but were only able to see the south all the way up to Madrid, located in central Spain.  It was too hard to get over to Barcelona on the east, but we vowed we would sometime in our life - thankfully 'sometime' was just the next year!  One issue was that Ryanair doesn't fly directly to Barcelona, it actually flies an hour outside of it.  They do however fly directly to Valencia so we thought we would spend a night there and head up to Barcelona by train to see the coast, which I heard was beautiful.  Since nothing really flies out of Florence we had to make the trek to Pisa and fly out of there, which was actually surprisingly easy and uneventful.  I became a bit worried before we boarded because of the many signs saying that your carryon baggage MUST fit in this bin or you could not take it on.  Now I have a very weird shaped backpack - it's shorter and wider than the normal backpack, which technically makes it hard to fit in one of those bins shaped like a normal rolly carry on.  Luckily no one said anything on our flight over, but on the way back is a different story that I'll get to later.

Ok so enough about boring logistics and on to Valencia!  Valencia is beautiful and reminded Caroline and me of a mix between Madrid with it's grand architecture and Malaga's coastal town feel.

As soon as we came out of the train station my breath was taken away by the beauty of the city and I was excited to explore.  We had about a 15 minute walk to our hostel, which was very cute and we were able to get our room to ourselves even though we had one open bed.  After we settled in we set off to find some dinner!  We found a restaurant called Baldo with a waiter who did not speak a lick of english and spoke mainly Catalan (we think) since it didn't sound like spanish.  We settled on paella Valenciana to salute the city, a couple of tapas of patatas bravas and croquettes (my fav!) and red wine.  All in all it was a good meal...the paella was a bit bland, but Caroline and I had experienced that before in spanish cooking when we came before and Courtney's sister who lived in Spain for 6 months also said the same thing.  The tapas were amazing though!

The waiter continued to talk to us in rapid Catalan even though we clearly didn't speak it, and somehow Caroline was able to discern that he wanted us to meet him and his friends at the bar around the corner when he gets off at either 12:30 or 2:30 to celebrate his birthday.  He also gave us his number.  While it was nice of him, we just nodded our heads and headed out to explore a little bit before passing out early. We saw some cool piazzas and buildings that we were looking forward to seeing in the daylight and also got ice cream to top off our meal.

The next day the nightmare begins...

Bed Bugs.  I don't know what those words elicit in your mind, but in my mind it's something like "HOLY &^%$!!!" followed by more streams of expletives that would just look silly on here.  They are disgusting and it's an epidemic that is only going to get worse all over the world since apparently we can't use DDT anymore (yes we are now all experts based on the fact that we found them).  We woke up and had breakfast and when we came back to our room I noticed a little bug on my pillow.  My mind immediately went to BBs (writing the word even gives me the skivvies) and I wanted to shoot myself.  Cue panic mode and everyone began to freak out.  We believe that they came from these giant green blankets we pulled out of the closet before going to bed because we were cold, since we didn't notice anything before going to bed.  Also, this hostel has awards and stellar reviews for it's cleanliness so I don't believe it has much to do with them, this was probably from the many travelers that have come through there.  We were so freaked out that we bailed on exploring Valencia and decided to get the hell out of there, first alerting the staff and then heading up to Barcelona where we could wash and dry every single thing we had.

The train ride was stressful as we were all still panicking, but the parts of the coast I saw were beautiful.  We finally got to Barcelona and into our fabulous hostel.  Thankfully they had laundry in the hostel so we took everything we could and washed and dried it.  It was very stressful and tensions were high in the group, understandably so.  We headed to the grocery store and got trash bags and zip lock bags and put everything we owned in them.  We did have one roommate from the Netherlands and who knows what she thought, but we tried not to care.  We were determined to beat this thing so there was no way we would bring anything back to our place in Florence.  We were also determined not to let it ruin our trip so we basically did everything we could that first day and tried not to think about it again until we were heading back home.

That does it for part one of our trip.  Sorry to have grossed you out, but it does get better I promise!  Barcelona was a fantastic trip and I will work on updating that post this weekend!

Ciao for now friends and word to the wise - if you are traveling ANYWHERE, be aware that you can find those things in even 5 star hotels so just be careful...being exposed to them is one of the grossest things that have ever happened to me and I wouldn't wish it on anyone!  Thank god we never had any bites, but the war continues and you'll just have to read on to hear how we are dealing with it...