Barcelona to Valencia 9/4/2008

Today we left Barcelona, (bummer), en route to Valencia, (neat). We took a train. We checked in to our hostel which was a much farther walk from the train station than Kelly would have liked. We were in a large room with several bunk beds and we shared it with lots of people, including one girl from Georgia (the state) who was studying abroad in Valencia. We left the hostel and found a neat bridge and walked through a long park in the middle of the city.

Pretty much the only reason we went to Valencia, other than to break up the train ride to Madrid, was to see the Center for Arts and Sciences. It is a campus of five buildings designed by Santiago Caltrava (see Barthelona 9/1/2008). The five buildings are an opera house, an IMAX theatre, a science museum, an aquarium/SeaWorld type building, and an arboretum/parking deck. As with all his buildingds, Calatrava is able to do some amazing things with the help of some pretty extreme engineering.

We walked around outside for a while and took pictures and tried to decide which buildings we wanted to see most. We ended up buying tickets to go in the science museum that evening, and to see an IMAX show the next morning. The museum was pretty neat. A lot of the exhibits were aimed toward children and because of my superior intellect and maturity, it was hard for me to enjoy. But there was a totally cool one about comic books. It had all kinds of cool heroes like Spiderman, Wolverine, Daredevil, and I even got a picture of me with the HULK! Totally rad! In contrast, I did find the other exhibits to be much more mundane and juvenile.

After checking out the museum, we hung out outside taking pictures until sunset. We then walked back and got a cheap dinner and indulged in some ice cream before heading to bed early for the evening.