Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

Adrienne went to her conference sessions this morning, while I wandered around the Old Town. I'd meant to visit some museums, but they turned out to be closed on Mondays, so I visited the Cathedral and the Royal Gardens. The Cathedral is interesting because it was built as a plain gothic church and then upgraded multiple times in neoclassical and baroque styles, resulting in an odd mishmash. Also of interest were the displays of relics (the skull and bones of one saint, and the intact arm of another), and the museum (through a small door in a side wall of one of the chapels), which contains the Holy Grail.

In the late afternoon, Adrienne and I met up and we explored some other areas of the Old Town. It started drizzling, and looked like it was going to get worse, so we popped in to a department store (it seems like there's a branch of El Corte Ingles on every block here) and picked up an umbrella. It turned out to be a good choice, since it was pouring on our way home from dinner.

The Old town is quite confusing, with streets placed at any old angle, frequent street name changes, and signs written in Valencian which almost, but don't quite match the ones on our map, written in "Spanish" (Castillan), and a lot of restaurants were closed (because it's Monday). We ended up at a nice little place where we had a very tasty seafood paella.