If you are in the South of Spain, you must join one of these tours! đ
Enjoy!
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Nov 252015
Nov 182015
I gotta say, I love it here in the south of Spain!
Enjoy!
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Nov 112015
It is crazy to walk down the halls of what used to be a Mosque and enter a Church.
This is a must see!
(The entire structure is part of the Roman Catholic church and this is the Cathedral of Cordoba, regardless of what people want to say.)
Enjoy!
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Nov 042015
If you are near Madrid, you must make a stop in Toledo!
Enjoy!
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Oct 282015
I’m also introduced to Kim’s favorite Spanish chain restaurant and, to put it mildly, it BLOWS MY MIND!!! đ
Sometimes I wonder why I ever spent time on those two islands above Europe…
Enjoy!
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Feb 032015
Valencia Park at Night
Part 7 of 7 of my night in Valencia. Â Here is Part 6.
Itâs time to go back to the park to let the people in the group who would like to consume what was just purchased do their thing. We head to the park that used to be the bottom of a river; yea Valencia is cool like that!
At this point, it is just 5 of us: me, 2 Dutch guys, and 2 Kiwi girls. Can you guess who bought the drugs? Youâd be wrong if you thought it was the Dutch guys. Continue reading »
Jan 242015
Valencia Square at Night
Part 6 of 7 of my night in Valencia. Â Here is Part 5.
You didn’t think the night was over, did you?
After the pub, we head to the main pedestrian square in Valencia. Along the way, we buy some street-beers. The Spanish call them Paki-beers and this is because they are beers sold by Pakistani people that roam the streets. The beers themselves are cheap and ice-cold! Though, thatâs because they refrigerate them in the sewer systems, yea.
Oct 132014
In this episode I am in Valencia, Spain and I cook and eat a pig’s face! Â That’s right! Â I go through the whole process of buying, seasoning, cooking, and eating a pig’s face…
Watch and enjoy! đ
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Aug 302014
Valencia Wine Jug Drinking
Part 5 of 7. Â A Moment in Valencia â The Night is part 4.
By this point in my travels I am quite bored with the generic questions of âWhere are you from?â and âWhat are you doing in Europe?â and am much more interested in the information that can be classified as an outlier. I want something that is actually interesting, something that is different from the thousands of people that I have met before you. (Actually getting this however is more difficult than I thought because, as it turns out, most of us are incredibly similar, following similar patterns, and making similar decisions for similar reasons â but thatâs for another article)
As such, I now ask people to tell me something that they wouldn’t tell someone they would have to again see or encounter. This is such a fun question and yields quite interesting answers.
Back to the bar – When most of the group goes to the toilet, I pose the aforementioned question to one of the remaining girls.  She pauses for a moment, looks down, then starts to play with a lock of her hair as she finally makes eye-contact with me and reveals her secret. She is a lesbian and has a crush on her travel partner, who is also a girl and who is apparently straight. In fact, ever since they got really drunk together and hooked-up, which I took to mean kissing and perhaps groping, this girl has wanted her travel companion in a more serious way.
I canât believe what I am hearing. This girl has a secret lesbian crush on her travel partner and no one knows about it, except me!
Now itâs time for round two. The first âtoilet groupâ starts to come back as the second one, including lusting-lesbian-travel-partner, heads off to the toilet. Her travel companion sits down next to me and I ask her the same question: âCan you tell me something that you wouldn’t tell someone that you ever had to see again?â There is no way that I am going to hear something as interesting as what I just heard, but I feel that there is still no better question to ask a fellow traveler.
She looks around to make sure that no one but me can hear what she is about to say and then she tells me that she is worried that her friend likes her and wants to get with her; she says that this is the reason that she never drinks too much around her travel partner. She is worried that if she gets too drunk around her that the girl will try to hook up with her. The manner in which she says this, with a bit of hesitation and trepidation in her voice, makes it seem as though this has been looming over their entire trip.
At this point, I am freaking out. I canât believe that these girls, separate from each other, both commented on the same thing, this thing that could ruin their friendship forever and which hangs over their travels and their relationship as a sort of ominous shadow no more than a few feet behind them as they backpack through Europe together.
The lusting-lesbian-travel-partner has no idea that her straight friend is nervous that she might engage her sexually during their travels. The straight friend has no idea that her suspicions about her travel partner are actually true.
So, here I am, sitting down in this bar, with the entire group now back together, and I can barely contain myself. Both friends are sitting right next to each other, neither knowing about the otherâs desires or fears, and I am the only one at the table that knows about it. It is the craziest feeling in the world and I am just bursting at the seams with excitement. I am trying as hard as is humanly possible not to show anything on my face as I look back and forth between these two girls to see if they have magically found out what the other said through some sort of female-to-female sixth sense osmosis based communication system.
It takes a minute, but I am able to calm down a bit after a few more drinks from the jug of white wine.
At this point, the tour guides who brought us to the pub decide to go home. We are now left to our own devices…
 A Moment in Valencia â Robbery â Part 6 of 7
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Aug 252014
Drinking in the Park
This is part 4 of 7. Â A Moment in Valencia – The Next Day is part 3.
After the day, I am glowing with happiness.  I could not think of a better way to spend a day and, by this point, I am a bit exhausted and just ready for bed.  But, as I walk towards my room, two beautiful girls ask me out for drinks.  Damn.  So, I can go to bed or I can hang out with two seemingly fun girls and drink – hmmmm.
This really is the ‘problem’ with staying in a hostel.  There are always fun people around that want to go out and have a good time and it can be really difficult to say “No.”
It takes about a second for me to say “Yes” and I start to get ready for the night.  Before we go out to drink, we make a pit-stop at the local Pakistani run shop, since there they sell alcohol after the legally allowed time.  Once we acquire Gin for me and mixers for the girls, we head to a cool kind of river-park thing.  As we start to sip on the gin, we lay back and look up at the stars.  It is a crazy feeling to know that we are sitting at the bottom of what was a river for hundreds of years.
At this point, we are generally harassing each other for our differing English accents (American versus Kiwi) and having an all-around fun time. Â A few hours pass this way and then we decide to head back to the hostel to see what’s up.
River Park at Night
Arriving back at the hostel, we realize that it is Sunday, as a traveler you often do not know what day it is, and that the pub-crawl has failed to run because there was no one that wanted to go on it. However, the people that were managing the pub-crawl that night decide to take my group and some other people who were sitting in the common room to one cool pub before they leave for the night.
And this is how the night really picked-up.
By this point I was quite tipsy, maybe more than that, and, apparently, on the way to the pub, I have the most amazing conversation with the female pub-crawl guide; at least thatâs what I am told.  All I can think about is her amazing smile.
After about 15 minutes, we arrive at this small hole-in-the-wall local pub where no one speaks English.  The place is split into two levels and the second floor is about 5’5″ high and overlooks the bar below.  There is a giant paper mache dinosaur head on the wall and the atmosphere is a mix of cozy and crazy.
Wine Jug
Once we sit down, the guides introduce us to the best part about this place, a special wine jug drink that is really cheap and has a fun teapot type spout.  The goal is to pour the wine into your mouth without touching the spout.
The tour guides start the drinking and show us how to make a good pour without spilling anything. Â Now, it’s our turn. Â Everyone seems to be doing a decent job but they are definitely holding something back. Â When you are afraid of being embarrassed you never go full-throttle.
I, however, do not have that problem by this point in the evening.  As I start to pour the wine, I immediately extend my arm all the way out; here is my childhood dinner table shenanigans paying off – told you so mom!  But, just as I get my arm fully extended, the female tour guide blows on the stream, covering me in white wine. At least no one will mistake me for sober now that I smell of wine.
But the fun was just getting started…
A Moment in Valencia â Stories â Part 5 of 7
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