Thank goodness for GPS

So today was our first day in Valencia which is the 3rd largest city in Spain. Valencia is located on the coast so it's a bit warmer and we're hoping to get some beach time in tomorrow! We arrived at the train station this morning with a whole 3 minutes to spare. Then once the train was already moving, they though we were stowaways. Turns out we were just in the wrong seats. But in the end we made it here safe and sound!

Selen has never been to Valencia either so we don't really know our way around. We spent the first 20 minutes of our time in the city trying to figure out which direction we should be facing to get a cab to our hotel. We crossed the street about 3 times before we realized that the street only went one way so we'd have to go that direction regardless. Luckily it turned out to be the correct direction. Once we told our driver where we were going, he told us that our hotel was the best in the city. We were pretty pumped about that until he followed it up with "it's the best hotel in the city if you 3 beautiful ladies are staying there."

We went to our hotel, which wasn't anything to complain about, and checked in and then ventured out into the city. After taking the Metro 1 whole stop (which turned out to be quite a debacle since we couldn't figure out how to get through the gate with our new metro card), we got out, and managed to walk in the opposite direction of the city center for about 15 minutes. Clearly we were off to a rough start. But after that we figured out we should always go in the opposite direction of what we think and we ended up being able to see a lot of sights.

We searched the entire city for an outside cafe that looked to have decent food. That's one thing that isn't amazing here in Spain, the food...along with their customer service. We ended up at a place that had sandwiches because by that time is was almost 2 pm and we were famished so we went for it. Selen and I got chicken sandwiches were were your typical chicken sandwich. Damla decided to be a little more adventurous and ordered a potato sandwich...I think she learned her lesson.

My favorite part of today was the area of the city that is called the City of Arts and Science. It's basically a bunch of really modern buildings that are placed on one end of town. The architecture was amazing and beautiful. Some of the buildings were still under construction so we didn't go in any of them but that suited us just fine since none of us really like museums. The city center full of very old looking building that have cute balconies and intricate designs. It's slightly hard to identify what everything is from the tiny pictures on our map but we were at least able to say that we saw them.

Valencia is famous for its paella and we weren't about to miss out on any of that. We asked the hotel for a good recommendation and went there for dinner. They special ordered the seafood paella for us ahead of time and it was delicious. It was actually even better because we ordered a pitcher of sangria along side of it. :)

Tomorrow our day consists of getting some sun and checking out the area along the beaches of Valencia!!