BURN BURN BURN.

Italy was amazinggggggg. can't wait to go back. i have some funny stories to tell.. (that weren't so funny at the time..) however, those will come later bc i forgot to update about Valencia and las Fallas.

Paella originated from Valencia so our goal was to order one of those giant pans to share.. Well, our first mistake was to look for paella for dinner.. Usually, the custom in Spain is to eat a huge/late lunch and then a smaller late dinner.. which means, we should have been searching for paella at 2 or 3 pm.. anyway, we toured the city around 6pm looking for paella and only found one shop that was sort of selling it on the street. We passed it up and instead we found a cuban fusion restaurant and decided to give up and eat there. It was the best mistake we ever made. We ordered this HUGE rice dish.. and almost died bc we were so deliriously full. We tried some interesting appetizers too. Basically, I was really happy.

PULPO A LA GALLEGA (OCTOPUS)

CALAMAR A LA PLANCHA (GRILLED.. CALAMARI..)

BOQUERONES Y ACEITUNAS (ANCHOVIES AND OLIVES)

ARROZ (with i have no idea what.. we couldn't finish it with 5 starving girls...)

I went a little picture happy (so you can check my shutterfly if you want to see more pictures), but I thought the statues were all really cool. There was basically one on every corner. They're called "fallas." Since usually "fuego" means fire.. my theory is that "fallas" also means fire.. but, in the language/dialect they speak in Valencia. Anyway, they spend the entire year building these things and on the day of the festival.. they burn them all down. It's ridiculous.

We got lost a few times during the day, but there were soo many of them that we rarely saw the same falla twice. At around 11pm we got to see two or three burn down. They call it "la crema." There are firemen waiting at every corner and they even hose down some of the buildings to make sure they don't catch on fire. For each falla, they start with a bunch of fireworks and then torch the entire statue. It's crazy. There are barriers... that don't stop the fire from coming towards you.. lol at one point, we were running away from it.. as it was falling. and the sunglasses were intended to stop the ashes.... we didn't really factor in the fire part...

you can see the firecrackers and fireworks they set off.

the inside structure, burning away

Oh yeah, I felt like I had terrets? or w/e it's called.. bc firecrackers were going off non-stop! worse than Chinese New Years...