City of Arts & Sciences

This morning we said adios to Peñíscola, and took the train back to Valencia. We got in around 11am, and took a cab to our new hostel called Moon Beach Guest House. When it dropped us off at the address, we couldn’t find any building on the street with that number, nor was there any place with a sign saying the name of the hostel. We sat around waiting a while, debating what to do. My phone for some reason has no service in Valencia, so I couldn’t call the hostel or anything unfortunately. I thought maybe we’d been scammed, but then decided to ask a random man in a restaurant if he had ever heard of it. He pointed to the unidentified door next to his and said that was the hostel. We tried it, but it was locked.

We heart Spain

After a frustrating twenty minutes we finally saw a girl walk up to the door with a key and let herself in. She was Russian or something and said this was the hostel, so I followed her inside and up the steps. I yelled around until I found this surfer-hippie guy named Davíd, who is the owner of the “hostel”. After a brief chat with him and figuring out this was the place, the three of us lugged our bags upstairs to our room. The place was an old building converted into a surfer-on-acid themed guest house. The facilities were nice and it seemed like a fun young-people hostel, but I definitely wrote my complaints on the sketchy difficulty of finding it on my hostelworld.com review.

With that behind us, we went outside to hail a cab. We were staying in a good location, literally one block from the beach, and across the street from the high-end Las Arenas hotel. Before we decided to take advantage of this though, we headed into the modern part of the city known for its unique and impressive architecture: The City of Arts and Sciences. The famous architect Santiago Calatrava designed the whole complex, and it was recently completed in 2005. It now includes a nature park, a science museum, an opera house, an aquarium, and an I-max theatre. After we walked around and checked out some of the cool architecture, we headed to L’Oceanografic- the aquarium.

Ciudad de Las Artes y Las Ciencias

The Aquarium, or L'Oceanografic

 We spent most of our day there, and it was a fun time! We got to see the usual shark tunnel and exotic fish, but also some belugas, penguins, fighting walruses, and cuddling seals.  At one point, some trainer had a giant falcon land on Christina’s head, and later I thought a giant pink bird was going to attack me. The highlights of the day included seeing these electrical jellyfish that look like something from a science fiction novel, and of course… the Dolphin Show! Christina was so excited about it; she was like a little kid on Christmas. We got there an hour early to make sure we had front row seats. It was a pretty awesome show though! After we split some pizza at the aquarium for dinner, we headed back to the hostel.  We made it an early night for our day-trip tomorrow morning!

Moon Beach Guest House, Valencia