Valencia Was Made for My Mom

This past weekend a couple of the girls and I booked a trip to Valencia.  For those of you who do not know where Valencia is, it is an eastern coastal city in Spain that lies south of Barcelona.  That being said, we had REALLY AWESOME weather for the weekend!  We grabbed buses from the Madrid bus station and took the 4 hour ride to Valencia.  After checking in at our hostel and grabbing something to eat Bethany and Teresa wandered the city while I Skyped in on my new RA staff's discussion session.  It was so neat to be able to meet everybody!

What followed that evening as I tried to go to bed is now why I have a strong hatred for french girls.  Yes I know this is generalizing and yes I know I've only had experience with two of them but let me tell you they did not make a good first impression for their country.  So I got back into the room at about 1am.  There were two people in bed so I quickly and quietly got ready in the bathroom so as not to disturb them.  Around 3am two french girls come into the room.  They are speaking VERY loudly and even when they see three people sleeping do no stop having their loud conversation.  This goes on for 15 minutes.  Finally they shut up.  Ten minutes later another girl comes in, much more quietly, but since we were all already awake this postpones sleep more.  By now it is 3:30 and I've probably slept for about an hour and need to be up again at 8 the next morning.  Around 4am one of the french girl's phones goes off.  It proceeds to play VERY LOUDLY and play and play and play until it finally shuts off.  This happens about three more times before I finally realize that this girl has the phone NEXT TO HER HEAD and is not waking up.  At about 5am everyone in the room is awake except the french girls because the phone has continually gone off.  Finally the girls across from me attempt to get it to silence it.  They can't reach, but are speaking english, so I offer to get it, since it is the bed above mine.  The phone is turned off and peace is restored to the room......for a little.....at 6:30 the french girls wake up and the one panics because her phone is no longer next to her head, it is now on the table where we put it after the fiasco the night before.  They begin arguing loudly, jump out of bed and turn the lights on.......AT 6:30 IN THE MORNING.  When she finally finds her stupid phone RIGHT THERE ON THE TABLE, they begin gathering their things and half and hour later have packed up to go.  It is now 7am.  Moral of the story, I hate french girls and got almost no sleep that night.

That day we were going to the Lladró museum just outside of Valencia.  It is where the only Lladró factory in the world is located.  This is reason number one of why Valencia is for my Mom.  Now, just as a precursor to these photos.  These were taken illegally!!!  I was not supposed to take pictures on the factory tour but I was taking notes on my itouch and may have taken a few.....just to show you people.....so appreciate my leap into the life of crime!!!

We were first shown a small video and the original models for the figures.  They are started as clay/plaster structures that are hand carved and then used to make molds.  These molds are where the porcelain is poured into to make each figure.

 

All of the figures are hollow.  They all have a small hole in the bottom too so that when they are in the kiln they do not explode.  Each piece also has a marking on it (a letter or number) that signifies which person worked on it.  Every craftsman has their own identification symbol.  Each piece is also made up of multiple pieces which surprised me greatly.  On most figures, the heads and limbs are made separately from the torso and then attached using liquid porcelain.

Because every piece is hand painted, there are not two identical pieces in the world.  After they are put in the kiln the pieces shrink about 15% percent.  It doesn't sound like much, but they really look like they've shrunk a lot.

ATTENTION ILLEGAL PHOTOS AHEAD!

So this is where I decided that everything was too cool NOT to take pictures, and so I used my itouch which makes no noise as it takes photos :-)  These were stealthy pictures so sorry about the finger in the way sometimes...

 When they paint the figures the porcelain they have to use a small black marker to note where they have and have not painted.  The porcelain absorbs the paint so quickly that most of the time they pieces only have two visible colors on them before they are fired as you can see from the angels in the photos above.  The reddish color will actually become a brown.

 Before the pieces are fired they are covered by a glaze which makes every piece almost completely blue in color.  This will bake clear though.

 

Any of the flowers on various pieces are not made with molds.  They are made petal by petal by hand with a more malleable version of the porcelain.  This dries out the hands of the modelers as the porcelain (even in this form) absorbs the smallest amount of water.  I found out that they only use Nivea hand cream for their hands because it is the only cream that will not stain the pieces.

After the factory tour we were able to walk through the showroom where they have every variety of piece they make.  They also have THE most expensive Lladró piece ever made.  This piece is so exclusive that only 100 were made and after production on those was completed, they destroyed the molds.  Only 78 of those 100 have been sold.

Keep in mind that each one of these was hand painted.  Also, the price.........$120,000.  It's their most expensive piece....clearly.

I found a few other pieces that reminded me of home:

 

All in all i had a wonderful time at the museum!

That afternoon I headed down to the "Ciudad de Artes y Ciencias' or the City of Arts and Sciences!  It is this beautiful museum complex in Valencia that contains 5 separate complexes.  One is the Palace of the Arts (an Art Museum), the second is an IMAX/laser show/planetarium, the third is a science museum, the fourth is an auditorium like area where the Valencia Open was held in 2009, and the final is an Aquarium/Aquatic Zoo Mix.  It was the most beautiful set of buildings to behold.

 From right to left those are the "Hemisferic" or IMAX, the Science Museum, and the Ágora which was kind of an auditorium area.

Here is another view of the Science Museum and Hemisferic.  I will OF COURSE just keep posting more since I thought they were GORGEOUS!

 Here is a map of the whole complex.  I want one of these in Cincinnati on the river!

 

This is the first building in the complex, the art museum or "Palau de las Artes".  It was designed to look like an eye which, sadly, I did not realize until someone pointed it out....I clearly don't have the eye  for architecture.

 This is another view of the science museum.  Bethany and Teresa kept making fun of me because of how giddy I was to be in the science complex.  I kept calling it my Mecca among the various art museums and cathedrals we've gone to......yes I know I'm a geek.

 Another view of the Hemisferic.

 Here is a view of the Ágora looking on towards the "Oceanografic" which was the Aquarium/Zoo like area.  On the path to the science museum there were little signs which showed pictures of various things and various events at the complex.  Here is the picture of the inside oft he Ágora during the 2009 Valencia Open.

So there is a tilted view of the inside of the Ágora.  Not my fault the poster was like that...

This was taken off of the balcony of the science museum during a 2010 MTV event at the complex.

So after all of this wandering I go in to buy tickets for EVERYTHING.  I went into the science museum and then saw an IMAX on the Hubble Space Telescope (with a headset in english thank you very much) on Saturday, and then bought a ticket on Sunday for the Oceanographic.

The science museum was SO COOL.  Almost everything there was written in Spanish and English so when I couldn't understand the Spanish I wasn't totally lost.

View from inside the museum.

They had a couple exhibits on perception, some on the environment, this HUGE section on genes where there were separate parts that each had a chromosome coming out the top and a number on them (or X or Y) to denote which chromosome they talked about and certain problems or characteristics located on those chromosomes.

Now, another main reason why Valencia was made for my Mom was the other exhibit that was at the Valencia Museum.  It was a traveling exhibit that would only be there for a few more weeks and I happened to catch it...

Yes that is right.  There was a Star Trek exhibit with costumes and everything!  Since I knew I wouldn't remember whose costume was whose I took pictures of the plaques next to them which I will also post here after each photo.

 This was the set of costumes from the most recent Star Trek movie.  I have more pictures of other costumes I saw, but for the sake of saving space I'll just post them on Facebook for anyone who is interested.

I thought this was great.  Long life and Prosperity is the literal translation!

The next day I went to the Oceanografic to wander around the animals!

View of other complexes from inside the Oceanografic

 They had some areas above ground, but most of the aquarium areas where below ground and were amazing.

They had two tunnels like this that were around 50 yards long each and were SO COOL.

I decided to attend the dolphin show at noon since it was free with the ticket.

 The dolphins were adorable and usually jumped closer like this once they'd completed a trick and wanted food.

They even had times where the dolphins would support a trainer in the water with their snout and push them along or throw them upwards.

All in all it was a wonderful wonderful weekend with beautiful weather and two very cool museums.  What more can a girl ask for?

OH WAIT!  I forgot about the funniest thing I saw.  So there was a little penguin exhibit that had a small ledge around inside of the space (really just where the wooden walkway ended).  Well somehow one of the penguins had managed to get up there and then proceeded to just walk back and forth right on the other side of the glass as us.  The people around (and myself) were speculating that it was because he was either afraid to jump back in or didn't want to because the water was so cold haha!  The other little penguin kept swimming back and forth following him and attempted to jump up to him because he CLEARLY wanted to hang with his buddy again!  I took a video!