“Have you ever thought that you would be living in Spain?” It’s a question that P asks often, and my answer is always the same: no, never in a million years had I ever imagined that we would, on a whim, move here, having never visited before, and to this particular city, as opposed to the more predictable choices of Barcelona or Madrid. Not because it’s not a wonderful place to live, to be sure, but because I (like many others, it would seem) had never even heard of Valencia before.
It was an especially bad summer, weather-wise, in Edinburgh the year that we decided that we needed a change. The month of August had been the worst, with gloomy overcast skies, rain, rain and more rain, and even hail once! All the new sidewalk terraces on the beautiful George Street were left abandoned, waitstaff waiting listless to server fresh Scottish lobster and glasses of white wine to go with it, but the weather was impossible — it was simply too cold and windy and wet. Weather conditions that are tolerable, of course, in the wintertime, but not in August.