Highlights-Valencia Day 1

I walked to the IVAM (modern art museum). The route included passage through the old town, past the Cathedral and the Central Market. After seeing them, I wandered off the route my map app suggested through the side streets, avoiding the chocolate with churros stands, gelato shops, and souvenir shops (not that there is anything wrong with them). It was cooler because of narrower streets. The exhibit halls were large and spacious. The first I entered was like a darkroom with tiny lights far from the entrance doors. It was an immersive installation called Radix, “an ecological fable that turns our gaze down into the depths of the subsoil, imagining a fictitious biome inhabited by beings that move between science and speculation and the observable and imaginary worlds … [asking] us to reflect on nature and the potential micro-worlds within it, past and future, and invites us to reconsider the limits between different species, disciplines and states of matter, and the hidden networks …” That’s a lot of stuff to think about in a dark room with small glass things pulsating with life. I had other priorities beyond reconsidering limits between species and states of matter. I was looking for the bathroom. There were more glass blobs in other exhibitions, some lighted and some not, that looked like sea urchins or elephantine cancerous growths. There was an extended video of water (ocean or lake? no way to tell) near the shore (it was green, a dead giveaway). At one point, there was a photograph in the water. After doing all the reflection “on nature and the potential micro-worlds within it” I was capable of, I wandered back through the small streets to the Mercado. I like going to big indoor markets to browse the variety of offerings. I’m partial to the Mexican variety, but I try to appreciate them all. This one had lots of items for sale, but no place to sit and consume them (“Don’t Sit Here” signs were plastered all over the steps outside). Many Spanish mercados are like that. I bought some Jamón Iberico for later consumption. Finding “good paella” (I wouldn’t know how to define that) is a challenge because the normal preparation technique uses a pan that feeds an entire neighborhood. The mercado vendors would scoop bright pink and yellow paella out of such a pan and put it in a box, if desired. I passed. I have reservations about eating food that looks like someone spilled fluorescent dye into it. The sandwich shop across the street looked safer (Spain has a law against coloring jamón).