Photos from Valencia

I was in Valencia over the weekend and have posted up some photos from my trip. A few things to note:

Valencia uses a dialect of Catalán known as Valenciana, which essentially preserves most of the traits used in Catalán. As a result, it is common to see street signs written in Castellano ('Spanish') on one block and appear in Valenciana on another.
The city features the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (City of Arts and Sciences), an architectural wonder designed by Santiago Calatrava, a world renowned architect and Valencian. The compound hosts a science museum, a planetarium, an IMAX cinema, an aquarium, and a concert hall.

The city is also home to paella and orxata (horchata in Latin American Spanish). For those of you who don't know the wonders of one of the signature dishes of Spanish cuisine, Paella, allow me to explain. Paella is a simple rice dish prepared with seafood (or other types of meat) and spices; it is cooked over a wood fire and served on a heavy cast iron pan. The dish emerged from the Albufera, a lake near the city where fishermen would prepare simple rice dishes with fish after they were done working for the day.

Orxata is a milky, nutty dish made from Chufe, a nut the size of a peanut, which is ground up and mixed with suger and water to form the drink. Incidentially, the drink made its way over to the Americas: Mexican horchata, which is popular in the States, is made from rice; Salvadoran horchata, which I drank as a child, is made from another seed that grows in the rain forests of Central America.