A night at the opera... (nearly!)

Audiences arriving for Carmen at El Palau de les Arts

[This blog was written but held over from 7 November 2007]

It's been a while since my last post and indeed I hardly have time tonight but will try to get a few words and photos out before sleep gets the better of me.

In the past couple of weeks, we have had a total of 12 guests staying with us - one after the other - ranging in age from 2 to... well, OK, I promised not so say, but certainly bus pass +!

As if visitors were not enough to keep us busy, we've been watching the development of our two new business websites back in the UK and another issue of the magazine appears to have put itself out to the readers (only joking team!). We've been helping with the English translation of a Spanish academic paper about women entrepreneurs, written by a friend here in Valencia. And then we've queued for some opera tickets. Oh yes, that was it. The time-consuming part of the past fortnight or so has been what to most people, should have been the relatively simple exercise of booking 4 tickets for the opera - Carmen at the Palau de les Arts in the City of Arts and Sciences - for this Friday evening...


It's really quite a long story, and it starts off 50 years ago almost to the day when the City of Valencia woke up to one of the worst floods in its history. The River Turia, which, for most months of the year remained a dry riverbed with all but a trickle of water to be seen, burst its banks following torrential rainstorms. Over 100 people were drowned as a result and the City finally took a decision which had been kicked back and forth for most of the previous century - that is to divert the river to run south of the city. Indeed not only was the river subsequently diverted, but for good measure, the new river wall on the side of the City was built at a higher level than that on the outside, meaning that if ever such another flood were to manifest itself again in the future, sadly the folks living beyond the southern perimeter of the newly diverted river would bear the brunt. Anyway, I digress...


Thus having dug a whole new riverbed, the good citizens of Valencia were offered the opportunity to replace the now completely empty riverbed with a late twentieth century six lane motorway, taking traffic all the way into and back out of the historic city centre. Can you imagine such an opportunity? Can you then possibly understand how such citizens then simply rejected out of hand this generous offer, instead deciding to convert the old riverbed into an area of peace and tranquility through the development of 9km of sports, leisure, parks and open spaces? How could they?!


Roll forward to the 1990s and the grand plan for the area just to the north of the beach and the port areas, which was handed over to, amongst others, Valencia's own son, the world-class architect phenomenon, Santiago Calatrava (see earlier posts) for the creation of a new science museum, planetarium and IMAX cinema and opera house (plus a couple of bridges, stunning gardens, car parks and other incidentals). The past decade has seen the creation of these masterpieces which have of late, put Valencia squarely on the 'cities to see' list for millions of weekend tourists from across Europe and beyond.

The opera house - perhaps his pièce de résistance, is still an unfinished project, though has completed its first full opera season earlier this year despite a number of modifications and other ongoing construction works which continue to this day (cranes and engineers seem to come and go as frequently as visitors to the box office). As you can witness from our many photographs, the opera house building itself is of world class standard and seen close-to is quite an amazing sight - a feat of human imagination and construction skills. With such a stunning building filling much of the view from our apartment terrace, we could hardly fail to attend at least one performance of an opera, and what better than to pick out that Spanish (well, French, actually) classic, Carmen. Thus, we watched for announcements on the opera house's website and scoured the local press to find out when the single tickets would go on sale (with opera seasons featuring numerous productions over a number of months, it is customary for subscribers - regular bookers who purchase a season ticket to many or all of the productions - to buy their tickets first, before the organisation allows mere mortals such as ourselves to pick over the scraps of any remaining tickets!). Eventually, through our own investigative efforts and those of our friends and acquaintances, we discovered that the box office would open for single ticket sales at 9am on Monday 23 October (in the UK, a management process known as 'marketing' is employed when an organisation wishes to communicate with its potential customers - here it seems, in both arts and other related leisure activities, the process has yet to fully take off - one of only a very few gripes we've had so far in relation to our overall experiences of living here, and something which seems to fail to happen with alarming regularity. Often the lack of advanced information about events leads us to wonder how organisers ever achieve an audience or participants at all - such a pity in most cases, when the events themselves are of such high quality). Anyway, another digression...


So there we were a few weekends ago during the opening few days of a very moving exhibition at MUVIM, Valencia's museum of the enlightenment, in which the events surrounding the flood of fifty years ago were on display in La riada que cambió. Less than a week later, the skies clouded over, torrential rains ensued, and a repeat, albeit on a far smaller scale, of the Turia flood was back on the cards. Cue much gnashing of teeth amongst the city fathers as the entire Calatrava river development took a deluge of floodwater. L'hemisferic lost several days of trading and much equipment, the science museum took an early bath, but the opera house fared worst of all with major floods in the lower areas and the loss of the auditorium's hydraulic lifts, the entire box office computer system, costumes, sets and more besides. With the new opera season about to kick-off, complete and utter chaos ensued for several days whilst Calatrava's team tried to figure out what to do; customers with tickets for the forthcoming season wondered what would become of their season, and, those without tickets (us!) made desperate attempts to figure out whether any performances would be going ahead this year - or even next - and even, whether or not we would be able to obtain tickets!

Several days after the rains, and with no news forthcoming from the opera house, Liz made her way across the riverbed bright and early at 7.30am on 23 October, to be amongst the first in what we anticipated to be a lengthy queue for Carmen tickets. People began joining the queue throughout the first hour - arriving by taxi, on foot, by car. Many had taken the morning off work in order to ensure they achieved their ambition of seeing the show. At around 8.45am, the front doors of the opera house opened and a man in a suit walked outside with a sandwich board which he carefully plonked in front of the now lengthening queue and walked back inside, locking the door behind him. The sign announced that the box office would be closed until further notice 'due to the rain', and that was it! No apology, no proper explanations, no preparation for any future announcements. Those gathered - many of whom had travelled from across the regions - and at great expense - were furious but quietly went off their separate ways.

Some days later, when a clearer picture of the flood damage had become emerged, it was announced that one entire production had been cancelled and that performances for other productions had been rescheduled. On the grapevine, we heard that, despite announcements to the contrary, costumes for at least one production - and some of the sets - had been damaged (we saw costumes outside the opera house, drying in the sun). We also heard that orchestra rehearsals were taking place in stinking flood damaged rooms and that some musicians were doubtful as to whether any production could go ahead. Finally, it was announced that the Carmen production would go ahead and that single ticket buyers (us!) could go along and queue for a repeat performance on Monday 29 October at 9am sharp. This time, the announcement, which was publicised across the region, stated that the first 300 people in the queue would receive a numbered voucher, and this would give them an opportunity to buy up to 4 seats for one performance of Carmen on one of three specified box office days. Oh, and the other item of 'news' was that during the rains, the entire box office computer system had been 'lost' and that a new system would be installed within a further month... and that all single tickets for the immediate production of Carmen would be 'manually produced' (that is, hand-written onto the auditorium plan and the tickets hand-written in exchange for cash only payments!).


Queuing for Carmen tickets

Expecting something of an adventure, Liz duly arrived for the queue at around 7.30am, to find there were already the best part of a couple of hundred people already in the queue, with more arriving by the minute. The newly-arrived were all being carefully placed throughout the queue by a casually-dressed but official-looking man with a clipboard. The people arriving all appeared to have been 'pre-booked' into what we had otherwise thought was a 'first-come, first-served' queue. When I joined Liz half an hour later, the queue was growing by the minute and the man with a clipboard had apparently organised everyone into their pre-agreed places. I decided that, even with our limited abilities with the Spanish language, I had to learn how a supposedly free and fair queuing system appeared to have been pre-arranged and what the opera house thought it was doing running such a shoddy operation. It might have been better if Mr Clipboard had been unable to speak or understand English, because he quite clearly explained to us that he was 'just a member of the public' who thought it would be better to do his public duty by 'organising the queue' so that people didn't have to arrive too early and that when they'd called him on his mobile or arrived in person, they'd simply given them his name and he'd numbered them and placed them in the queue. We were furious and explained that, in Liz's case, she'd already been waiting more than an hour and that probably more than 100 people had arrived after her and been 'placed' in the queue. We were joined by a lovely German lady who had driven up from Denia (an hour's car journey away), who also failed to understand the helpful organisation of the queue, having waited for most of the past hour herself. With a bit of supportive jostling from others in the queue, we were 'allocated' number 307 (out of the limited 300 places!), and the German lady stayed with us despite not having been allocated a number. Finally at around 9.30am, the queue started moving and this continued for 45 minutes. We continued to see new people arrive and join the queue ahead of us (others had obviously been phoning friends on mobiles and others had been 'holding' places open for colleagues. We saw some people complain to the opera house security staff that they had 'official' numbers in the queue, but the security staff, rightly, ignored these pleas as the 'organised' queue had not been officially sanctioned. Finally at around 10.15am we got to the front of the queue to collect our official 'turno' ticket - number 286 (quite what happened to the missing 21 people we still don't know!) and our German friend got number 287. Since the box office was only able to deal with 100 numbered 'turno' vouchers per day and our number was in the final 100, we were told to come back at 10am in a couple of days - to repeat the entire queuing process for a third time - only this time, for actual tickets!

To make a long story only very slightly shorter, the process was duly repeated on Wednesday, two days later, and we waited for a further 2½ hours before being relieved of the best part of €350 - in cash - for four (hand-written) tickets to Carmen some 9 days later.

Having expended so much blood, sweat and (nearly) tears for our tickets, there was plenty of excitement and anticipation (talk of the need for new clothes, shoes etc) prior to the performance in the intervening week. When the big day finally arrived, we turned up at the opera house appropriately attired for what was a sell-out occasion - only to discover that Mr Clipboard had managed to secure his own tickets for Carmen - for the same night - and had carefully plonked himself one row ahead and five seats to the left of mine. I have never (since childhood) so desperately wanted to sit right behind someone so much just so I could simply flick his ear throughout the evening! The performance itself though, was great.

Sometime in a future post, I may ramble on a little about the inside of the great opera house which is strange, to say the least, though what it lacks in some of its design features it more than makes up in its (unintentionally humoured) use of graphic icons to explain the do's and don'ts of acceptable behaviour within the auditorium. Our favourite was the sign which appears to direct people the 'his 'n' hers' shared bathrooms which appear to insist on a communal squat - or maybe we misunderstood?

Birthday treat: mid-life crisis or mis-spent youth? You decide!

Brian, Chris and Jo celebrating someone's forty-something birthday on roller blades!

OK, birthdays only come around once a year and although not a particularly special milestone this year, there is something nagging at me about still being able to do most things a nine or seven year-old can do. Thus it was that this year, after promising myself for several years, I finally got myself a pair of roller-blades for my birthday. Laugh, you may well do, but I did manage to stay vertical the entire day whilst 'blading' around the Palau de la Musica in the Turia riverbed and later in the day at the America's Cup Port which has an amazing expanse of tarmac and no one on it for the majority of the time. Chris and Jo have also become quite proficient at skating now, having spent a similar amount of time on their new respectively blue and pink rollerblades - all courtesy the dear-old Decathlon sports hypermarket on the outskirts of Valencia.

The rest of my birthday was equally rewarding. In the evening, our friend Lisa kindly babysat the kids whilst we disappeared off for a meal followed by a trip to Babel, Valencia's answer to the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, to see Christopher Zalla's new Sundance Festival-winning film, Padre Nuestro. As somewhat long-in-the-tooth marketers, the marketing of events never ceases to underwhelm us, and this was no different. We spent most of the previous week trying to search out a film of sufficient quality, preferably with some subtitles so we could improve our Spanish, secure in the knowledge we could at least understand the plot. Padre Nuestro was firstly advertised - deeply within one website - with only a starting date and no times. A cycle ride to the cinema two days in advance resulted in no further information as the place was shut up and no publicity material was posted in or outside the venue. On the evening of the performance, the times were suddenly posted, plus the fact that the film was in 'Inglés / Español'. Having committed to the event, we duly sat down to discover about 10 lines spoken in English (and subtitled into Spanish) and the rest of the film spoken in Spanish with no subtitles in any language! What we really need her is a local Trading Standards inspector! Still, we enjoyed the movie and managed to figure out the majority of the plot. I'm still not sure how good the film was though, because without more identifiable language, it's hard to tell!

With the movie beginning at 11.00pm - considered only early to mid-evening here, we departed for home around 1.15am, with several more movies due to start well into the early hours of Sunday morning, and the temperature around us - in early October - in the mid-twenties. Now that's what I call ideal weather for a great autumn birthday!

Lessons for the UK: No 2 - the bike

Brian, Chris and Jo at XI Día de la Bicicleta - Valencia

In many ways Cambridge and Valencia are similar. Well, they're both flat!. OK, that's the end of the similarities. Or its it? Valencia seems to fancy itself as a competitor to Cambridge if only in it's apparent new-found love of 'la bicicleta'. The newer parts around the City of Arts & Sciences, the America's Cup Port, the beach and some areas within the old city itself have been transformed by the creation of cycle paths. The Turia riverbed which runs from the port all the way up to the north of the city contains an intertwined string of cycle paths with exit and entry ramps and most of the bridges along its entire length.


Some of the thousands of families taking part in the XI Día de la Bicicleta

More than that, Valencia seems to be catching the cycling bug in a bigger - and, some would say - more creative way than the UK. Just off the Turia riverbed about half way along its length are the beautiful gardens of Jarines del Real (the Royal Gardens - also known as Los Viveros) which surround the Museo de Ciencias Naturales. One particular area of the gardens is memorable for all children under the age of twelve or so - it has been constructed as a mini-road layout for bikes, complete with traffic signs, roundabouts, motorway flyovers and childrens play areas dotted around throughout the entire road system. Our kids absolutely love the park - as much for the cycling and learning basic road sense - as for the swings, slides and tunnels. What an original and creative way to encourage kids to enjoy the open air, practice their cycling in a safe environment, learn road sense and play on the various park apparatus - whilst mum and dad catch up on the latest issue of the international Guardian! Having seen the recent campaign to keep open the local Milton Country Park just outside Cambridge - a perfect place for outdoor family activities which are sympathetic to the environment, I think this is one trick that has been missed to date!

The mini-road layout is not a total oasis in Valencia. Last weekend we heard about an annual Día de la Bicicleta (Day of the Bicycle) event, due to take place on Sunday. We heard about it with twelve hour's notice late on Saturday night, and despite digging around on the Internet and paying an unsuccessful late night visit to the Day's sponsor, El Corté Inglés to register (registrations having closed the previous Thursday!), we turned up at 9am on Sunday morning to find somewhere around 5,000 families and their bikes queueing up, ready to set off on a 12km ride through all parts of the city - old and new - down to the America's Cup Port and la Malvarrosa beach and back. Again, what a fantastic event and what a great way to involve such large numbers of families in a truly community-oriented event on a Sunday morning. With all the messages about leaving cars behind, finding alternative means of transport for work and recreation, reducing the carbon footprint, staying healthy and reducing obesity - why has this idea not taken off in the cycling visits of the UK? Día de la Bicicleta is now in its 11th year. It is sponsored by the El Corté Inglés, the leading department store of Spain - again what a great brand link. Within Valencia, the event is organised by Bici Club Valencia and supported by the city and the tourist board. Surely an event such as this could easily be rolled out once a year in towns and cities where cycling is already a major mode of transport and this could be held up as an exemplar to those who should be following suit?

Lessons for the UK: No 1 - looking after the environment

The midnight run

It never ceases to amaze us. Everywhere we seem to be, day or night, sunshine or cloud (a rare occurence!), we are confronted by the sight of dustcarts emptying bins, roadsweeping vans washing and scrubbing pavements, mowing public lawns, trimming trees, emptying drains and other public works designed to maintain the appearance of the city. It's not simply the city of Valencia - we noticed it last year when visiting smaller towns and villages. It has become something of a joke between us. Every road and every pavement outside our apartment (and there are a lot, believe me) is swept at least once every 24 hours - without any exaggeration. The usual utterance from one or other when the sound of whirring brushes starts is: "Well, they haven't swept since breakfast time!"


Street cleaning by hand

I have finally decided that it deserves a mention on the blog. OK, so the noise of srubbing brushes is a minor irritant when it starts to compete with the delightful sounds of the nightly (occasionally daily) firework display, but what has really forced comment this morning is the sight of a city employee scrubbing the inside and outside of our bus shelter downstairs. Now precisely how often does one see a sight like that in the UK?


Street cleaning by machine

The whole of the City of Arts and Sciences (and the city centre of Valencia itself) remains permanently spotless (apart from the piles of dog s**t randomly and occasionally subtly distributed along pavements - something of a paradox when one considers the mown, trimmed, bleached, scraped and scrubbed landscape that surrounds it) and it seems that people have a basic pride in how things look. Gardening in the Jardin de la Turia is an on-going daily activity on an industrial scale.


Within any kilometre stretch of the Turia riverbed on any weekday, you'll see upwards of 30 park staff cleaning, mowing, trimming, strimming or tidying the beautiful surrounds

It's not a complete paradise though. Aside from the regularly-cleared excrement, spray-painting artists provide more than their fair share of 'contemporary art' throughout the city and surrounding area, which is something of a pity when set against the "it's-so-clean-you-can-eat-off-the-floor pavements".


And the same to you, too!.

It's even more of a pity when some of the abuse has been carefully crafted in English - now is that a Spanish student trying to perfect their mastery of international linguistics, or is this the result of one of those cheap Luton-Valencia lager-fuelled stag weekend trips?