Quality end to the European holiday

Today is a public holiday - All Saints - so things are fairly quiet out on the street, though they weren’t during the night when lots of young people were out and about yahooing and generally waking up old people in the middle of the night. Anyway, we didn’t have to get up quite so early this morning, even though we shifted out of the apartment.

The new apartment is about five minutes walk away (at normal walking speed: with our bags and Celia’s foot it took us somewhat longer), and it’s entrance is in a much narrower street again. In fact cars don’t go down it. There’s a square just on one corner with a statue of what looks at first like a skateboarder; think it’s some explorer, though. The trees in the square seem to be growing mandarins, or some equivalent, and outside one of the balcony windows is the back of the Cathedral with a door that looks as though it hasn’t been opened in some time.

The apartment is much more luxurious-looking than the other place, although both of us found the previous place to be very comfortable and up to date. This one has a lot more ‘antique’ furniture. It may actually be antique; I don’t know, but it probably came with the place when Nicholas, the owner, bought it. Again it has a superb oval glass-topped table, with six chairs this time, instead of four. There are all the mod cons in the kitchen and bathrooms (two of these again!) including a dishwasher again. We’re not much into bothering with dishwashers; most of our English rellies have them, but we’re quite happy to wash up as we go.

There are original paintings everywhere, some by an artist called Antonio Ferri. You can read a short biography of him here. Seems he’s a local painter, who’s spent some time in the States but has decided that home is best.

There’s even a hallway to this apartment, something our previous only pretended to have. In it is an antique couch with cushions, gold braid and so forth, and opposite a shelf with a delightful statue of a horse. Celia’s a bit iffy about being in a place with so many knickknacks of the antique sort; she doesn’t want to turn round suddenly and break something.

The lounge has two modern couches facing each other, another glass-topped (square) table, and more antique furniture. Plainly the latter isn’t hard to find in Spain!

Finally, there's an even more up-to-date tv and dvd. And a different collection of movies. We're having a blob day (after all our exertions yesterday) and Celia's watching something while I type.

I haven't mentioned that in both these apartments I've had free wireless for the Internet. The last place had one option - this has three!

The picture by Antonio Ferri comes courtesy of Galeria Estil in Valencia.