To the sun!...the first day

So the flight was nice - clear skies and sun the majority of the time...and I got my window seat! The approach to Valencia airport was great - down the coast then across the city in-land. The city looked huge, and it was good to see some of the landmarks I recognised online, like the City of Arts and Sciences. Here are a couple of flight pics, but the quality isn't great.

At the airport I met up with two Dutch girls - randomly asking them..."Erasmus??" - of course they were!, and they were also doing the language course down in Gandia - So we stuck together.

The first stage was getting on the metro from the airport to the city centre - a Spanish women showed us which station we had to get off at. Walking out of the metro was so nice - instant warmth!...nearly 20 degrees in the middle of January....it's like skipping 3 months of weather in England.

Valencia!

So straight across from the metro was the Estacion del Norte, the train service that we needed for Gandia. Asking for tickets was the first time I had to speak Spanish...so...Tenemos que ir a Gandia (We have to go to Gandia). She understood! - I was thinking...is that the first time I've actually said something useful in another language? - anyway...it's so satisfying to get the message across. We had to wait an hour for the train to come, so a Spanish McDonald's filled the time.

After more travelling, and then a bus onto Grau to Gandia, we finally arrived at our apartments by 9:30am or something, and here are a few pics (while it's tidy).

Some of the Erasmus students had already arrived at the appartment - one of my housemates came yesterday (Ben from Germany), and we are still waiting for two others - I think an Italian (surely with a name of Paolo) and an Austrian.

Soon after arriving, we went to meet other Erasmus students. It was funny trying to communicate in each other's languages and hearing 3 or 4 different languages in the same room - everyone was struggling, and my accent definitely didn't go down well...!! (even though the American girls liked it) - I need to talk slower... After meeting more people and discussing each other's nationalities, we called it a night at around 2am.