The Gandía campus of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia was the venue of the EUROCALL 2009 Conference, 9-12 September. Gandía is around 65 km south of the city of Valencia, where the University's main campus is located.

The blog of the EUROCALL 2009 conference can be found here, including live blog reports using CoveritLive: http://virtualeurocall09.blogspot.com/

See the EUROCALL website for further information about EUROCALL: http://www.eurocall-languages.org/

It proved to be well worthwhile spending a few days sightseeing in Valencia after the conference, visiting the city's many attractions, both old and new, especially the ultra-modern City of Arts and Sciences (Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias) complex and the spectacular Oceanográfico marine life park. Valencia also boasts a long, sandy beach, which is easily accessible from the town centre by public transport - we took the number 19 bus to the end of the line, Malva-Rosa.

I made an effort to learn some "survival" Spanish before my visit to Spain. I found the BBC Languages website particularly useful: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/. But we also found that people in this region speak Valenciano, which is a language in its own right, and many of the public notices and signs in Valencia and in Gandía appear in Valenciano first, followed by Spanish underneath: http://www.valenciaconnect.com/showlevel1.asp?pid=4901

This page contains a few photos that I took in Valencia and in Gandía - click on the small images to see larger images. I also found this website, which contains a large collection of photos of Valencia: http://www.travel-images.com/valencia.html

Photographs of Valencia and Gandía

The Cathedral, Plaza de la Reina, Valencia	Town Hall, Plaza de Ayuntamiento, Valencia
Plaza de Ayuntamiento, Valencia	Science Museum and the Hemispheric, City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia
The Hemispheric, City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia	Palace of the Arts, City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia
L'Umbracle, City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia	Graham on the beach, Valencia
El Chato restaurant - just one block back from the beach in Valencia, at the end of the no. 19 bus route, where we enjoyed a three-course lunch and a beer for just 7 euros!	View from our hotel, Las Cibeles, Gandía - 5 minutes from the beach and five minutes from the Gandía campus
The quadrangle, Gandía campus - complete with palm trees and orange trees	Flowers, Gandía campus

 

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Text and photographs © Graham Davies 2009. This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.