Obstacles Disappear In Valencia (Mascleta)

I need to tell you that Valencia is the kind of place where obstacles sort of just disappear.  If you pack in your suitcase a little bit of ‘some how it’s just going to work out’, it actually does in this city.

What do I mean?  Well, I was headed into town from the airport.  Seems simple enough, right?  Except that the hotel is located a block or two from the main square where the daily Fallas mascleta occurs.  The mascleta is a raucous fireworks display.  That doesn’t do it justice and since I’ve only seen videos posted online and haven’t experienced it first hand yet (stay tuned), I’ll  just say 2 things – 1) when the local TV station covers it live, they have a decibal meter on the screen for entertainment purposes and 2) I read in a Fallas pamphlet that the folks here are keenly aware of how inexpensive gunpower is.  Ok, so precisely as the taxi was nearing the streets toward the hotel, the mascleta was ending.  Streets all over town are already closed off and when mascleta ends, you guessed it, those streets are filled with throngs of people.  So, naturally, there are Policia at checkpoints to stop cars from coming in.

My brave taxista Vicente put up a good argument to get through, but all he kept getting was ‘no se puede’ – no one gets through.  It seemed hopeless.  But, Vicente kept talking and somehow convinced them to let him drive closer to the hotel to the next Police checkpoint (most other people would’ve turned around at that point – lost cause, right?!  You’d think it was all a waste of time, but no, at that checkpoint, we were waved on without even needing to plead.

Have you ever seen a fish since upstream?  Here’s a few pics of the taxi in front of the hotel at the end of mascleta.  My next blog will about another obstacle disappearing – getting into a bullfight that sold out 3 hours after tickets went on sale.  And, it turned out to be the best bullfight I’ve ever seen!