AbHarm Valencia Tour 2013
In the summer of 2013 I went on tour with Absolute Harmony, an A Capella choir from Royal Holloway, University of London of which I am a member. We traveled to Valencia, Spain, for one week and spent the days seeing the sites, relaxing on the beach, eating ice cream and paella, and singing to whoever would listen. These are my notes from the week, or rather the first three days, which were—in my opinion—the best (most interesting from a writing perspective). This is omitting a piece about the flamenco that we saw on the third night, which deserves its own post.
25th June 2013 – Arriving
The water like cracked leather, ferries like mosquitoes breaking the surface, fields of wheat and rapeseed like tiles of tessellating crack earth.
Passing over Southern France, covered in soft, curly white fur, the Pyrenees break through as if it has been scratch raw and brown. The mountains drag down onto rugged plain. The landscape is twisted and rippled and bare. Patches of hills like rough alligator skin. Canyons lined by stepped sides. Deeper passes become blurred with mist or dust in the heat. The mountains thinned and the ground turned to dark, cold porridge, still bare save a few sparkling slithers of ponds and lakes and thin threads of roads like fading scars leading between settlements, the buildings like dashes of salt on the ground.
The must increased, obscuring the view all but directly beneath us; it dirtied the landscape and faded to the clean white horizon and up into the aqua sky, scorched pale by the sun.
We dropped, passing over a few high mountains. Closer to the ground, the earth was less brown, more dirty-green. Still the heat haze blurred the distant hills. Houses and towns were more visible now, turning from scatterings of salt to clusters of sugar cubes.
The hills looked soft from lower down. No longer hard like alligator skin, they became like piles of sand; dune with tufts of hardy grass surviving on them. In between tracts of rumpled hills, the fields held neat rows of stout dark green trees, each small patch set askew from its neighbours, like the cross-hatching of an artist. The dirt showing in between the rich green was a dead brown. It looked hot and dry…
Walking from the metro to the hostel, twenty-two of us dragged suitcases across small square stone tiles separated by shallow grooves of grout. The bumping wheels of the cases made a sound like twenty-two crabs tick-tacking across marble, like a team of percussionists on castanets, like an army of miniature horses tiptoeing a brisk trot across stone.
Later that night, Marco took us on a hike through the mostly empty streets, searching for Tapas place they had found previously online. The directions told us it was a six minute walk, but a fifteen minute hike brought us no closer to the destination. The streets were lined with various shop fronts and trees that looked as if the crown had been grown inside a box. Above the shop fronts, balconies of carved stone and ornate iron gridded the four or five stories. Some had bay windows of wood, the paint heavily peeled and splintered, others were patterned with squares of red and yellow. Every few minutes another heavy oak door came past, tall wide and studded with spiraled iron. Hugged by Movistar and H&M, or BBMC bank and jewelry, or shuttered cafés and pharmacies on either side, I wondered what they hid; covered courtyards for a rich apartment complex, private back-alleys strewn with discarded furniture and rubbish bags, large welcoming spaces in stone and wood, foyers and lavish atriums with stairways and doorways leading off to the rest of the building.
26th June 2013 – Singing on the Square
We ate our official ‘first meal’ just off a square in the centre of Old Valencia. The square bordered the back end of the central cathedral, a building rather plainly Moorish from the outside, and modestly decorated on the inside. A swathe of street lamps flicked on as the sky turned deep ultramarine, bathing the square in sulphur-yellow light. Shiny marble slabs covered the space, two sides fronted by crowds of tables and umbrellas, two by the back end of the cathedral and next-door basilica. A rectangular fountain feature sprinkled water from pots held by stone maidens surrounding the central reclining man. A lone traveler-type whispered on his ukulele, sat on steps leading up the basilica. A scattering of people loitered on the square, or strolled past. We lined up in formation in front of the large dark wood doors set in the huge Gothic arch of the back end of the cathedral.
As we sang, a group of passing photography enthusiasts stopped to photograph and film us. A few other wanderers paused to listen to our performance too, milling through the square with an ear cocked to us or gathering in the growing crowd. The great doorway behind us acted as an amplifier, reflecting the harmonies across the hard marble slabs and between the tall facades of the apartments bordering most of the square.
We finished and dispersed. The ukulele player continued his light song-playing. We surrounded him to listen, repaying him the audience we had effectively stolen from him just before. He invited us closer and so we joined him on the steps, sat like a group of kindergarten children gathered around their teacher for a sing-song. He played and we applauded and he blushed.
We asked his name and story: Vance, an American from Oregon travelling the world for the past year, so far visited Thailand, New Zealand, Germany, Australia, China and France before Valencia. He invited us to sing the harmonies for the chorus of one of his own songs and so we hummed and cooed to his gentle ukulele and lyrics. He had written a simple harmony, boys singing a third below the girls.
We performed, huddled as if around a campfire, the hard walled square around us making it seem like a concert hall space. A few passer-bys turned their heads, but that wasn’t important to us anymore. We each enjoyed the simple melody given to us and we flattered Vance with our attention. Afterwards, he flustered with thanks, in disbelief of his luck.
We skipped away after our goodbyes, humming the tunes we had learnt and those we had sung before. Vance packed up and we saw him meet others he knew, glowing with pride and praise for the impromptu singing session.
27th June 2013 – Beluga Whale
I entered the ‘Artico’, a tall white honeycombed hemispherical dome. Inside it was dark and musty, and cold. You enter onto a circular walkway that runs mostly alongside a circular tank set below the walkway by eight feet and extending three metres out to the edge of the dome. A square spiral ramp leads down to the open space below, surrounded by the curved walls of the tank. The space is dimly lit and the tank sparsely filled with faded-white fake rocks and columns. The water is murky with visible specks of white drifting through like smoke, like fine dirty snow.
A lone beluga whale flowed through the tank, gliding past the front glass wall and towards a corner, rising brief to surface and running down the glass, twisting away from the wall upside-down with a push of its tail and gliding back through the tank, still upside-down, passing a manufactured ‘organic’ under-water stone arch, through the murky water at the back of the tank and turning back towards the glass front. She repeated this path, slinking past the gawking visitors with a weary eye on what she could see: the distorted reflection of herself in the one-way glass. She continued this circuit, idle and unhurried, as if lost to herself, stuck in a rut, unable to do anything else. Each time she dropped past the corner glass, the gathering of children cawed and wowed, palms and noses pressed against the glass.
A seal meandered through the tank, appearing from the murk at the back and heading, aimless, across to one corner and then back. Perhaps in search of a mate, fish, food, a friend. The beluga whale and the seal are contained in the same tank to ‘preserve both of their well-being’. They seemed to ignore each other, both mindless in their rout, familiarising themselves with every inch of the tank and checking back for changes on every round.
The tank circles around the central space, split in two, a beluga whale and a seal in each section. The second beluga floated almost motionless, facing away from the front glass wall, its head up against the back wall. Its mouth moved open and closed, gawping at the wall, scraping the rock with no purpose, endless, monotonous, a slight, mind-numbed movement. They were alone in their ‘ocean’, nothing more than their own bent reflection in the murky mirrored window for company.