When I first saw la playa de la Pobla, I thought it was very ugly. Small beach backed up against ugly buildings, no waves (ok very tiny waves), litter, and too many people in summer. I was used to Californian beaches, broad expanses of deep sand, huge waves, dunes, coves, relatively few people. I still prefer the Pacific… I spent four years in Humboldt County, California, with views of the ocean from my deck. Northern California.
But one gets used to smaller, crowded beaches, where much of the point seems to be people: talking to friends, taking note of what the fashion is in bathing suits, towels, chairs, sunglasses, flipflops, whatever. Watching people get their daily exercise walking up and down the beach. Measuring muscle and fat carefully, in order to categorize everyone as thinner than or fatter than you, your friends, your family, and so on.
And it’s very colorful!
and you see all types of bodies. Some men look more pregnant than the obviously pregnant women 😛 definitely makes one less self-conscious…
The previous pictures were taken around noon. In the evening, there are chiringuitos, or small bars, along the beach. Not yet as many as in Cadiz, a province of Andalucia in the south, but more than when I first started coming to Valencia (when there were bars aplenty, and some kioskos near the beach, but no chiringuitos on the beach.
I’ve been swimming in the beaches of la Pobla and neighboring Puig many times, in the morning, afternoon, evening, and the middle of the night, to wash off the shaving cream of a crazy night at the discotheque (fully clothed, and only later realizing we had gone in next to where the sewage pipes emptied into the sea).
What I really love is to float on my back… I floated for so long, my arms crossed beneath my head (so my neck doesn’t tire), a few days ago that I fell asleep, only waking when a wave broke over my face and forced salt water up my nose. The surf is so calm here that when the tide is going out, the sea is still as glass, buoyant and peaceful… carrying you out towards the sea. I can float for an hour without having to readjust. When the tide is rising, it carries me in to the beach, until I run into someone, and have to swim back out to sea.
The beach at dawn:
