Valencia day #15

here is a picture of Amy during her hot run with Beth en las montañas con nos amiga Beth.  

Valencia is an interesting town.  Somewhat industrial, it is trying to remake itself much like Bilbao.  They make Seat (spanish) and Ford's here as well VW.  VW own Seat and when you get in a SEAT it sounds like my VW diesel Jetta that I had.

So they bid on the Americas cup which was last winter.  it was not much of race as the Americans of Larry Elison, Oracle fame out of San Francisco,   built a trimaran That sailed faster (2 knots upwind) and closer to the wind.    Allinghi (Swiss boat owned by a rich Italian) apparently would win the start which is everything in America's racing and the American's would just sail right around Allinghi and crush them by the first windward mark.

The boat was an engineering marvel, over 90 feet long and 90 feet wide with 250 tall sail.  It would ride up on the leward pontoon.  The boat was full of all sorts of strain gages because the forces quickly became enormous above 10 knots of breeze and the alarms would start to ring right away and the chase engineers were demanding that everyone wear full head gear and shoulder pads because they were worried the thing would completely destruct with tremendous force.

Classic sailors got tired of the Engineers and turned off the strain gage alarms,  They were constantly ringing.

They sailed it in the final and one both races.  They had started to see the boat start to come apart and figured that it would not survive any more races and currently it sits in big boxes (90feet by 90 feet).  Valencia built giant piers hoping that Allinghi would win and come back.   No such luck, this is going likely to San Francisco and hopefully no more giant multi hulls.

I got all of this information that were on the Americas cup team (from NZ and Australia) and had been here for 4 years as professional sailors considering there next move.  Great guys.

Valencia also built an Indy course in town and has spectacular arts and sciences museum and incredible aquarium that we hoped to go see.

We ran yesterday and went to the pool and played soccer. Walking back we met a family that currently lives in Miami and has 2 kids but they are from southern France, Serge and Soumiya

Max proposed that we go for a walk up to the top of the mountain in the moonlight with Serge.   After listening to Max and Serge talk for 10 minutes, I thought I can not pass this up.

Serge is French but his family is from Africa.  He attended undergraduate at Harvard and MBA at Wharton I believe.   He currently does major construction projects in Equitorial Guinea, west coast of Africa.  This is the only Spanish Colony in Africa and hence why they are in Valencia.

He does projects in other countries like Gabon and it was absolutely fascinating to here the to talk about religion, culture, business in Africa and Arabia, customs, world perception of America, and also education of kids in france, USA and spain.  

It was one of the most incredible fascinating discussions I have every been apart of.    We are going to have dinner with them later this week and I hope to gets some Onglet or hangar steak marinated that has been a crowd pleaser.

It is hot. We have been at the pool all day and we have a tennis time at 7pm-9pm tonight.

Eric