LBB Note #3: Chronicle of a Regular Day

It's been a week already since I started working, and I am already getting into a general routine during weekdays (weekends are frankly a mess, a lot more improv). So I'll do my best to describe what a normal day looks like for me:

8:20- Wake up, shower, get ready.
8:45-Walk out of the apartment and take the ten or so steps it takes me to get to the tram stop. Take the tram.
9:00:00:00- Walk through the front door of the lab. Normally at this point we would get the assignment of what we will be working on that day, be it some probe testing, a lecture to brush up on our Electrochemistry, or research on our laptops. We would start that shortly after I walk in.
Around 10:00 or 10:15- Have our breakfast break. (If you noticed I didn't eat when I got out of the apartment. That's because Spanish people normally only drink a cup of coffee and eat a small snack before going to work. They get a 30 minute-or-so break mid-morning to get some small pastry or orange juice.)
10:45-2:00- Finish the work of the day. Get off around 2, depending on how fast we finish what we needed to do.
2:15- Start cooking lunch (at the beginning, I had a bit of trouble with the sea salt they use here; I was mostly putting too much)
2:30-3:00- Eat
3:00-5:30- Siesta (To be fair though, Spanish siestas are usually a bit shorter. I just think that if they're worth doing, they're also worth overdoing). For the siesta I normally commandeer the sofa in front of the TV for about two hours or so. If you were to walk into our living room around these times you would probably find me in a compromising sleeping position and attire.

From when I wake up from the siesta, (which is honestly one of the better things Spanish colonization brought to the Western Hemisphere. Shame it isn't that widely practiced over there any more) the rest of the afternoon and evening is free for whatever I feel like doing.

During the first week when there were some parts of the city left unexplored I would normally go out and look at whatever the locals told me to look at: a walk through the nearby botanical gardens or the old town, taking a tram to the beach and going for a swim, riding a bike through the park*. Now that I have settled in and looked at all the tourist attractions, I normally go out for a run on the beach boardwalk. After the first week and the daily rounds of Tapas I was having every night, I needed to add some cardio into my daily schedule. I don't want to take too much of Spain back with me.

*Valencia's main park is on the original course of Valencia's Turia river. After a catastrophic flood in 1957, city officials decided to divert the course three kilometers south of it's historic flow. In it's place, city authorities founded a meandering park.