Day 4

It was definitely a short night. Jenny and I had to be up at 7:30 to get ready for our first excursion (with all the CC-CS students) to La Rábida. So we got maybe 4 hours of sleep, but the bus ride to this site was long enough for a nap so it was ok. At La Rábida we visited the Monasterio de Santa Maria de La Rábida. This was the place where Christopher Columbus planned out his voyage to the Americas. It was beautiful. Just down the road was an exhibit of Columbus reaching the Americas, which was called Muelle de las Carabelas. The main part of this exhibit was the replicas of the three boats Columbus used for his voyage- Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

Finally we got to go to the last destination of the trip—the beach! La playa de Mazagón. It was awesome! There was the perfect amount of heat and breeze, and the water was the perfect temperature. I could get my first vitamin D fix for the summer. There were tons of seashells and a huge box-jelly fish that washed ashore. The most interesting part of the day was (1) the amount of just topless women walking around because I guess tan lines are a no no and (2) the rising tide, it kept creeping closer and closer to us where we were laying that we had to move almost a total of 20 yards because it came up so high. I thought that it was the moon that caused the tides to come in but I guess it can happen during the day too.

I bought a super cute big bracelet from a beach vendor too, had to get something to remember the first beach experience! But of course I got too much sun, even with SPF 30 and 15 on! On our way home we could not find aloe at the local supermercado (except this bottle of lotion containing aloe for 12 euro! Which seemed like a lot for the size of the bottle) but anyway my Señora has some really good lotion I am going to try and see if it helps.

For dinner we had some very traditional foods. First gazpacho, which is like a cold soup consisting of like red pepper, tomatoes, and other spices (its orange in color), followed by croquetas, which is best described as like a cross between a chicken nugget and hush puppies, fried bread with chicken inside. They were pretty good, probably would have been better with ketchup . After eating the normal late dinner, 10:30pm, everyone was so tired but we still wanted to try and do something. We went to this music/beer/food/international festival, which was fun, but we were all so exhausted that we just got ice cream (which was to die for) and just sat for about an hour and headed home.