Villajoyosa

On Friday, CIEE took us on a day trip to the city of Villajoyosa, which is about 40 miles north of Alicante. The drive along the coast alone would have enjoyable enough, but the city was a blast. We started with a tour of a 16 century country estate that had been in the original family until 1992, so much of the building and contents were original. It was a beautiful home that allows us to get a closer look into how the nobles in Spain lived during the last few hundred years. After this, we had a walking tour of the city. Since the old town of the city was formed in the 700s, there was a lot of interesting things to look at. The city started as a county get away for rich people in Barcelona, but then turned to piracy. The King of Spain built a wall around the city to help protect it, but required the citizens to take over passing ships and then give between 10 and 100% of the boot to him. As you can see in the pictures that I took along this tour, the city is very cool. All the houses are painted in different color because in the past, each house would be painted the same as the color of the flag that the father’s ship flew. Now, the citizens continue this, even though they don’t have ships. The streets were very narrow and the neighbors would just yell across/down the street to get each other’s attention. It was kinda like stepping back in time. One interesting part of the walled city was that the church doubled as a fortress, which is unlike other churches I have visited so far in Spain. After a quick stop at the beach, we went to a mom and pap run chocolate factory. This was amazing! Here they took raw cocoa beans and turned it into chocolate. The smell was amazing and all the machines were covered in chocolate shavings that tasted amazing. After leaving this chocolate heaven, we went back down to the beach to have our lunch. This was a great ending to the day that allowed us to just relax and watch the waves come in. Once back to Alicante, I was able to take a long nap during my siesta before hanging out with CIEE friends downtown.

Today was more of a chill day. I got to sleep in until 10:30 and then met Laura and Tessa downtown at the Paseo Explanda de Espana. This is a marble tiled promenade that is lined with shops, restaurants and palm trees that is located near the beach. Here people just kind of wander up and down the 600 meters talking with friends or people watching; I choose the later. It’s really to just sit and watch all these old and young couples walking arm in arm while listening to live music, the warm sun didn’t hurt either. I had to pull my way away from this in order to make it back for la comida (lunch) with my family. The two hour long meal of paella with mi mama, mi papa, mi 2 brothers and the grandma was fun. Although, I had no idea what they were talking about for most of the time, they did try to teach the grandma how to say hello and to say my name. Both the mother and grandma say my name like Queen and the father always corrects them. After lunch, I again to a very long nap during my siesta. I think that I have finally got over my jetlag, but I have a little cold and every time I walk downtown, it’s a 20-25 minute walk, which I would guess would be about a mile and a half. After this nap, I called people back home using Skype. I am really glad that I figured out Skype and how to use it to call landlines and cell phones because it allows me to talk to a lot more people. I also use Aim, emails and facebook to stay in touch with everybody back home (thanks Mandi for being my connection to Falk and Kelli). I really enjoyed talking to all of you, so thanks. Also, thanks for reading my blog, feel free to comment on anything because it’s fun for me to read what you think. Tonight, I don’t know what I am going to be doing. I may just chill here and start a book or else call other CIEE students and see what they are doing.

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