Spain: Day 9 - Beach day!

This weekend has been even more busy than the weekdays.  Saturday was our planned beach day with entire World Partners group of volunteers.  After the late-night fiesta on Friday, we all met at the school at 11am and boarded a bus.  Again, we had no idea of what adventure might await us.  First, we headed to see a  lighthouse in Dénia called the Cap de San Antonio.  The view of the Mediterranean from the lighthouse was breathtaking.  The trails winding around the lighthouse were not marked very clearly and there were no guardrails along the cliffs, which made it all the more exciting.

After spending a few minutes at the lighthouse, we got back in the bus and traveled back down the mountain. On our way down, we saw a car laying on it's side (like, 2 doors on the ground and the other 2 in the air) with the windshield shattered.  The police were there directing traffic and no one looked hurt, so everyone hurried to one side of the bus to get a shot of the unusual position of the car.  I'm sad to say that I didn't get a very good picture of it.  That was only our first run-in with the police that day...

When we got down from the mountain we traveled to a little town called Jávea and ate at a Chinese wok buffet.  Interestingly enough, the Chinese food made me feel like an American again.  I was also intrigued by the workers at the restaurant - Asian women who speak Spanish and broken English; quite an odd mix.

After lunch, we had planned on going to a beach in Granadella with a 15 foot cliff we could jump off of into the water.  On our way there though, our bus got stopped by 2 policemen on scooters.  Even though no one on the bus had heard a sound, allegedly the bus had hit a fence which fell on a car behind us and scratched it. We finally got everything straightened out and were on our way to the beach again.  Run-in with the police #2.

This is a picture of a valley that we passed through on the way to the beach.  Just to put it in perspective, see those scrunched-up pieces of metal that look like popcans?...those are cars that have fallen off the cliff into the ravine below.  And just to remind you, we were in a full size bus with 21 people on board.  It was a bit nerve racking to say the least.

 After about an hour of driving through hill and vale, we finally arrived at the beach.  However, the bus driver stopped in the middle of a 4-way intersection when we got there; we couldn't go forward because the road in front of us was a one-way road and we couldn't back up because there was a line of cars behind us.  This caused an inconvenient traffic jam so a few members of our team jumped off the bus to direct traffic. The traffic jam must have been bigger than we thought because the police soon showed up again (to make it run-in #3).  The officers seemed a bit irritated that a bus that large traveled through the mountains and got stuck.  Nonetheless, they, along with a few of our team members, guided our bus through the process of a 3-point turn around.  The road on our right that we were going to back into was probably a 45 degree angle downhill while the road to our left was about a 45 degree angle uphill.  As we started backing up, the people outside the bus started holding their heads and pointing to the front of the bus.  Those of us who were still on the bus soon realized that they wanted everyone to move to the front of the bus to help distribute the weight.  Later, they told us that one wheel of the bus was 3 feet off the ground, which is why they had us move.  Eventually we got unstuck, but since we had stressed out the bus driver too much we decided to skip the beach and head home.

On our way home we ended up stopping in Jávea again to go to a different beach.  Jávea is a very touristy town and the beach was overcrowded.  Myself and few other guys walked about 15 minutes down the coast and found a secluded spot to relax from the excitement of almost dying in a bus (just kidding Aunt B, don't worry.  I'm still alive to tell the story).  We sat by the tide pools for a few hours getting to know each other better and attempting to catch crabs (the kinds with claws that you can eat...not the other kind...).

After winding down at the beach for a few hours, we hopped back on the bus and headed home for reals this time.  The ride home was definitely less exciting than the rest of the day but I did get some amazing pictures of the mountains.

We finally arrived back at the school a little before 10:00pm.  Little did we know that the excitement of the day wasn't over.  Myself and the other 3 students I'm living with walked for about 25 minutes to find a place to eat.  We thought our professor would be meeting us there for dinner but found out that he would be picking us up at 10:45pm at the church down the road from the restaurant.  We ended up waiting at the restaurant for 20-25 minutes before getting up and leaving because the waitress hadn't come to get our order.  The four of us decided to just go to the church without eating to wait since it was almost time to be picked up.  Unfortunately, the only student with a phone forgot to mention that we wouldn't be picked up until after 11pm.  To make a long story short, we waited for a while.  It wouldn't have been so bad if our day hadn't been so eventful and busy.  That said, I am thankful for our bus driver that day, for the missionaries who paid for our meal at the restaurant, for safety while traveling, and for new-found friends.  I must say this was one of the most adventure-filled days I've had in Spain so far and I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings :)