May 25th-27th: La Playa de la Mora

Oh man, this weekend was the most amazing weekend yet!  We went to "La Playa de la Mora" which is one of the beaches here and it is about 15-20 minutes away from the center city of Tarragona.  We took a bus at 11am on Friday morning and met our professors there.  Our professors called it "camping" but we were staying in bungalow cabins for the weekend - they weren't 5 star but they weren't too bad either!  After putting our stuff down in our cabins, we all headed down to the pool!  Oh my goodness, the pool was so beautiful!  It had trees and these wooden bridges built in and tons of chairs to lay out in.  We chilled at the pool for a good while and then headed to the beach to lay out there.  The weather was beautiful and the ocean was cold, but it felt so good!  After spending a couple hours on the beach, we were all starving for a snack and dinner wasn't until 8pm, so we headed up to grab something from "Bar Luigi" and it was so delicious!

The beautiful pool...is this real life?!

Friday night dinner was amazing...it was Tapas night!  We started off with bread and sangria, delicious!  Then the first course was a salad with such fresh vegetables.  Next was a vegetable tapa with peppers, caramelized onions, and eggplant.  The 3rd course was calamari.  The 4th course was my absolute favorite...mussels!  They were made in a delicious garlicy sauce, and we were told to slurp them instead of eating them with our form.  The 5th course was pork kabobs...I could barely finish them!  For dessert we had an ice cream cake type thing with vanilla ice cream and chocolate.  I finished off dinner with a café con leche.  It was a 3 hour long dinner, with some of the most amazing food I have ever had!  Bueno!  After dinner, our teaching assistant and our professor's son Patrick (he is 8 years old) played guitar for us and we all sang!  We hung out on the beach for a little bit after too!

Saturday morning we were served breakfast right on the beach by a little cafe.  There was café, leche, and toast on the table when we got there...delicious!  And then they served us eggs, bacon, sausage, and doughnuts!  It was the best breakfast I have had here...a break from the daily chocolate croissants was needed.  I think we were all in heaven.

After breakfast, we headed to the pool to lay out in the sun.  I started reading "The Help" on this trip, so I sat by the pool and read...that is usually my favorite part of summer.  It is always great to read books for fun in the summer because I don't have time to read during the school year.  Towards the late afternoon, me and a couple of girls decided to explore and find a Spanish castle we had been told about.  It was a long, rocky hike up but after asking for help from a couple from England, we found it!  Oh man, it was so beautiful...and the scenes of the Mediterranean Sea along the way didn't feel like real life!  We were all joking that we were all going to have our weddings in this Spanish castle...it would be pretty sweet!

Spanish castle.  Amazingly beautiful.

Me and some of the girls on our adventure!

Saturday night dinner was just about as good as Friday night.  We were served champagne and bread to start...holla!  Our first course was an amazing salad with fresh mozzarella cheese, tomatoes, corn, and an awesome dressing, I could live off that salad.  For my main course, I ordered the cod in a champagne sauce served with potatoes.  It was out of this world, I can't even describe how delicious it was!  For dessert, we had a traditional Catalonia dish called "Crema Catalunya" and it was really similar to creme brulee, it was super rich and creamy.  I finished it off with a café con leche, so good!  We hung out on the beach again Saturday night and it was relaxing to look up at the night sky, put my toes in the sand, and just hang out.

Sunday, we had another amazing breakfast and spent the rest of the day at the pool, until we all decided to head back around 2:30.  We took the public bus back to the city and oh man I think it was the worst bus ride I've ever been on.  It ended up being almost an hour long and it was packed with people.  The bus driver was whipping around corners and going crazy around the round-a-bouts.  By the time all of us got back, we all felt like we were going to throw up!  For the rest of the day, I just hung around my room and chilled because everyone was pretty tired!

Tomorrow we are going to visit a monastery, so no classes for the day.  I'm pretty excited to see what it looks like and to keep exploring!  Sorry for the novel, but it was just such a great weekend!