Noja 2015 <3

Noja 2015

Okay. Sorry for taking two weeks. I kinda haven't had Internet and only mobile data, except for two days when we went to a bar and had wifi but I was preoccupied and couldn't even begin to think about my blog. 

Be prepared to read a lot...

Noja is a small part on the northern coast of Spain that is connected to the Cantabrian Sea. It's really just a summer town. It has over 40,000 residents in the summer months, and only about 300 residents in the winter. Nice. 

There's a lot of really cool beaches around- we visited the 3 main ones. The water was normally pretty cold, which is expected from a western coast ocean, but it was tolerable. Too bad I don't like swimming in the ocean.

I spent most of my time on the beach walking along the sand and listening to music, reading, talking with others, sleeping, or playing beach games, like frisbee or fútbol. I really enjoyed talking with his friends. Sometimes we would talk in English, sometimes we would talk in Spanish, but most of the time, they spoke in English and I replied in Spanish. It was a pretty good way to practice. 

While Andrés and his friends would come back from diving and hunting for octopus shivering, I would sit by watching, warm and dry. 

Super fun card game. I won. 

Another thing we did  couple times was hiking up small mountains in the area. One of them was along a mile-long beach, and we climbed that one on the third or fourth day. All the days kinda blur together. 

This one was overlooking another part of the town, with a really big prison. I guess the convicts, should they escape, can't really go into he ocean unless they were planning on swimming for a good long while. 

The other mountain hike was just a few days ago, and was on the opposite side of town. I think you can even see the first mountain in the pictures from the top of this mountain. This was definitely a more difficult climb: lots of uphill in a short amount of time. More my style. Even though it was sprinkling just half an hour before, we were all sweating quite a bit. Unfortunately it didn't start raining again until the next day. I really liked this hike. It gave a really good view of the area. 

We stayed at Andrés’s dad’s house in the area, about 2/3 mile from the beach. Which was okay for the first few nights, when we didn't have 9 people sleeping in a small house… yet we all managed. Kind of.

I had some real interesting food here in Noja… 

Last night, the five of us that remained all went out to dinner at a local restaurant, where we got some really good burgers. Andrés and I had the best ones:

2x burger, 2x Lettuce, 2x Fried Egg, 2 Onion, 2 ham, and a really good bun. 

Ugh it was so much food. 

I made an amazing Apple crisp for when we had lunch on the beach. And by “an,” I mean 4. Apparently everyone liked it, and were going back for seconds, so I guess that's good. 

Also, that beach lunch consisted of Paella that was made. For thirty people. The 2 pans they used were so big, my goodness:

I tried 2 alcoholic drinks, because I guess that's what you do when you're 18 in Europe. So the first was a drink they call Calimocho, which is a combination of Wine and CocaCola. I don't understand why they love it so much… It's not very good.

The other one I tried was a mojito, which was much better. At least it tasted good, compared to the former...

Now, I also tried some very interesting food… For example, the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten in retrospect was this small circle of purple rice. Just some white rice with some sauce on it, yeah? When they handed it to me, they said, and I quote, “it's just rice. More or less.” So I was suspicious. But I mean, what is so suspicious about purple rice?

It wasn't until after I ate it that they told me what the sauce was. 

Sangre de Cerdo. In English, Pig Blood. 

Thank you Javier, I could have gone without you describing to me how they got the blood. 

It was the only food I've eaten here that has made me not feel good for the rest of the day, and even typing about it right now makes my stomach hurt so I'll stop and talk about something more fun. 

Bonfires on the beach were also super cool. (Well except for the whole returning-to-the-house-at-5:30-in-the-morning…) We prepared burgers beforehand that we would bring and then eat there. Amazing, nobody was hurt, except for the time someone decided to throw an empty 2 liter bottle on the coals and it exploded and got molten plastic on someone's leg… But other than that…

And the second bonfire we had came with an extra surprise: floating lanterns! They were so cool! I have never used these before so it was super cool. 

Of course, when you hang out with 20 year olds in Europe, you're going to go to parties. Well, if you're Josh, you go to party. 

Now, said party turns out to be a birthday party for you and one other, but still. 

Party. 

It was pretty cool. I had to explain some English idioms to people because they were curious. I'm still not sure how “Bob’s Your Uncle” came into being. 

We all played Charades, more or less. They played. I tried to play. But it's difficult when you are trying to get them to guess people you know almost nothing about.

And look they got me this cake!

And that was my whole last two weeks. I took so many pictures- what you see here is only a small small fraction of what is on my phone and camera. 

I had such a good time here and I'm going to miss them all so much! They are some of the coolest people I've met out of the country. (Okay, I haven't met many people, but still.)

And look here's all of us!