We had a bit of a lie in this morning as we didn’t have to meet at AIP until almost 11am. We arrived a bit early so we had an orange juice at a nearby café. Conor decided not to go on the trip today because he wanted to go to the beach with some of his friends that he met here.
We have the option of partaking in the activity on Fridays and Sundays but every other day is obligatory…’obligatory’ sounds like it’s a bad thing…but really we enjoy the activities! It just means that if you prefer to spend time with your host family or maybe go to the beach with friends or shopping, there is the option to do that on Friday or Sunday but most of our friends here were going on this trip, plus it involved going to the beach too, so happy days!
From AIP, we got a bus with lots of other international students from AIP (some of which we now see as friends!), to a coastal village called Peñíscola about 2 hours away. One of the lads was playing music on a speaker during the bus ride and we were all chatting away, so it didn’t seem like 2 hours. The beach was absolutely packed and the sand was golden and soft. The beaches here are so amazing, they are like something out of a movie and the water is lovely too, with little or no seaweed and no jellyfish (like at home!). The water was fairly shallow too so you could swim out a good bit and still touch the sandy ground. Me and some of the other students swam out to an old castle on the other side of the bay where we climbed up a set of steps and found a cool place to jump off from and into the water! It was deep enough to jump in but not too deep in terms of safety, plus the water was very calm so it was perfect! Unfortunately, we didn’t get any pictures of this because of the water…but trust me, it was fun! Towards the end of the day, we went on a tour of the town and went up to the old castle where there was a gorgeous view of all the surrounding areas! When we went into the castle, there seemed to be so many steps that you could just keep going higher and higher, and just when you thought you had seen a great view, there was an even better one up higher! We had 20 minutes to spend looking around the castle and reading about its history, then we me outside the castle and made our way back to the bus.
On the way back to the bus, we were shown an area just below the castle which apparently was used to film some scenes in ‘Game of Thrones’! The bus took us back to Valencia, but this time most of us slept for the 2-hour journey! I definitely recommend a visit to Peñíscola as it also had plenty of restaurants and the beach went on for miles so I’m sure there is even more to see!
Saturday 8th July #Splash