Are topless beaches NORMAL here?!?!?

There are about 1,001 adjectives to describe how amazing this weekend was, but I'll spare you the reading and just show you the pictures to prove it.  My friends and I went to a little beach town called Nerja.  We met up at the bus station at 8:00am on Saturday morning to catch the 9:00am bus to Nerja.  It's about a 2 hour drive, but we soon realized WHY it was a 2 hour bus ride when the bus driver drove slower than a turtle all the way there!  We planned on taking the bus back to Granada at 7:15pm, but those plans quickly changed...  Once we got to Nerja, we were dropped off at what we thought was a random stop in the middle of no where, but later found out that's the bus stop.  It was very weird.  We walked down toward the beach to find a place to eat.

The place we found to eat was a little restaurant that over looked the beach.. Very cool!  The waiter was hitting on Rachel the whole time and asking the boys if we were their girlfriends, even though there were 2 guys and 3 girls.. whatever.  And then the waiter thought James was gay.  It was a very strange and interesting meal, to say the least, but we were just excited to finally be in Nerja and ready to soak up the sun!

Once we started walking down the boardwalk toward we got really, really excited.  Encarna had talked sooooo much about Nerja that we had very high expectations for this city.  Luckily she was completely right about everything and it became the best trip we've had so far!

Once we saw how beautiful the view from above was, we had to find a way to get down there!!! We took a little path that we thought would take us to the big beach, but we found out it took us to the little beach on the left side of the balcony.  This was still an incredible view!

We climbed up and over all the rocks to get to the other side of the beach.. where we wanted to be, but didn't know the correct route.

These are the rocks that we climbed over to get to the other side.  The sand in Nerja is different than sand that we're used to in the US, it's little tiny rocks, so eventually they start hurting your feet if you walk too much!  We managed to get through all the big rocks and finally found the beach!

Haha.. Hannah and I decided to have a photo shoot with the rocks!  The boys wanted to climb the extremely big rocks and jump off them (boys will be boys), so we needed our own activities to do!

The longer we laid in the sun, the more we wanted to stay the night.  We just had to figure out a way to do this, so we went to Cielto Lindo to get guacamole and margaritas to discuss our options.  This was what was put on the menu... It's a complete lie! They're just trying to weasel money out of the tourists.  Luckily we know better and definitely didn't leave a tip!

We decided the first step to staying the night was to make sure we could change our bus tickets to the next day.  It cost us a whopping 75 centimos, so we definitely went for it.  As we were walking away from the bus station, we discovered that we didn't have our map AGAIN! Rachel kept losing the map everywhere we went.  James, once again, saved the day by finding our city map!

We went to the balcony to overlook the whole city to figure out where we would stay.

We decided on a Hostal called Hostal Regina.  It seemed very legit, we each paid 18 euros (25 dollars) and we got 2 private rooms, breakfast, and wifi, that we didn't use.  We went to a little store across the street to find toothbrushes, face wash, and used the sampler perfumes and makeup to make ourselves look presentable to the world.  We hung out by the beach at night, and then got back to our hostal rooms at around midnight or so, talked for 30 minutes and went to bed.  We woke up and went downstairs for breakfast.  Once we got downstairs, there was no one at the desk (which was the bar), no one around anywhere, no breakfast, no nothing.  We sat and waited for about 10 minutes and finally some men came to set up the restaurant that was connected to the hostal and we asked them to call the man in charge of this place.  He came downstairs and we gave the keys back and got our passport information back from him.  During this time, Hannah decided she was going to tell him what she thought about his service.  He wasn't pleased with this, but he was the most unprofessional man alive.  So we went on our way, found some allergy medicine for me,  (I didn't have mine since we weren't planning on staying the night) and went on our way back to the beach!  We stopped and got breakfast at this AMAZING little shop on our way to the beach.  I had the most amazing toast and sunny side up eggs with tomatos.  It was so delicious.  Our day started out a little hazy and chilly, but as we laid on the beach longer, the day got much better!

The girls, again, decided that we wanted to go exploring a little bit.  And since we have a photo contest coming up with ISA, I decided I needed to take some really neat pictures!

We had a running joke about how short I was compared to everyone else.. this pictures just goes to prove it...

By the time we got back on the bus at around 4pm on Sunday, we were beat!  We all crashed on the bus!  Overall, this was BY FAR the best weekend I've had!  Our group was awesome!  Everyone was so laid back and easy going, it definitely made for an amazing trip!  I can't say enough good things about Nerja.  Encarna was right about how beautiful it was.  James commented that FINALLY a host mom was right about how fun and beautiful a city was!

Encarna had surgery today.  Julie told me that she's doing well, but I think I'm going to go visit her tomorrow in the hospital.  She had a very minor surgery on her neck to have a small tumor removed.  She wasn't nervous about it, she was just glad to finally have it done, since she thought she was going to have the procedure done in January!  So I've been hanging out with Julie and Carmen today.. definitely not the funnest day I've ever had in my life.

I thought I had an intramural volleyball game tonight because we won our game last week.  When I got to the volleyball courts, there was no one from my team there.  I think the referee got our group confused with the other ISA group.  That's ok.  I'm going to get Chinese for dinner tonight, I'm excited about it.. a 3 course meal plus a drink and dessert for less than 6 euros.  Can't beat that!!!! 

This weekend we're hiking in La Alpujarra.. it's a part of the Sierra Nevada.  I'll keep you updated on how everything's going.  I can't believe I only have 5 and a half weeks left!  And James leaves next weekend.. our group is going to miss him for sure!

Hope you have a great week!








...and to answer this question.. YESSSS topless beaches are 100% normal!! ..we did not participate!