Where in the world is Rachel

The next morning, July 8th, we woke up and headed straight to the beach. It took us a little while to get there. We obviously knew where the sea was but it was a little tricky getting there because the Marina was in the way. :) After I asked the police officers how to get to the beach, we were there in no time!

We found a nice quiet place next to some students who ended up being from Michigan State. We laid out our towels and fell asleep. It was nice not having to walk around all day long!! When we woke up, to our astonishment there was a big group of guys that had set up camp right in front of us on the beach. They were a very loud group of guys from somewhere in England. After a while we started talking to the guys and found out they were from Liverpool! They were there on a long weekend get away for their friend's "stag weekend". Essentially they were there on a glorified bachelor's party.

The beach was a GREAT idea! We got to relax and get in the water, which was actually pretty cold. One annoying thing was all the people trying to sell stuff on the beach. You couldn't go more than 10 seconds without someone coming up asking if you wanted a henna tattoo, wrap around dresses, 5euro massages, beer or pretty much anything else you might want/need. We just learned to ignore them. It was interesting though because apparently it is illegal for people to be selling things/services on the beach the way they were doing, so anytime a police officer was in the area, all the vendors would lay down or stop what they were doing and try to blend in!! I did see some Police Officers take some of the vendors away.

After a long day on the beach we went back to the hostel and got ready for the night. At the hostel I met a girl that was sharing our room. Her name was Tina, she was from Germany. She had just gotten into town and didn't know anyone and had to plans for the night. I invited her to come out with us for whatever we ended up doing. We finally headed out and stopped at a restaurant to get some drinks. They were incredibly overpriced but I guess that's what we get for getting HUGE drinks. Late that night we ended up meeting up with the guys from Liverpool.

The next morning, Juliana and I had to catch our bus to Pamplona around 7:30am. So we thought it would be a good idea to just stay up all night so we could sleep on the 7 hour bus ride! So...that's what we did. We stayed up with the guys going from one place to another until about 6am. That's when we decided to go to the hostel pack up and head to the bus station. We end up running into those guys again before we leave our hostel. We make it to the bus station around 7am. We thought it was enough time to get on the bus. Due to things that happened and other circumstances we ended up NOT making the bus to Pamplona.

So now we were NOT going to Pamplona and are stranded at the bus station without a place to stay. At this point it was probably 7:45am and we still hadn't gone to bed...so sleep deprivation was about to set in. After a little while I decided to call the Hilton. I thought we deserved a good day/night's rest on a nice bed. Around 9am we get to the Hilton and check in early, thank goodness a room was ready!!

We went STRAIGHT to sleep! We woke up around 2:30pm and decided it was time to make something of ourselves for the day. We ended up getting ready and heading back down to La Rambla. Of course, later that night we met up with our new friends from Liverpool! Funny thing is, we actually ran into our friend Tina as well!! We stayed out way to late again but it was well worth it!! We got back to the hotel around 6am. :)