The Second Week

Again, catching up a bit on Jan 11-Jan 15:
Wednesday night, we went out for churros and chocolate. Churros are basically elephant ears in stick form: deep-fried, long pieces of dough that you dip in hot chocolate syrup. They are absolutely delicious! We ended up ordering too much chocolate syrup, though, and it is WAY too sweet to drink. They also have a menu with enough chocolate desserts that we could come back every week and not finish trying them all.
Thursday was extremely windy. I went out to the port which has various piers sticking out into the water. There was sand blowing across the beaches and up onto the road. It is really fine, white sand, so it was hard to capture a picture, but I did put one in. Don't ask me what the boat is doing sitting on the sand. It wasn't there the day before I took this picture...
Friday, we went to a reception in Javea (Valenciano spelling: Xavia). The head of their cultural center greeted us and took us to their cathedral. The cathedral has a lot of castle-like characteristics because it was used for defense against pirate and Muslim invasions throughout the city's history. It suffered a lot of damage during the civil war, and all of the interior work had to be redone, but the main structure is still the same. We were allowed to go up on the roof and take pictures of the city. In this picture, you can see us standing on the domes of the roof. On the way up, we took a spiral stair-case that had the slats in the walls for archers, and at from the top of the church, we could see the troughs over the doors that stick out from the main ceiling and have holes in the floor. This guards soldiers on the roof and allows them to shoot through the holes at the people on the ground. The bell tower was pretty cool, and we were up there on the hour, so we got to listen to the bells from the roof. After the cathedral, we went to the city museum which contains artifacts that they have found from all the various periods of history that this city has been through (Roman, Medeival, Muslim, etc.). They also had a more modern section on the top with old sewing machines, bellows, mills, blacksmith equipment, etc. from the 19th century. From the terrrace on top of the museum, we could also see the castle.
After seeing the museum, our whole group went to a restaurant for tapas (appetizers) and vino (wine). The appetizers ranged from mini-pizzas to ham and cheese slices to grilled fish pieces. It was all very good!