It's a pity I didn't manage to get any pictures of Justin, Vinnie and Gastón (our super-cool Spanish Teacher accompanying MizzO) folding their itineraries into paper darts and throwing them off the tower- Litterbugs! It was funny, the darts were landing on people's roofs which I assumed were also their patios. I wonder what would happen if the patio-owners or the Torre Tirava guides saw two boys and a fully grown man throwing paper darts off a balcony and onto their city! I'll admit, it was all innocent fun =)
We were lead inside the Tirava, before gathering around the main attraction, we were instructed not to take any photos or videos whatsoever while inside this room. So, the pictures of la Cámara Oscura that I've posted here were, unfortunately, stolen from the internet. So I tried to make it as authentic as possible with the skills and software at hand (Paint).
La Cámara Oscura is a large white dish in the centre of a small room at the top of the tower, directly under a closed portal in the ceiling. When the door closed and we stood in the dark, the guide opened up the portal in the ceiling using levers, and the light came streaming onto this dish, through an optical effect created by mirrors that caught an exact mirror reflection of Cadiz. Not only was it just like a panorama of the city, that could be rotated and zoomed in and out (something I still can't explain), but the town was still alive, washing was flapping in the wind, birds were hovering above the streets. It was amazing.
We also managed to spot a pointy paper dart resting lightly on the roof/patio of someone's house... pity I couldn't get a picture of the boys' faces then!After that spectacle, we headed off to the mall for some good old-fashioned shopping (sorry guys, but this had been long-awaited) at a large centre in Cadiz. With a group our size in a mall that size, we had to set a meeting place and time. So we hit the shops! I bought a patterened jumper for 25 Euros, a belt for my new dress, and two fake-fur Russian-style-hunting hats- one for me and one for Ashley! They were so ridiculous, but so funny, and I just had to get them =)
We then hit the beach! Well, a beach. There were so many that I couldn't remember the names of them all. I remember being warned about the beach in the morning before we left, but I didn't bring my togs with me. So we played around on the sand for a bit while Sean and Justin went for a swim (the only two who actually did bring their togs) and then headed off home after a long day.
For dinner, we walked a short distance to a small Morroccan restaurant, set out in the bottom storey of someone's apartment. It was a cosy restaurant due to it residing in the apartment, but the atmosphere was actually quite nice. The menu, to us Brave Spaniards, was however beyond us, and we could not read/ understand/ pronunciate any of the dishes available to us. After getting the poor waiter to explain to us each dish we threw at him from the list of foreign delicacies, i settled for the 'Warakarish' (?). I was a little skeptical about my choice of dish, as I was the only one who ordered it. And I guess I'll never understand the true flavours of the evasive Warakarish, as they had to come out and tell me they had ran out of the specific ingredients for the dish. I wouldn't have been too phased about this issue, had they not told me after waiting about half an hour and after serving up everyone else's meals, giving them enough time to get about half way through it before I heard the news that my dish would not make it. So to avoid waiting for another half hour and keeping everyone in the restaurant for that length to wait for me to finish, I snacked on the bread and dips and lost myself in contented chatter among the table. Eventually I forgot about the dinner altogether and just enjoyed the company.
It wasn't until we got into the heart of our discussion when it came to my knowledge that Jess and Justin had been trying to talk MizzO into giving us a later curfew, as they had spoken to the year 12 group who told them that their curfew was an hour later than ours (11.30!) and we were fed up with not being trusted enough by her to not do something stupid. Well, not stupid stupid, like talking to strangers (actually, that's how we met half the people we came to know in Vejer. They were friendly strangers). We were not irresponsible though, and we knew right from wrong and having fun from being reckless and stupid. ish. Yeah, our defence wasn't the strongest. But we still thought it was pretty unfair. Anyway, the debate took a totally different turn than expected, and Miss scolded us severely because she was disappointed that we hadn't included Melanie and Natasha (two other year eleven girls) in anything we had been doing and she felt as though they had been left out. Well, this of course gave me a lot of fire, because they weren't exactly in our little Circle of Friends, and we weren't in theirs. They were closer to Lotta and Alex than they ever were to us, and those two had left them to hang out with the year 12s in their large group. So why weren't they getting told off too?
So anyway, we lost that argument, seeing as though Miss averted our points and left us sitting in guilt. I was unsure whether her little speech would ever take effect though- it didn't seem as though Mel and Tash wanted to join our group in any instance, and we didn't exactly ignore them when they said things or spoke to us, so they never really migrated to our end of the bus.
