Two days until Barcelona!

I am so sorry I haven´t written much while I´ve been in Tenerife. It´s more difficult to get on the internet here for a significant amount of time.

We only have two more days left in Tenerife and I am going to miss my friends here, but I am ready to move on. The island is beautiful, but you can only go to the beach and shop for things you don´t need so many times until you get tired of it. I´ve been to three different beaches since we´ve arrived: Playa Jardín, Playa Martianez and Playa de las Terecitas. Playa Jardin has black sand, which is very cool but also very hot on the bottoms of your feet, and that one is about 20 minutes walking distance from our apartment. It´s huge with decent sized waves and the water is just the perfect temperature. There are three parts to the beach and we always go to the one furthest from our home because it has the least amount of rocks on the sand and in the water. It also has an area where people play soccer and volleyball and a few restaurants as well. The majority of the women go topless, which I´ve gotten very used to, however I never get used to seeing women who really shouldn´t be going topless. 80% of the men wear little speedos that show everything. The worst are the hairy older men with thick, black, curly hair coming out of every part of their body. Playa Martianez is very rocky and you always get scraped by the rocks when you try to enter the water because there are so many and they are so big. I is a ten minute walk from our apartment and you can see the 7 made-for-tourists pools and a modern, white sculpture from this beach. Playa de las Terecitas is in Santa Cruz, about 30 minutes west by car, and it has soft, white sand and tourquoise water that you can see the bottom of the ocean from no matter how deep it is. It´s very long and has many Kiosks with different Spanish names along the beach that sell food and drinks and also help you find where you put your towels if you wander off down the beach. There are no waves because they have blocked off the current with rocks, but I liked that feature. I got a calamari sandwich there and Tyler got a macadamia nut ice cream.

This week has been very cloudy, but hot and humid. We skipped school on Tuesday and went to El Teide, the volcano on Tenerife, with our friends Cristina (Spain), Magnus (Norway) and Bebe (Belgium). Cristina, who grew up in Puerto de la Cruz, has been very gracious to us and offered to drive us up to Teide. It was like arriving on another planet. As we drove up the mountain, we passed by a little town called La Orotava an then into the forest with tons of  ...... to be continued!