Well today we had a fantastic sunny day, and to be fair the weather has really picked up this week – even at night the tempreture has not dropped below about 20 degrees, so its nice and pleasent to go out even late at night and walk in shorts and a tee shirt (no Dave its not the alcohol that is keeping me warm, although I admit it may be helping – hehe).
This last week has been pretty busy for both Liesl and I work-wise, which is good, on Friday we went down to the Spanish bar to have our weekly Spanish evening, this week was particularly good and Isobel (the owner) has now started to regularly bring out plates of tapas for us to try, she was on good form that evening and we had a really nice night – Liesl’s Spanish is just getting better and better (I am typing this whilst listening to her have her Spanish lesson over the Internet with Claudio and she is miles better than me, I really should pull my finger out and start to study!).
On Saturday we spent the evening with our friends Paul and Jackie, they came to our place for a meal and a few drinks, a great night was had by all.
On Sunday afternoon we walked along the Los Arinales prominade with L
iesl’s Mum, Ken and his brother (Adrian) and his wife (Margaret), we have spent some time with them over the past couple of weeks while they have been visiting Ken and Heather (they are over here looking for a place to buy), really nice people. Hetty was particularly happy that Adrian was here as he was test driving his scooter, so she decided that she was old enough to qualify for a ride (see if you can spot her in the picture!)
Building work is carrying on at a pace on our urbanisation, over the past couple of weeks we have had scaffolding erected around our block – right up to the apartment and there is a gang of around 10 men that 
start work at 8am and finish at 8pm who spend most of the day making as much noise as possible (I’m told that this is all part of their job, but I am certain that they are doing it with the sole intent of pissing me off!)
I guess it had to happen at some point, we desperately need the blocks to be renovated and we are paying a great deal of money to make it happen so it was inevitable that they would get around to us at some point – I am just glad that they have started and, hopefully, our bit will be completed soon and we can get back to some sort of normality – I mean its affecting us in so many different ways, not just the noise, we are not able to dry clothes as we used to hang them over the balcony, now there are several men on scaffolding and lots of dust so that’s out of the question – we are having to try to dry them
indoors (no central heating remember) or take them over the Heather and Ken’s place at the weekend and hang them up in their garden.
As you can see from the pics (and they were taken after the workmen had cleaned up for the day!). It’s not the best view we have ever seen from our balcony!
Out local town – Santa Pola – had a Medieval Fair on over the Easter holiday (Santa Semana in Spanish!) so we decided to take a look.
The stall holders had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to make their stalls look medieval, they even took to dressing up in old attire, Liesl and I couldn’t figure out whether they travelled around Spain holding these type of markets all the time (and therefore styled their stalls that way) or whether they had gone to special effort for this time of year, as you know Spain is a very religious country and it wouldn’t surprise us if they had these ‘special’ stalls stacked away just for this one weekend of the year!
Either way they were very impressive.
In typical Spanish style they made sure that the children were well catered for, with free amusements in the park area, they could learn to use a bow and arrows, play medieval games or just use the swings etc that had been setup to look Medieval.
Whilst wandering around the market we spotted a woman dressed up in a witches 
outfit, we watched her for a while until, to our astonishment, she was nothing to do with the market, her outfit was simply what she had decided to wear on that day!
The weather has not been that great here over the past few weeks, however we woke up this morning to torrential rain, worse than anything I had previously seen, as you can see from th
e first picture, the water was streaming down the window and bouncing off of the scaffolding outside (remember we are being renovated at the moment, so most of our days are spent having to listen to pneumatic drills outside the apartment!).
The strange thing was that by m
id-day the storm had cleared and it ended up being a gorgeous day!
Very strange weather for this time of year!
Blimey, it’s been a manic few weeks, work has been very very busy and the social life has been pretty busy too as you will see from this post. We have just been too busy even to post on the blog to keep you up to date!
24/3 – A Saturday and the date of the first urbanisation meeting that we can actually attend. Every 6 months or so the “community” in which we are members, basically our estate, all get together to shout at each other in very loud Spanish. The idea is sound, everyone gets in a room and discusses their issues and the community as a whole (well those that are there anyway) vote to approve or deny various things. The meeting is chaired by the committee that we have all voted in. In reality the English and non-Spanish speaking are told to sit on one place (so that the translator can try to translate to them), the Spanish sit in another area and generally the meeting goes something like this….
1. Agenda point 1 is raised by the committee.
2. Someone (or everyone) in the Spanish area shout every loudly about something, they get up and wave their arms around and shout some more.
3. Some type of agreement is reached, generally with some more shouting and waving of hands.
4. The translator tells the non-Spanish speakers what has happened and what agreement has been made (lol, so much for having a ‘voice’!)
Anyway, this day is when the manic part of our past few weeks started, my business partner, Richard and his girlfriend, Caz were visiting us on the same day so we knew things were going to be tight on time but we thought that we would have enough time to go to the meeting and then rush to the airport to collect them. This was all fine until the night before the meeting I received a call from a customer asking me to visit them on Saturday morning – not being in a position to turn away work I agreed, so then Liesl had to find her own way to the meeting, I had to go to the customer and we hoped still to be able to meet Richard & Caz at the airport.
Well the Saturday didn’t start well for me, it took me 45 minutes to find my customer’s address, I asked about 10 people, greeting them all with a happy “Buenos Dias” followed by a request in Spanish for them to help me find the address, all of them replied with “wot, sorry m8, I’m not Spanish”, finally I decided to ring my client (after being 15 minutes late at this point) only to find out that I had no credit left on my mobile – nightmare!
I found a shop and bought 15€ of credit and because I was out of mobile area the credit wouldn’t go on the phone, I therefore had to drive about 2 miles to get the credit to work, when i looked at the phone I noticed that I had a missed call from my client asking where I was! I was now 30 minutes late!
I finally managed to speak to my customer and he gave me directions to his place (totally different area to where I was asking for directions!) and I finally arrived 45 minutes late, he was very pleasant about it – people are so laid back here.
As I had started late at his house I was late finishing and had to drive like a maniac back to where Liesl was at the community meeting, I was hoping to be able to collect her and go straight to the airport, but in typical Spanish style, the meeting had only just got past point number 1 on the agenda!
I had to therefore go off to the airport on my own, leaving Liesl with what looked like blood seeping from her ears – poor thing, she said that at one point she was sure that a fist fight was going to start!
I collected Rich & Caz and got back to pick Liesl up, the meeting was far from over and I believe that she had voted about 6 times already (the first vote being to decide whether a member of the audience would be allowed to record the proceedings or not!), anyway, she had had enough (poor thing) so we decided to leave them to it.
That weekend we had a great time with Rich & Caz eating and drinking far too much, they seemed to enjoy themselves and they returned to the UK on the Tuesday evening.
Both Liesl and I were very busy with work on Wednesday and Thursday and didn’t go out in the evenings, on Friday we had a friend over for drinks – Janice, she is an estate agent and fluent Spanish speaker, she has really helped me out when I had issues with Telefonica.
On Saturday I had promised to help Ken lay some gravel around his house, but again, circumstances conspired against us and a customer rang with an urgent problem that meant I had to go into Alicante late on Friday to collect a new printer and then go into Guardarmar on Saturday morning to set it up for them, making me about 1.5 hours late for Ken – I felt bad not being able to get to him on time because he had already started on his own but I have to take the work when I can get it.
On Saturday afternoon we went to look at a house we had previously visited with a view to buying it, the place is lovely, however its over our budget and we would really have to stretch to get it – don’t know what we will do yet. In the evening we went out to a pub with Ken and Heather, there was a live band playing, it was a nice night out.
On the Sunday we met up with friends Bob and Jackie who are currently over from the UK, they have a place about 40 minutes drive from us, we spent the afternoon with them and in the evening we took them to our Spanish evening and had a great time.
And that pretty much brings us up to date, last night (4th April) we went to Henta Hista Alegre (a restaurant in Santa Pola that hosts a charity dinner dance on the first Wednesday of every month), there were about 150 people there, we had a 5 course meal with as much wine as you can drink, all for 12€ each – and they still manage to make a tidy profit to give to their cancer charity – we were there with Ken, Heather, Jackie and Paul (our friends from La Marina), Brian and Lynn (neighbours and friends of Ken and Heather).
This evening we met up with Peter (an old work collegue from Getronics) and his wife Val, we had a lovely meal at Picasso’s in La Marina.
Afterwards we went to a very Spanish bar close to the resturant, in there they were playing very loud, very Spanish guitar music, all in all, a great evening and it was fantastic catching up with Peter, he had just signed for his villa near Murcia, its finally built and I think that they are both looking forward very much to spending some time there chilling!
