For this past week, my father and his friend Val have been staying with us, they arrived last Sunday (29th April) and were delayed by more than an hour (not something that would have helped a nervous flyer I guess!)
As they arrived late on Sunday we didn’t get to do anything other than get back to the apartment, have a chat and a “wee drink” and go to bed, the following day the weather was glorious and Liesl had already got up very early to do some work, while she was finishing off what she had to do, Dad, Val and I went orange picking (at the same place as Liesl and I had visited before), in about 20 minutes the 3 of us had picked a massiv
e amount of oranges, I have been juicing them all week and I would say that we have about 3kg of oranges left after making 10.5 litres of fresh juice and after a weeks worth of 4 people eating them!
In the afternoon we went over to La Marina to visit Liesl’s mum and Ken as they would be flying back to Ireland early on Wednesday morning, we spent some time with them sitting on their terrace chatting and enjoying the sun.
Tuesday was a bank holiday; however Liesl worked for most of the morning as she was quite busy, in the afternoon we all went for a walk on the board walk in La Mata. My work is very quiet at the moment, I do hope that it picks up over the next week or so as its a little scary when the phones don’t ring!
On Wednesday and Thursday Liesl and I had arranged for Dad and Val to go on some of the free blanket trips that are locally arr
anged, its a full coach trip out for the day, all free of charge, the only requirement is that you visit the factory where blankets are made and listen to a presentation for an hour about the blankets. On Wednesday they went to the trip that spends time in Benidorm. Val loves Benedorm and has been several times before, she took pleasure in showing dad the old town – don’t think that they saw any Sticky Vicky shows – well if they did then they kept it quiet 😉
On Thursday they went to Guardalest which is a picturesque mountain village, they said that they did enjoy it but as it hailed for some of the day, it was spoilt a little – they would like to return on a good sunny day as they said the views were breathtaking.
Last night we went out for a meal to Cocoas, dad very kindly paid and afterwards we came back to the apartment and our friends Gerry and Trisha, who are over from Scotland at the moment came round for more than a few sherbets’ – great night.
Today we are planning to go to the Saturday market in Santa pola (woohoo) and probably have a walk in the sun as its looking like another hot hot day – not a cloud in the sky! Tomorrow I expect we will go to the Sunday market in the lemon groves and we have been invited to a BBQ in La Marina, I shall also have to arrange for the “transfer of the pensioners” – lol, dad and Val are spending next week with Val’s son, Shaun who lives near Quesada (about 20 km away from us).
As way of a minor footnote, its been two weeks since I part exchanged the Barchetta for a Citroen Picasso, it was a very sad day, not made any easier by liesl’s comment when we test drove the Picasso – “its not as quick as the Barchetta is it?” The Picasso is a MUCH more practice car, its large enough for our shopping and the seats go down so collecting large items is not a problem, its a diesel and does about 1000km to a full tank, where the Barchetta struggled to get 300km to the same size tank, it has cruise control and satnav although the latter is not working at the moment as the CD is for Belguim! I still pine for the Barchetta, as does Liesl, but we didn’t come here to have everything that we want, we came here to have a less stressful and more relaxed way of life and I guess a convertible, hand built Italian sports car doesn’t fit with that ideal however much I would like it to.
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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!)
After the walk we all went for a meal at La Fantasia (a new resturant about 2 minutes walk from our apartment – good meal.
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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!
The weather here is still changable, its been said that the Spanish have never seen this length of rainy weather before – typical eh? Anyway, its all set to change, according to the forecast, on Monday the sun comes back and the tempretures shoot up, we are not due to get any more rain until around December!
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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!
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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!
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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).
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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!
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This evening we were invited to visit our friends Pam and Dave (the ones that we bumped into at the market), they have a fantastic villa in San Miguel. We were late leaving home to drive to their house (about 50 minutes away) because I had to wait for a delivery from Dell, deliveries here are a nightmare, in the UK its bad enough as you generally get a time slot of morning or afternoon, but with the extended working day here (because of the mid day siesta), the time slot is any time from 8am to 9pm! Finally the package arrived at 6:10pm and we left to visit our friends. About half way there I got it in my head that I had left the door unlocked, so we had to turn around and drive back only to find that, of course, I HAD locked up prop
erly!
We finally arrived at the pub our friends were waiting for us in about 1.5 hours late – they had already started drinking, only to be sociable you understand 😉
We had a meal with them in the pub and a couple of vino tintos, and then retired at about 10:30 to their place – only to open another bottle of wine so that we had something to drink in the spa! Yes they have a spa located on their first floor terrace – posh eh?
I went to be at about midnight, leaving Liesl up having what she described as a ‘girly chat’ with Pam until 3am! Heaven knows what a ‘girly chat’ is but I daren’t ask!
The next morning we went back down to the same pub for a ‘full English’ breakfast, although I suspected that Liesl had an “itsy bitsy” hangover – lol. Although the breakfast was not exactly Spanish, it was really nice and set us up for the day.
During break
fast we met up with Bill & Avril, who are neighbours of Pam and Dave and after breakfast we all went off to the boardwalk at La Mata. It was a beautiful day and it was lovely walking along the wooden promenade for what seemed like miles, at one point we left the main boardwalk to walk slightly away from the coast into a wooded area that had hidden water features – check out the pics!
We stopped for drinks at the end of the 
boardwalk and from the café could actually see the building in which our friends Bob and Jackie own – they should be out in a week or so, it will be great to catch up with them! After our drinks we returned along the boardwalk until we came across a tapas bar – well it would have been rude not to stop wouldn’t it? So we all had tapas and some more drinks!
Finally we got back to the cars and drove home, a fantastic weekend which we would love to do again – hint, hint Pam!
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Paul and Jackie invited u
s to their villa for a BBQ (first of the season), it was a glorious day, really nice and sunny and it stayed warm right into the evening.
Paul cooked, as you can see, and made a chicken paella!
It was great – yes I did eat it!
We had a great evening and I hope we are invited back again soon!
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Well last night was more than just a “little bit windy!”
We had a tree on the urbanisation snapped in half and some of the street signs have actually been bent at their metal base – all because of the high winds – have a look at the pictures!
Many people have lost ridge tiles and more from their houses and there is debris everywhere.
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e amount of oranges, I have been juicing them all week and I would say that we have about 3kg of oranges left after making 10.5 litres of fresh juice and after a weeks worth of 4 people eating them!
anged, its a full coach trip out for the day, all free of charge, the only requirement is that you visit the factory where blankets are made and listen to a presentation for an hour about the blankets. On Wednesday they went to the trip that spends time in Benidorm. Val loves Benedorm and has been several times before, she took pleasure in showing dad the old town – don’t think that they saw any Sticky Vicky shows – well if they did then they kept it quiet 😉
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