Bedrock

Archive for the ‘pizza’ Category

A very pleasant evening out with friends last night, down in the town – the famous “G8” which basically means a bunch of us out on a Thursday night for drinks. We started at the Galera Hotel and ended up at La Posa.

A favourite Spanish trick about this time of the year to terrify the wits out of the British – is to set off an explosive every time the church bell has finished ringing – which it does quite a lot. Yesterday I was reversing the car when it happened and I’m sure the thing had to be within feet of me because I was convinced I’d blown the exhaust pipe up. Talk about heart-stopping.  From a distance you at least have a chance to save on heart attacks because you see the puff of smoke before the sound reaches you – but close up you don’t have a chance.

After a couple of beers last night we were convinced someone had heard enough and decided to commit suicide. If you look at the front of the church here – the rightmost window, at first glance it looks like someone ready to jump.

Thankfully I had my camera with me and a quick zoom made it clear that’s the bell!!! I thought it was someone’s leg.

So much for the evening’s entertainment. We ended up at La Posa for drinks and Maureen and I shared a pizza.

This morning I went down to the village to meet Antonio from Habland who supply our Internet here in Spain – to get a new router as mine’s been acting up – he was extremely helpful and now I’m up and running hopefully reliably – we even have the iPlayer running without having to go through hoops. We do have a little issue that my cameras will no longer talk to me since fitting the new router but I’m sure I’ll resolve that in the next day or so.

Late morning after Antonio left, Maureen and I went off to the village for some ZUM – which is a powerful spray to kill insects – particularly those who like to eat your wooden beams. On the way back we stopped in the centre for a coke.  We’d popped up to the house of some friends who can’t be here right now armed with water to sort out their plants – but it turns out a friendly Spanish neighbour has taken on the job.

The village is being set up for the forthcoming August festivities in which we have bands playing and all sorts of family entertainment throughout the month.  Funny old day, it started off with a spot of rain which immediately disappeared in favour of stunning sunshine – by lunchtime it was up to an amazing 38c though the car even after driving for a while said 41c and I’m inclined to believe it…. then by mid-afternoon it was back to a little rain and lots of cloud – still hot of course. 

As I look outside – it’s sunny again. Apparently this will all have cleared up by tomorrow – I think it’s the first spot of water the weeds will have seen for a couple of months judging by the colour of most of them (a kind of dead orange-brown colour).

Probably tomorrow we’ll wrap our heads in towels before spraying the place with ZUM and backing out of the door for a few hours to make sure only the insects die and not us along with them. We’ve been warned – and the can looks pretty ominous – though being in Spanish I can’t follow a word of it.

If you don’t see any more entries here you’ll know what happened.

We’re onto our second full weekend and it looks like the weather is going to hold. Friday night we went off to the pizza cave up the Fuente Caliente turnoff for a pizza. The place doesn’t show up on the map but it’s just south of the A-4302  turn-off to Huescar, under the motorway and on up past the pool to Huescar, it’s on your left 2/3rds the way up – looks like a deserted Western movie set.

We arrived early and were the first in which was nice… sun setting, 32c, ice-cold coke.. what more could you want?

After a very nice evening, having overdone it the night before, we retired early and hence first thing Saturday morning, the girls walked down to the village for coffee and toast+tomato+olive oil. I followed shortly thereafter in the car (I started the morning off watching “District 9” on the tablet and checking the email for even more urgent stuff) but not before dumping the venerable and much-loved S600 printer in the skip!

After breakfast we had a wander around town to get some essentials and came back to freshen up and so I could do some blogging and a little research. Saturday night we went down town Galera and enjoyed a chat with friends. Today (Sunday) we’ve been down to the Galera pool for the first time – which apart from being a little derelict (the pool is great but they’ve let parts of the grounds go to seed) and some particularly noisy children was very pleasant.

We came home to a nice email from our Internet service provider who has moved us onto a quieter link as we were getting massive download variations – which is nice – and tonight the plan is to go to the old Orce market. Tomorrow I have lots of FSB work to catch up on and I’m hoping my new iPhone replacement lens and back will turn up as there’s a very slight scratch on the current one….  we’ve promised ourselves that on Tuesday we’ll head off to the proper beach over Aquilas area to the South-East for a few hours.

If you’ve read my previous blogs we’re here at Bedrock to get the place ready for the summer – the usual – holes appearing in walls etc. and the plan was to get some paint and cement and start the process early this week.

That was kyboshed when our Spanish-registered car packed in on the way over here. I can’t remember ever being without a car… it’s an interesting experience… not half as bad as I expected but we were beginning to wonder how to get the next set of groceries up the hill (it’s a BIG STEEP HILL) when one of our local friends who’s been talking to the garage in Caravaca De La Cruz for us informed us that it’s a wiring issue (so much for the road-side mechanic and his BATTERY theory) and we can pick it up tomorrow –AND it’s not going to break the bank. We’re so grateful for offers of help we’ve had – nice to have decent neighbours.

Meanwhile it turns out there is still an issue with some paperwork stopping us getting the electricity sorted and so we’re ok as long as we don’t go above 2-3Kw – which means no hot-tub…

On the upside the broadband is working a treat and the weather has been SUPERB – it’s 33c out there as it was yesterday also – BEAUTIFUL sun-bathing weather with a nice breeze to stop you frying.  Maureen is alternating between outside jobs and watching the royal celebrations – I on the other hand have two genes missing – one for watching sport – the other for following the royals – so instead I’m alternating between plugging holes in the walls, doing a spot of programming and buying cheap Chinese crap on Ebay – I managed 30 minutes in a deck-chair and that was it – too many things to do, too little time.

We just found out today that Lorca has a decent shopping centre with an Eroski supermarket so no doubt we’ll be taking a trip there before long. But first… a trip to the local bar for a beer and pizza.

A far cry from the height of summer, Galera in Autumn is, well, a little, ordinary kind of town… Thursday night, the night the Brits supposedly head off to the pubs – nothing, nobody, zilch.

After a day’s solid (virtual) meetings and website designing I headed off down to the village to check the local gossip. Not a British soul in sight!  Thankfully I’m comfortable enough at the local pizza bar to sit and have a billy-no-mates night. I could not believe it – not a single British soul – worse, no-one that looked like they might speak English either – which is a bit of a problem when your Spanish skills amount to "2 beers please" and "sorry I don’t speak any Spanish". Thank heavens for Facebook and text messages.

Still, a nice warm fire courtesy of our new wood supplier makes all the difference. I have to pick Maureen up from the Airport sometime Saturday and the car rental company were kind enough to desperately need the car back to sell it (times must be tough) so they’re paying for the trip (not insignificant – a full tank there and back to Murcia airport – though why they call it that when it’s miles away from Murcia I don’t know). Meanwhile it looks like we’re now the owners of a Spanish car so hopefully being ripped off by car rental agencies will soon become a thing of the past.

I’m counting on tomorrow being a much quieter day and maybe tonight’s rain shower (the one the  useless forecasters said had no chance of happening) will clear the air. 19c and sunny – apparently…

After a lazy Wednesday afternoon in the local pool, we took a trip to the Skips on Thursday (the girl in the photo is a dummy someone conveniently strapped to the entrance) to get rid of our now defunct and replaced dishwasher, then we headed off down to Granada to get some supplies and pick up my sister-in-law Elizabeth from the airport, stopping on the way at a Chinese outlet to pick up a solar car (about an inch square, marvellous – but I’ve not found a flat surface yet to test it out).

On the way back up from Granada we stopped at set of roadside stalls to pick up some pottery (I have to take pictures next week to show you – more items of pottery than you’d believe) followed by a quiet night in.

With Elizabeth staying with us I spent the morning struggling with work stuff and dreaming about nuking tech support after which we spent much of Friday up at lake Negratin, followed by a quiet pizza at the pizza cave restaurant just outside of Huescar. The reason the photos look “wet” is that the staff had just been spraying everything to get rid of the dust of the day, it’s very dry here.

As you can see in the photo above, the lake wasn’t exactly “crowded” (Maureen and Elizabeth on the LEFT, our chairs on the RIGHT) and at around 33 degrees it was an ideal say for a swim.  When we were done we went off to the Chinese store in BAZA and bought a 73” inflatable boat + electric inflation gadget and I’m quite looking forward to sinking that in the next few days. Photos will follow. We inflated it last night to test it out and it looks solid – of course that’s started Maureen off looking on EBay for a proper inflatable with electric motor – because we’d both dearly love to go exploring around the far end of the lake and much of it is not accessible by road.

Don’t forget to click the images if you want to see much larger originals. Today we went to Velez Rubio and Velez Blanco –(pronounce that “VELETH”) there’s a market on and of course we had to take Elizabeth to go looking at ruins! Finished the trip with a visit to Orce pool (no boat as the car power supply doesn’t have enough power to run the pump) and we’re back now to cool off and I’m going to get some work done.