Wednesday 28 October - Mojacar

Being the last full day we will have here without Diego working around the house, today was set aside for sunbathing. Unfortunately we woke to a solid grey blanket of clouds, so it didn’t look good. We found our way up to the village through the back streets this time. The southern end of the town must be relatively old, as the streets are steep, winding and narrow. Today was market day again, and we needed some fruit and veges, not to mention a top-up of nuts. Got these sorted OK.

The nut sellers are a good tag team. They consist of a father and son. The father professes to have no English at all, and when people start pointing at one of the dozens of varieties of nuts on offer, he immediately starts filling a bag up for them, whether they want to or not. The son does much the same, offering taster nuts and then filling a bag. And of course all done with great cheer.

Stopped for a while on the way back out of the town in a shop selling a whole lot of Indonesian furniture and gifts. We really do like the style – dark solid timber, unfussy detailing, some decoration, and a casualness about it. If we can’t rebuild in Southern Europe, we would still like to do some building or rebuilding back home in NZ. We haven’t exhausted our house-building – we so enjoyed building Walters Bluff that we’d like to have another round. The biggest issue would be finding a suitable section with all the advantages of our current one. We are not at all convinced it is possible. For our next house, we’d like to do a straw-bale house, as it offers good insulation, lovely deep reveals, plastered walls and the ability for us to do a fair part of the work ourselves. Perhaps we should have gone to Morocco with Sandy and Lynette, as the Moroccan style and decoration really appeals too.

As we left the pueblo, the sun finally broke through, and by the time we had worked our way through the maze of streets and home, there was barely a cloud in the sky. And so to a profitable afternoon’s sunbathing. Given it is now the equivalent of the end of April, there isn’t a lot of heat left in the sun, and our tans, while clearly ahead of anything we’d achieve in NZ in September/October, are not as deep as we might have hoped.

Had a bit more fun in the evening trying to find a suitable film to watch. The best ones were either empty boxes, or turned out not to have English language dialog or subtitles. We enjoyed Malena last night, and The Door in the Floor tonight, also something called The Spanish Prisoner which was an good story spoilt by wooden acting and dialog.