Bits and Pieces

These are just miscellaneous impressions that I gathered and did not fit in any prior post.

One Wednesday night, before I jumped the flames to get cleansed at the San Juan Fiesta, Leea and I went to a Thai/Chinese restaurant. We had some Spring rolls with sweet chili sauce that were crispy on the outside with succulent vegetables on the inside. Then Leea had curried tofu and vegetable, while I, the barbarian, had chicken stir fry with lemon grass. The chicken pieces were so tender and juicy they were like piccata with a slight taste of the lemongrass, slightly lemony but not lip puckering or overwhelming.

The following day after being cleansed and/or welcoming summer I slept until nine. I awoke to a brilliantly hot day, did laundry, and barely got it hung on the line before it dried. I had some yogurt and did my morning meditation book. Leea asked what the plans were for the day and I said, “I don’t know.” I was shocked. Maybe there is something to this cleansing thing.

Anyway we walked to town on a hunt for a mata mosca (fly swatter). We went to the ferreteria, but they didn’t have one. So we went and had lunch, peach juice and tortilla Espanola for me and coke and bocadilla de tortilla for Leea.

After lunch we went to what can only be described as a junk store, think Big Lots only tiny, a store with a little bit of everything, a Spanish version of a five and ten cent store. Anyway, they had a mata mosca. Then it was off to the Farmacia where Leea got some allergy medicine and attempted to weigh herself but the scale didn’t want to cooperate. We decided it was not worth the trouble and maybe this was the universe telling us we didn’t really want to know. So we went to the internet café.

On the way home we stopped at the panaderia and got some pan (bread loaves – think bread in the shape of French bread, only it is Spanish bread.) Next stop was the heladeria where we got two scoops of helado (ice cream.) My choice was chocolate and nata de nueces de carmalizada which seemed to be saying ice cream with chunks of caramel. They threw the word California into the English translation but it did not appear in the Spanish. Leea had vainilla y nata de nueces de carmalizada.

Then it was siesta time and I barely made it home before the siesta hit. It has been a long, hard day, but we need to soldier on because we had to go to town for dinner again that night and a meeting and probably some café con leche. Normally, Wednesday is our night to eat out, because the meeting on Wednesday is at 8 pm and we stop and eat after the meeting. This week we are forced to eat out twice, because of the Fiesta de San Juan. We all have to make sacrifices for our beliefs.

Out the window of our apartmento, across the road is a large stone wall. It is probably sixteen to twenty feet high and curves around the corner of the road. It is a retaining wall for a large house on the hill. It is made up of stones of various sizes, shapes and colors. There are tans, browns and grays of various hues and tones all set together to form a flat surface. The wall is a gorgeous work of art. There are two antique looking lamp posts on the road in front of it. The lamp posts consist of a metal pole set in a square base that tapers toward the top. Atop the pole is an octagonal lamp with the lower four sections made of frosted glass being two thirds the height of the lamp and the top four sections made of metal completing the final one third of the lamp. At night when the lights are on and cars drive by I imagine scenes from every old spy or action movie I’ve ever seen that is set in Europe with a car whizzing along a hilly road toward danger. It is an amazing thing, the mind.

The boxes for depositing mail at the Correo (post office) in Fuengirola are four lion’s heads with mouths wide open, ready to eat you, on the outside of the Correo. Object is to place the mail in the lion’s mouth. One mouth is for local, one is for the Málaga province, one is for Spain, and the last one is for extranjero (foreign.) So we are going to drop our post cards in the lion’s mouth before we leave town because we don’t know if all Correos have this feature and we don’t want to miss the opportunity of feeding the lion.

Fuengirola is (pronounced Fuen as in buen in bueno, her, roll, a.) When John and I were first here and we were taking the bus from our camp site to town and had to say tell the bus driver where we were going, I could not, for the life of me say Fuengirola. Now it just rolls off my tongue. The Brits pronounce it Fue-in-grrr-roll-a. But then they say Hi-un-dye when speaking of the auto Hyundai. Leea and I have had a few conversations about the derivation of British and Amenrican words and pronunciation.