Days 67-70 - Please Don't Rain On Our Parade

Sunday 14^th October and we had heard that the good weather was officially coming to an end soon, with heavy rain and thunderstorms forecast for the next few days. 

In the evening Thorsten dropped us down to Callosa, a small town 6km away from the finca so that we could see the parade which marks the end of the annual festivities of the Moors and Christians. 

So, after a trip to a nearby petrol station to buy a light snack consisting of a bag of madeleines and a couple of cans of pop, we settled down at the side of the road next to group of women dressed as pirates, and waited for the parade to begin.

There was a large group of kids hanging about in the middle of the road, and at first we thought they were just causing trouble and getting in the way of the procession but it turns out they were there for a reason:  The first thing to come down the road was a group of people with giant freaky plastic heads.  The children’s job was to run away from these people – not too difficult as they were advancing on them at a zombie-like rate of motion.   We’re not really sure what all this was meant to signify.

  

After this strange start to proceedings came row after row of people dressed in brightly coloured sparkly outfits, interspersed with floats full of children throwing confetti onto the heads of the spectators (or in some cases just dumping it straight onto the road).

This was all very well and good but it all got a bit samey after a while as the people weren’t actually doing anything to warrant the raucous applause they were receiving from the onlookers.

They were literally just walking past in a row, dressed in sparkly clothes.  Our favourite parts were when the horses arrived, doing a little dance as they passed by, and in particular this guy who's sole job was dragging along a wheelie bin and scooping up the horse poo.  Thorsten informed us that a different man fulfils this role every year and it got us wondering whether someone volunteers for this position just to be part of the action, or if it was perhaps the forfeit given to the loser of some annual local game.  Anyway we decided to take a picture of him, as probably no-one else was paying him much attention.

After a while we got fed up and went for a beer in a nearby bar. At the table next to us was a crazy old drunk guy who when his food arrived, kept giving me really evil looks like he thought I was going to thieve it or something – I mean I wasn’t even hungry, we’d just had all those madeleines.  He then started talking to/at us and kindly informed us numerous times that we were in the Mediterranean, which was really helpful because prior to that we’d had no idea.

We quickly finished our drinks and headed into another bar situated in a small plaza, having first checked through the window for anymore geography-obsessed elderly people.

In this plaza is a church which looks a lot like a castle.  We have seen a few of these in Spain and it seems that wherever one of these church/castles is situated, it’s some kind of law that a smaller plastic replica must be built just next to it.

A few beers and some tapas (standard) later, we realised that there were a couple of minor flaws in our plan to casually ring the number for the taxi company that Thorsten had given us and arrange for a lift home:

Number  1:  For the last couple of days Nick had been trying to connect to Orange and put credit on his phone and had so far not been successful.

Number 2:  Neither of knew the Spanish for “Could we please have a taxi from A to B?”

Obviously Nick’s suggestion was to walk back, but first we thought we’d try going to a payphone and simply making ourselves understood by just repeating the road name we were on over and over again (obviously preceding this with “Hola” for politeness’s sake), and hoping that someone turned up.

Nick drew the metaphorical short straw and rang the number and after a couple of minutes of putting into action our repeating the road name over and over again plan, the man on the other end of the phone just started a conversation with someone else, leaving us none the wiser as to how we were getting home.

Contrary to what either of us would have bet on however, within a couple of minutes our taxi arrived and we were on our way home.  When we arrived we found a note on our door letting us know we could have the day off tomorrow, so after a brief celebration we went to sleep.

The next day we took it easy in the morning and in the afternoon went for a walk to Bolulla, the nearest “town” to the finca.  Not really much to write about here to be honest – with a population of only 400 people there was not a great deal going on.

On Tuesday after taking care of breakfast duties, Nick began the mammoth task of chipping away at part of the finca’s rock face , removing all the clumps of mud and weeds to reveal the grey stone underneath.

I tidied up around the grounds, sweeping leaves, doing laundry and generally being my usual helpful self.  Later that day the torrential rain we’d heard was on its way eventually arrived and didn’t stop for the next few hours, effectively ruining all my hard sweeping work and creating a load more laundry to do the next day.