25th November 2016. Ontinyent, Spain.

We had another lazy start today and the view across the valley had changed again since yesterday with clouds hanging over the mountains.

When we got upstairs Beki had been very busy since she came back from the school run and had made rice pudding for breakfast and homemade soup and cheesy bread slices ready to put in the oven for lunch all of which were gorgeous, I wonder if I can do the bread slices without an oven.

We had a nice relaxing day sitting around chatting.

In the evening we went out to a restaurant in town which was lovely.  We were the first people to arrive which was probably just as well, it made it a bit easier for the waitress with us not knowing what anything was.  We had tapas, one of the dishes was tiny bits of potato and carrot in mayonnaise, it wasn’t at all what we were expecting but it was very nice.  The meal was lovely and very filling but if we thought ordering the food was confusing ordering coffee took confusion to a whole new level.  The poor waitress, Ronnie and Beki ordered coffee with milk, no problem but we wanted an Americano instead of an espresso.  Sometimes that’s all we have to ask for but this restaurant was an untouristy family run restaurant and no one knew what the hell we were talking about so we tried miming coffee with hot water in a big cup (turns out I’m no Marcel Marceau!) the waitress looked even more confused so I tried asking for two espressos in a cup with hot water.  It looked like I’d said the correct thing for a brief moment until she came back with two espresso cups with a shot of coffee in each one.  We pointed to Beki and Ronnie’s coffee cups to show we needed big cups and I said I’d pour the hot water into the coffee.  She disappeared with the cups and a man came back with two larger cups with double espressos in and a beer glass full of hot water.  Exactly what we wanted, phew!  We’re frantically trying to learn how to ask for that in Spanish now, perhaps it might be a good idea to write it down too.

We had a great evening, I’d thoroughly enjoyed talking to Matt, he’s a very clever and interesting boy.  We decided to call it a night when we got home, we’d all had too many very late nights.