Monday 2 January 2012
Windy weather greeted us at our condo by the sea. Dian took a walk and saw lots of wind surfers. She folded her hands behind her back and bent slightly forward in a manner not unlike Sherlock Holmes, trying to solve a case. This posture, she recognized, was her normal stance for beach combing, and came as naturally as the white-crested waves to the shore (been reading Robert Burns).
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| View from Frances' place |
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| Charles, Frances and Nicole walking around Frances' place |
Although Frances' place was only 10 minutes up the road from Ajfan's condo, we managed to get lost but finally appeared at her door around 3PM. She gave us a tour of her neighborhood canals and the marina before walking us over to the giant Costco-like Alcampo to return a piece of electronics, where we ended up buying a cell phone to replace the one we had lost (or had pick pocketed) on the ferry from Greece to Italy a couple of months earlier.
We'd been looking to do this for all that time but were stymied by rules that made it impossible to add minutes onto a prepaid phone without being a resident of that country. This was our opportunity: Scottish Frances was a 30-year resident of Valencia and a
professora de Espanol, and if she couldn't get across the concept that we needed to be able to add money/minutes onto the phone by credit card, online, anywhere, no one could. The
hombre at the Vodaphone booth absolutely assured us that could be done, signed us up with the cheapest phone (19 Euros/25 bucks) plus 5 Euros of airtime, and we left, all smiles except for a little doubt of yeah, we've heard that before.
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| Just a fraction of the bounty of dark chocolate in Frances' collection |
Back at the beach condo, Frances fixed us a lovely salad with cheese and meat augmented by some bread we had bought, which we ate right after Charles put her new lamp together, mostly correctly. We watched some of Michael Palin's travelog of Valencia on the net, then drove home.
We'd been looking to do this for all that time but were stymied by rules that made it impossible to add minutes onto a prepaid phone without being a resident of that country. This was our opportunity: Scottish Frances was a 30-year resident of Valencia and a professora de Espanol, and if she couldn't get across the concept that we needed to be able to add money/minutes onto the phone by credit card, online, anywhere, no one could. The hombre at the Vodaphone booth absolutely assured us that could be done, signed us up with the cheapest phone (19 Euros/25 bucks) plus 5 Euros of airtime, and we left, all smiles except for a little doubt of yeah, we've heard that before.
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