More about our apartment and beach

Rita and I shared a nice 3-bedroom apartment on the 3rd floor of an apartment building, one of several buildings, near the shore in Sopalana. The kitchen was so small that we used the tiny back porch for storing soda and milk. We bought our milk in quart cartons, and it didn’t need to be refrigerated. We had a maid who did dishes but very little else that we could see. The apartment complex had tennis courts, a pool and a snack bar. We were supposed to have access to the garage, but nobody had a key to open it. Our apartment had a washing machine; Spanish and Belgium washers work alike - they do a little bit of work, then rest awhile. I got Chris Tichner to buy us a dryer and Rita paid an Ercosa worker to run the wire and conduit for it, up the kitchen wall, across the ceiling and out to the porch, where we set the dryer. Concorde was subletting the apartment from a Spanish couple; I met them once when they came over because the electricity kept going off (Rita was in the States at that time). I was concerned they would be upset about the conduit, but they admired the job, so we got the same guy to fix the bathroom wiring, which fixed the electrical problem we were having. 

On one side of the apartments was a good public beach, always popular. Looking down from outside of our apartment, we could see all along the shoreline.

This beach was always beautiful.

Everyone littered all over it, but it was cleaned up every night. It was not a clothing-optional beach, but guys would come onto the beach in their street clothes, strip off, and put on their swim trunks. In high summer the traffic on the road to the beach, which was also the road to our apartment, was so awful that sometimes the police would route traffic away. When I wanted to drive through to our apartment, I had to convince the police that I lived there so they would let me through; my Spanish wasn’t very good, but my ability to find another way to our apartment was worse, so I made it work. 

There were 2 roads between Sopalana to Asua, where my job was. One went through town, through a couple of big roundabouts and past Eroski. The shorter way was the mountain road. This was a rough two-land road, very curvy, no road visibility, no shoulder, almost nothing to keep a car from going off the road on the cliff side, and only two places where passing is even remotely possible. According to American standards this would be a road of death, but here motorists and bicyclists used it regularly, and often at the same time. And in the early morning, when a heavy mist settled over the forest in the valley, the view was fantastic. But as much as I wanted to take a picture of that beauty, even I knew I couldn't take the risk of taking a picture while driving on that road.

From the hill above our beach, we could look back at the hill where our apartment building sat. At the foot of the hill is where the coast started getting rocky

On the other side of the apartments was a small rocky cove. It was rough and rocky and it didn't occur to me that it might be used as a beach. 

But Randy discovered it was. And it was not clothing-optional either; it was a full-on nude beach. 

When Randy arrived in Spain at the end of May, he replaced our housekeeper for awhile. He was a much better housekeeper and made some improvements, too. He moved the kitchen table to the covered patio outside the living room, and we would have tea out there. But he didn’t like the pay scale; the company would pay the maid for doing almost nothing, but wouldn't pay him anything.  

One Friday night we had guests over for dinner: Tapia and Anna, Mercedes, Santi, Edwardo, Tony, and Inyaki. We had bought a small BBQ grill at Eroski and set it up on the patio with the awning down. Tapia and Randy grilled chuletas (little lamb chops) with no sauce, just a little seasoning. We also served baked potatoes, crackers with peanut butter, and sliced melon. The food was very good, but Rita had to show our guests how to eat baked potatoes, and they thought the chuletas were too spicy! We had dinner in the living room, then went out on the patio to drink wine and tell jokes. Rita kept busy translating the jokes for Randy and me, since everyone else spoke Spanish. 

We finished all the wine we had bought, then started pulling out bottles that had been left in the apartment by previous tenants. About 4 o’clock in the morning we ran out of wine and Randy and I were getting tired. So we invented a new joke: “These people must want to leave, let’s go to bed!”. We turned in for a couple hours of sleep, while Rita and the rest of the gang went out to find an open bar.