Thursday 23 January 2014

Midweek in Monda

After the Wednesday Matins, Eucharist and coffee morning, Peter took Clare and I to the newly purchased Chaplaincy house to look around. If all goes according to plan, I`ll be moving in there at the end of February. It´s a generous sized family home with good views of the sierra de Mijas on the side of the house where the study will be. I took lots of photos and later made them into a Powerpoint show so that others interested can see what it´s like before the housewarming, whenever that will be.

Thursday we drove up to Coin for their fortnightly Eucharist, and over coffee afterwards we started planning a Shrove Tuesday Quiet Day to accompany the Lenten day of prayer scheduled to take place at Caroline´s house. Then Clare and I drove on to Monda to look around and have lunch. I had hoped to find the castillo hotel restuarant open, at the end of the very steep climb up to it, but the place was closed for renovation. It was most gratifying while we were up there to see a man riding a mule returning for lunch after a morning with his pruning shears in one of the orchards on the rugged hillside. There are places a quad bike or a four by four still can´t go nearly as well as a four footed friend.

We lunched on beer and tapas, incredibly cheaply al fresco, at a bar in the square overlooking a fountain and public wash house several hundred years old in its present form. The Fuente de la Jaula is one of four locally, whose origins and water engineering date back to the time of the Moors, as does the castillo. We couldn´t linger long, as I was due in Fuengirola´s Rosario parish church for another Week of Prayer for Christian Unity Service at five. To my delight there were a hundred people present for a service once more in English and in Spanish. I accepted the challenge to read some of the prayers of intercession in Spanish, since John the Scottish Presbyterian locum pastor, could only read in his contribution in English. It was a first for me, and I was surprised at bringing it off without embarrassing myself. Shades of ecumenism in Italian during my stay in Taormina last year but one!

After the service we dined out at la Vieja Escuela restaurant, where I´d eaten with Bill the day of my arrival. With a gentle bottle of rioja to accompany our fish dishes, it was another pleasant experience to conclude a satisfying day.

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