Our Spanish legal eagle is based in Moraira, a coastal town, one that’s a bit of a Brit stronghold, not too far from us here in Jalón. We have an appointment with them at 9:15 AM on Monday. Since we have an address but no directions, we decided to try to find their offices today so that we’d know where we were going early-ish on Monday. We took our rather scruffy looking piece of Italian automotive crap to the large, free car park in Moraira and abandoned ship.
A quick gander at the legal eagle’s address on the good old Internet had produced a marker on the map. However, there was no sign of the named plaça [Valenciana = place/square] that was named as the address. We wandered out of the car park, which should have been very close to the marker, to begin our search. Opposite the car park, the first thing I spotted was an abogado office; a solicitor/lawyer. My first thought was, great, that didn’t take long”, swiftly followed by, “bother, that’s the wrong name – not ours”. We wandered on looking for other lawyers. As we did so, Friend Liz referred to looking for an albóndiga. Hmm, OK, similar word, I suppose. Unfortunately albóndiga is Spanish for meatball so my amused brain immediately fixated on searching for our meatball. Neither Spanish meatballs nor lawyers will ever be the same again. :))
I couldn’t believe just how many meatballs there are in Moraira; almost every other office was for one set of meatballs or another. There are dozens and dozens of them. I don’t know what the collective name for meatballs might be but a Moraira of meatballs would be quite appropriate. Regrettably, none of the meatballs we encountered during our initial search was our meatball. To add to the frustration, Paul and I not only failed to find our meatball but also managed to lose Liz and Francine into the bargain. After a text message or two, we were eventually reunited with Liz and Francine down near the harbour where we decided to take a break from searching, have a coffee and ask directions. Our waitress did not recognize our meatball’s address. Neither did the barman, though he tried very hard to help by searching on his smartphone. He came up with the same marker on a map as I had. A helpful fellow customer, overhearing, suggested that the offices we were looking for might be one of those above a particular supermarket. We thanked them all, finished our coffee and continued our search.
We found the supermarket but not our meatball. There were a couple of police cars parked nearby, outside a plaça in which a police station was signed. We went over to ask there in our desperation. [Fortunately, Paul has enough Spanish.] Walking into the square, Francine spotted its name and, yes, you guessed it, it was the very plaça that we wanted. There, a few doors up on the right hand side, was our Spanish meatball with very subdued signage inside the windows, signage that was barely visible from the outside.
The square had two names, one of which was “Spanish”, i.e. Castillian, and the other of which, the one we had noted, was Valencianan. Perhaps if we had been equipped with the Castillian name, one of our helpers might actually have known it. Who knows? Anyway, we’d finally found our 9:15 destination for Monday – sighs of relief all round.
[Hopefully, you are now gently humming a very old and very silly song about losing a meatball when somebody sneezed. :D]
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