Fuengirola Spain

So I decided to give you all a little tour of my ciudad here in Spain. Down at the Mediterranean, there are several pieces of sand art that are really quite good. There is usually an "artist" there working on some minor part, but I'm pretty sure it's not the original artist as after a while parts of the faces start to fall off, and they'll just be fixing the table or whatever. I think this might just be the original though - I saw him later actually redoing the people who had started disintegrating. I guess he needs someone to collect all the donations though. Our missionaries aren't allowed at the beach (even the one who had a doctor's note saying it would be good for some medical condition or another) because Spaniards are, shall we say, quite cavalier about whether certain pieces of clothing are completely necessary. I try to keep to the cooler times of the day :)

The Med in a calm mood

The Med in an unusually wild mood

The last few days it has been pretty wild down there (unusually so - lots of people were taking pictures) with the water coming all the way up to the wall in some places. There were even people surfing the waves were so good!


Two days after I got here Fuen celebrated International Day, and there were all kinds of food booths representing different countries (you could have a Kangaroo burger from Australia, and it seems many countries like to cook slabs of meat propped up around a fire).




There was a parade down the center of all the booths with performers from 10 or so different countries, incl. Spain (of coarse), some African countries, England, Ireland, Japan, and I'm not sure who else. It was pretty cool! :)






They also had booths you could buy stuff from the various countries and I got a necklace and a carving of Mary, Joseph, and Christ from Israel.

There was also a carnival that had a lot of familiar looking rides, but I thought this one was very cool. They locked the kids in these big hamster balls and let them run around in a pool. It looked like a lot of fun!



The ward also had an activity to celebrate the day, and it was done as only Spain would do, with much style and a very easy going attitude. There were desserts representing a lot of different countries, including Iran (from a Sister who was in a very unhappy arranged marriage and fled Iran, but was not allowed to take her 10 yr old daughter, and in fact can't even contact her at all (the husbands have ALL the rights in Iran) and was just baptised a couple months ago).

The chapel/cultural hall combined - on the left is our Branch
President and his wife from Great Britain.

There was also England (of coarse! And I got to finally try Trifle), the US (brownies and PBJ samples), the Philippines, and I can't remember where-all else. We had a lot of time to druel over them though, because the dinner (Mediodia) was supposed to start at 2pm, but the paella (a traditional Spanish rice dish with lots of curry and various meats which I thought meant that there was seafood paella, beef paella, etc. - but it had seafood AND chicken AND beef) didn't come until 3:30 (the Spanish are even more easy-going about time than US LDS folks are!) The desserts were worth waiting for though - very yummy!

Well, this page has run out of space (and I have run out of time), so I guess I'll have to continue another day. A teaser of future blogs: