We have accustomed ourselves to Spanish time. Most days, we’ve eaten our main meal at our apartment mid afternoon, resting and reading late afternoon and then strolling out with the locals for tapas around 9.00pm.

As I’ve mentioned before, we are staying about 800m walk from the New Bridge. Like just about everyone else in this town, we have used the main pedestrian street, Carrera de Espinel, to get us to some of the key sites in Ronda. It is such a busy street, except of course from about 2pm-5.30pm.

Many of Ronda’s streets are lined with mandarin trees. The fruit is ripe but it looks a bit spotty. The soil the trees grow in is totally covered in concrete, so they probably are doing pretty well. They look very cute. Oh……and so does Mick!

We are directly across the road from an underground carpark that has about six restaurants on top. But during the day it looks like this.

Empty.

But, at around 8.30pm each night, the workers start to set up for the evening. We have watched with interest as they have scrubbed each table and chair every night before they open. Unsure how dirty they could be, but they certainly impressed me with their cleanliness.

And, by 9.00pm the tables are full of locals, and the pathway is filled with families – babies in prams and toddlers running around, groups of early women sitting on seats and chatting, and elderly men with their walkers or sticks strolling past and catching up with their friends. There is a lot of cheek kissing and chatter between the groups. We have loved being apart of this. The locals love getting together in the evenings and these restaurants sell great food at cheap prices. The tapas plates cost between €1-1.50 per plate and the beers are €1.

We have of course tried quite a few different tapas plates, but we kept to the same restaurant where we even got to know our waiter, Eduardo.

I thought I’d share some of them with you.

boquerones fritos (fried anchovies) and calamaritos (deep fried calamari)

pinchos de gambas (skewered prawns) and chipirones plancha (grilled cuttlefish).

We had to try the speciality of the house called Nido Bandolero (Bandit’s Nest)

This was a deep fried phyllo pastry parcel that contained a pork meatball, served with straw chips and a quail eggs. For €1.50 it was brilliant.

We never paid more than €10 for our evening drinks and tapas, and that included a good tip.

We would then stroll across to our local bar and finish the evening with a cold aniseed drink – Anis Seco.

We have thoroughly enjoyed our week in Ronda. We leave today by train to Granada. Mick is really excited about this next stop and I hope the three days I have booked will be enough. For the first time this trip, I am a little worried about our accommodation plans as our AIRBNB host’s English is about as good as my Spanish. See if you can work out what this message means…..

Hello,Jane
Jasminea told me that me today comfirmed
  if he can be her boyfriend for 17 hours in the apartment door
I comfirme when I sent him a message and I communicate
sorry,Sorry,sorry!!!

Oh boy! Mick is worried that this sounds a bit Demi-Moore-like in “Indecent Proposal”.