Not a very exciting day

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

When we woke up in the morning, it was pouring with rain. Fortunately, we are able to get from our building to the World Café by way of covered pathways, so it didn’t really affect us much – and we could see some blue sky in the distance, so it didn’t look as though the day would have to be spent inside. By the time we had finished breakfast, the sun was out (hopefully the sun was also shining on Glenn and his excursion!). A man with some parrots walked through the lobby, and one of the parrots pooped (Ingo says it’s my secret power, to make birds poop, since the flamingoes always do when I’m there), so he put them down on a wall while he cleaned it up. Torsten stopped to look at them, and had a lot of fun pointing out what they were doing. Suddenly, he said, “What’s he eating?” We had no idea – maybe a leaf? When the man came back, he hit the bird upside the head, and it spat out a rock. It was so funny, watching the man casually smack the bird’s head.

We then walked back to our room, changed into our bathing suits and went out. The sky was still a little overcast, but the sun made frequent appearances. Torsten, surprisingly, went down a small path to the big pool. There he stood, looking around, then crossed a bridge, walked around in a circle on the path, and re-crossed the bridge. Upon enquiry, it turned out that he was looking for the small wading pool, so we walked by the poolside till we got there. We were soon joined by Sunny and her parents, and the kids splashed around in the small pool all morning (joined intermittently by other small children), while the parents read and threw the odd comment at each other. Torsten occasionally wanted to go into the big pool, and Ingo took him in on a floating mat. The big pool was, however, quite cold, so they didn’t stay in there for too long. I went and got some popcorn for Torsten to munch on, and that was quite popular. On looking at the time, it was past noon, so we collected Torsten and went back to our room to get into dry things and have lunch.

By the time we got back to the room, Torsten was quite droopy. We managed to change him into dry things fairly quickly, and then Ingo toted him around for 5 minutes – and he was asleep. 12:30 is pretty early for his nap, but we thought it would be better for him to sleep than to be cranky at lunch. To tide us over, Ingo went to the World Café and got a pepperoni pizza for us to have as a snack in the room – it was remarkably good, albeit somewhat small. When Torsten woke up at around 2:30, we immediately went to the World Café to catch the last of the buffet before it closed at 3. Torsten was, of course, ravenous, and ate quite a lot – and made quite a mess.

After we got Torsten cleaned up, we went out to the Kids’ Club. There were two little girls there, playing inside the building, and a man and a woman sunbathing by the splash pool, talking loudly. I suspect, from the number of drinks around the area, that they may have been a bit drunk. We’d changed Torsten into swim diapers, but his bathing suit was still wet, so he ran around in his diaper. However, it was quite windy in the Kids’ Club and by the beach (there were very few people out), so we persuaded him to put his clothes back on and headed back up the path toward our room. On the way, we stopped at the little wading pool and splashed around a bit with Erin and some other kids. Unfortunately, there was a little French boy who kept screaming with delight (and Erin joined in as well) when one of the adults made the fountains splash up. Torsten wasn’t too pleased with the noise, so after a very short time, we dried him off and went back to the room. There we watched a bit of TV, and then strolled toward the main building to see whether the vendors had set up yet.

The vendors were pretty pushy, but very friendly. We ended up buying a pretty necklace from one guy who said he was giving us a discount to “open his luck” with other buyers. I told him that if his luck really opened, we wanted a commission, and he laughed. We saw Glenn on the path with another vendor, who threw an arm around his shoulder and gave him a friendly hug, and called him his “collega”, so we went to join him. Glenn really seems to have made a lot of friends with vendors and staff! Later, we found out that he had gotten free stuff out of some vendors by bringing them a pizza from the buffet.

After dinner, we went straight back to the room and had a family bath in the Jacuzzi (well, Torsten had a bath, while Ingo and I sat in it in bathing suits). Then we watched a bit of TV, and went to bed.