Rainy day and Sunday

Sunday, March 22, 2009

We woke up to a drenching cloudburst, and it looked like we were in for a rain day. There was a brief break in the rain as we walked to breakfast, but not 5 minutes after we got into the building, it began to pour again. Ingo turned to me and said, “So, no patio today then?” While we were waiting for Glenn, we met a nice English couple with a small girl about Torsten’s age (it later transpired that their names were Marty and Joe, and their daughter was named Erin). Torsten and Erin seemed to take to each other right away, but we went our separate ways, as they had already eaten breakfast.

Breakfast was the usual fare, only distinguished by the amount that Torsten ate – he was apparently quite hungry – and the fact that Glenn ate too quickly and spat up. It was still raining after breakfast, so we went into the shop and bought Torsten a pair of imitation Crocs, as he had hurt his toe the first day of the trip, and we thought that his present sandals might be preventing the sore from healing as quickly as it should. It was still raining after we were done, so we went back to our room.

Ingo decided that it was a good day to do some laundry, so he collected some things to wash and went out to the Jacuzzi with some detergent. Torsten followed, and soon the two of them were happily doing laundry in the Jacuzzi. After they’d finished, we dried Torsten off and changed him into some dry clothes, and then went to mass, which was being held at noon in one of the conference rooms.

Mass was interesting, as it was conducted wholly in Spanish. Nobody there really understood what was being said, so responses were muttered until we came to the portions of the mass that people knew, in which case the English responses were nice and strong. The music was also interesting – I’d expected the usual sort of hymns, but of course our music is strongly influenced by English, French and German composers, so what we actually heard were hymns with a strong Spanish and Latin American influence sung by one Spanish girl.

After mass, we met Glenn for lunch. Torsten had fallen asleep halfway through mass, and slept for about an hour, which meant that he woke up just as we were finishing lunch. Luckily, as it’s a buffet restaurant, we were able to fetch some food for Torsten, and he ate a bit, albeit somewhat groggily. We thought that he might fall asleep again after lunch, so we went back to our room, but he stayed awake, and eventually demanded to go to the “little sandbox”. I didn’t think I needed to change into bathing gear, so I stayed in my dress, but Ingo and Torsten changed, and we set out.

We never actually made it to the Kids’ Club, as we passed a small wading pool along the way, and Torsten saw some children, including Erin, playing in it. We went over and joined them – the adults sat around the pool in deck chairs chatting, while the kids played. Marty and Joe were from Cambridge, so we chatted about England for a while, and it also turns out that Marty is pregnant, so there were plenty of things to talk about. There were a couple of incidents – Torsten banged his mouth on a deck chair and had to be comforted, and he also ran over one little girl with a boogie board and then got upset when told to apologize. It was quite apparent that he was getting tired (having only slept for about an hour earlier), so after a little bit more playtime, we said our goodbyes and trundled back to our room to try to get him to nap a little more before dinner. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, as he simply noodled around, sang little songs, and generally didn’t nap, so we let him get up and have some snacks while we waited to go for dinner.

At dinner, Torsten was generally cranky, and didn’t want to eat very much, but the denouement came when we tried to give him his malaria pills. He yelled and wouldn’t take them, and when we got them into his mouth, he spat them out. Finally, we managed to get them into him, amid shocked looks from nearby tables. After that, he calmed down and cuddled into us, and we soon left the restaurant to go back to our room. We didn’t want to put him to bed too early though, and further disrupt his routine, so we watched some TV and went to bed at the normal time.