Spa Day

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Neither Ingo nor I had slept too well the night before, due to some stomach issues, so we were a tired crew heading into breakfast. However, I was quite excited because it was my day to get a haircut, manicure and pedicure! Breakfast consisted of the usual stuff (although I chose blander fare), and Torsten was excited to see both a lizard and a bird. He came down on the side of the predator, telling the bird where the lizard had gone (as it had, of course, vanished when it saw the bird). I told him that the bird wanted to eat the lizard, and he said, “No! Bird doesn’t like lizard.” I asked him what the bird liked, and he said, after some thought, “Scrambled eggs and bacon”!. Afterwards, I went off to the spa while Ingo and Torsten went to the beach and Glenn went to the Core Zone.

I had to wait for half an hour at the spa before finally being ushered into the salon area, as there was a bride getting ready for her wedding. My esthetician was Katrimia, and she didn’t speak much English, but she understood enough to know what I wanted done. She seemed rather shocked that I wanted my hair cut short, but complied. It took quite a long time, because I have a lot of hair, and she took a lot of pains over drying and styling it (with an incredibly hot blow dryer – I’m surprised my head didn’t burn!). The end result was great. Another esthetician came in while my hair was being cut, stopped in horror, and said “Por qué?”(“Why?”), and held up a lock of my hair against her head. Turns out she doesn’t have much hair, and couldn’t understand why I would chop it off.

After the haircut, I waited around some more, and then was taken to the manicure and pedicure area. Katrimia had thought that all I was getting was a haircut, and was surprised when the front desk told her I was also getting a “manicuro y pedicuro”. So she came in, and started to give me a pedicure. I had paid for a Café Café pedicure, which was supposed to be an exfoliating one, and it didn’t seem like she was giving me one, but heck, I don’t know anything about pedicures, and by that time, I was getting really impatient to be out of there. I’d forgotten how long this sort of thing takes, and I was really getting tired of the supposedly soothing music that they recycled over and over. Besides that, I had a bit of a headache from lack of sleep, and I don’t have a lot of patience for spa treatments at the best of times. At any rate, she was almost done my pedicure when someone came in, shot some rapid fire Spanish at her, and, upon hearing her reply, went away looking disturbed. Then she turned to me and asked, “Were you supposed to get a Café Café pedicure?”. When I said yes, she apologized, and said that she’d given me a normal manicure, and that I could have a Café Café manicure instead, and that they hadn’t told her (which I agree with, since I’d heard them say “pedicuro” – how was she to know it was a special one?).

After some confusion, I told them I didn’t care about the pedicure, and perhaps they could give me a Dreams manicure (with paraffin wax) instead. So that’s what she did. I felt a little bad, because it looked like everyone was blaming her (a woman came in, they had a conversation, and she said sneeringly to me, “You like her?”, to which I replied, “Yes”), and I thought it was just a simple misunderstanding with blame on both sides.

I finally got out of there, about an hour after I thought I would, and walked over to the World Café to meet the others for lunch. Torsten came flying out to meet me and give me a hug, with a big grin on his face, which was lovely. Ingo told me that they had spent the morning at the Kids’ Club, after stopping to visit the flamingoes and look at a turtle in the pool. Apparently, upon reaching the beach, Torsten became very excited and said, “I found it! Yay for me! Yay for Torsten!”. They also saw numerous lizards, so it was a good wildlife day.

We ate, and then because it was so late, we left Glenn to his own devices and went back to the room to get Torsten to take a nap. It turned out that all of us were pretty sleepy, so we all settled down for a nap, and only woke up when it was almost time to meet Glenn for dinner. We had agreed on the World Café for dinner, since we wanted to try it out, and after eating there, determined that we would take all our meals there in future – as it’s a buffet, it has a large selection, and the quality of the food was just as good as the restaurants. Apart from that, it was the only place where you could consistently get fruits and vegetables with your meal.

There were a bunch of vendors set up in the little plaza by the main building, so we wandered around them, experiencing some moderate pressure to buy, and collecting some freebies in the form of necklaces. We bought a few small souvenirs, and then took Torsten back to the room so that he could have a bath and hairwash. As there is no bathtub in the room, Ingo bathed him in the Jacuzzi. All went well until it came time to rinse off the shampoo – I brought normal kids’ shampoo, not the baby shampoo, and some got into his eyes because he wouldn’t listen to Ingo. I had to take him in through the window and finish rinsing him off in the shower. However, he was quickly soothed by watching Spanish-dubbed cartoons, and we all went to bed, sleeping like logs.