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Published: January 9th 2008
Happy New Year to all of you! I hope you had amazing parties and your livers are more or less back to normal. It was lovely to speak to those of you we managed to get through to at midnight! Can you remember speaking to us?
You´ll be glad to hear we managed to get boozed up too, although we calculate we were still probably in bed earlier than some of you, even given the time difference! (1am our time?) Our last meal of 2007, in the only restaurant we could find in Samara with more than one veggie option, consisted of giant pizza washed down with a selection of rum shots, culminating in a 21 year old that was particularly tasty. The beach at midnight was rammed and we almost got our eyebrows singed more than once as we were surrounded by kids setting off fireworks using the eyes-shut-fingers-crossed method. Haphazard but entertaining!
The last week has been characterised by the following things:
jumping waves
scrabble
chess (i still can´t beat Si - any of you any good at chess? if so please email me some tips!)
utter idleness
incidents involving keys
Unfortunately, keeping a spare
set of keys for hotel rooms doesn´t seem to be the norm over here. Talk about asking for trouble. Incident no 1 occurred when I shut the spare room door behind me (we spent the couple of nights round new year in an apartment with two bedrooms as accommodation in Samara was thin on the ground), having for some reason decided to store my stuff in there... Unfortunately the door was set to auto lock. After fetching the hotel owner who tried approximately 80 different keys in the lock, he was forced to conclude there was no way of getting to my stuff other than breaking the door down. We felt a bit guilty...
Incident number two then, didn´t make us feel any better - during a lovely New Years Day splash in the waves, Si dropped the keys to the whole apartment (front door, front balcony, back balcony) IN THE BLOODY PACIFIC OCEAN. Laughably enough we spent about half an hour trying to find them on the ocean floor before being forced to conclude the only answer was to go face the hotel management with our tails between our legs. Luckily they had a spare front door key,
but once again, no spare key to the back balcony, where unfortunately half our wardrobe was hanging out to dry...anyway, all was well(ish) after the hotel lady and Si managed to pop the lock of the door out using Si´s swiss army knife. She seemed to find it all very amusing and we managed to avoid the hotel owner for the rest of our stay...we left them some money towards the lock and slunk out very quietly in the morning! We´re hoping this isn´t some kind of omen for the rest of the year!
We arrived in San Jose yesterday afternoon and after some greasy mexican lunch (lush...) we headed off to the airport to meet Sarah and Aoife. It was amusing watching the flight before theirs (from Dallas) disgorging a lot of obese people in cowboy hats, and their flight (from Miami). Our favourite passenger from which was a guy in slacks, a salmon pink t-shirt and a navy sports jacket - as Si said, it looked like his flight had been delayed since 1987. Sarah and Aoife appeared just behind him looking very sprightly indeed for people who had been up for 25 hours!
Plans for
the next two weeks involve spotting as many turtles and monkeys as possible, lazing around on beaches, lazing around in other locations (hopefully in hammocks), and drinking many beers and banana milkshakes. Updates to follow soon!
Hoping that your years have all got off to spiffing starts.
Let us know how you all are.
Love, Nat xxx
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