A bit of rebellion!

As I predicted, there was a small rebellion at the pool yesterday. When I went down there were few sun loungers left unoccupied. And yet, once agin the numbers did not match up with the people in the pool. I managed to find one anyway and just got on with my day. Some time later a couple of women arrived with a small girl. Clearly rather disappointed, they put their stuff on the hard plastic chairs and looked around. Then they spoke to the people next to a couple of sun loungers with neatly arranged towels, bags and newspapers. And then they removed the offending stuff, carefully placed it on tables and occupied the sun loungers.

A coup d’état!

Many people around the pool applauded their actions - well, they said they had done the right thing!

When Phil goes down to play chess in the afternoon he takes with him a cushion from our room. The seats in the playing area are rather too low to give a good overview of the board apparently. The other day he realised after the game that he did not have the cushion any longer and went back to the playing room to look for it. No sign! He thought back over the day and remembered having it with him in the cafeteria before the game. So we went and enquired. Yes, they had found a cushion and had placed it on one of the sofas. We retrieved it and returned it to the room.

Something similar happened two years ago and we lost one altogether. I had to explain at reception when I paid our bill as they were mystified by the lack of a cushion in our room. I thought for a while we were going to be charged for it.

This time Phil says forgetting the cushion in the cafeteria was my fault. I had gone down ahead of him, ordered coffee, filled his flask for mid-game coffee and sat down at a table. Where there was not room to out his stuff down, resulting in the cushion being put on a chair and forgotten. My fault!!! Indeed?

Lunch in this hotel is always a copious affair, a starter followed by two courses and a dessert. We usually opt for two course, starter and one main course and then quibble over dessert. Lunch yesterday was mejillones en escabeche (mussels), tronco de verduras (a sort of spong cake affair with vegetables mixed in, a very curious and stodgy dish) and osso buco de ternera. Phil always rejects mussels and asked for an ensalada mixta. I love mussels so the first course was fine but I asked for an ensalada mixta after that. The vegetable sponge cake and the veal we both rejected. The waiters were a little concerned.

Then we discovered that ensalada mixta is a different beast in this hotel than anywhere else. Everywhere we go, we find ensalada mixta rather huge and often overfacing: lettuce, tomatoes, onions, olives, hard boiled eggs, a huge mound of tuna and sometime asparagus spears on the top. Here it was lettuce, tomato, onion, a token olive and a bit of carrot, chopped rather than grated. A modest affair, more of an ensalada simple! And a smaller portion!

Out and about, we came across a sportswear shop called Twinner and wondered at the appropriateness of the name, asking ourselves if there might be one somewhere called Tloser. (This is a North of England play on words!)

In the wider world, somebody posted a picture from the New Yorker magazine with this comment:-

 “Recently at the Holocaust Museum in Budapest, I saw photos of the piles of wedding rings taken from holocaust victims and wondered how we ever let the violation of human rights get so far. Then I came across this photo from The New Yorker of rosaries taken from people at the US border. May the US find its soul.”

Why do they confiscate rosaries? Is it some kind of White Anglo Saxon Protestant thing? You know the kind of thing I mean, a reaction against the Roman Catholic church with all its saints and pageantry. High Anglican gets close but low church and Methodism finds the clicking of the beads a little suspect.

But surely the land of the free should be able to put up with a few rosary beads. Confiscating the rosaries must be another staement of power!!