Monday, November 22/2010

We've eight cats who have attached themselves to the hotel. They're hungry and slim but definitely not starving. Always on the lookout, and some of the guests feed them, but they also play with each other and lounge in the sun.

Walk down to the port just south of us, ignoring the repeated invitations to stop at the outside cafés. Not easy to read the posted menus without raising expectations unduly, but we do note that the price of a beer in the café outside Claridge's is 1.8TD ($1.30CAD, 80p). It's probably well short of a pint though.

There are several large working ships plus a couple of pirate ship style boats for tours of the harbour. A number of men are fishing, most with long black poles but one, a man sitting in his sock feet on the harbour edge, is using line and hook only.

Find the Magasin Général a block off the corniche. It is, as the name suggests, a general store, selling everything from automatic washing machines and china to basic groceries, including rather unperky produce. Water here is 250 to 350 millemes for 1.5 litres, making it approximaately 1/13 the price of bottled water at the hotel. But then it's pretty inexpensive staying here on half board. Guess they have to make the money somewhere. Walk back from the MG to our hotel along the beach. There's miles of fine sand. Some sunbathers, but not overcrowded.

At home we check the temperature on the balcony. Twenty degrees iin the shade but 50 in the sun! That's 122 Fahrenheit, though no one younger than we are still remembers that. We sit on the balcony and look past the einosaur trunks and luxuriant fronds of the palm trees to the deep blue streaked with aqua of the Mediterranean. Interesting: the very word "Mediterranean" sounds so romantic in a way that the German "Mittelsee" doesn't, but the meaning is the same - it's simply the sea in the middle of land.