Day Off, Day On

As Mondays are our only (week)day off, we decided to make the most of it and do some of the more touristy stuff with hopefully fewer tourists around. (Still havn't got round to Christ yet, waiting for perfect weather for perfect views...)

Instead, we went to the Botanical Gardens. We left stupidly early in the morning because Alison told us that there are often toucans in the trees first thing. Alas, none for us today :( However, the whole place was lovely. Admittedly, it was just trees - very few flowers - and usually that thing is incredibly boring, but it was just such a nice space. Wish I'd taken my book! We wondered around loadssss of different areas: atlantic rainforest, humming bird garden (where we saw zero humming birds, but did spot 2 later on!), insectiverous plant house, japanese garden etc. Took many photos (attempted using macro on my camera, but as I have no idea what I'm doing as regards such things, the photos are pretty mediocre!), including a couple of intrepid-jungle-explorer ones!! Haha, we wish!

After that we walked to the nearby lake (which is huuuuuge) and rented bikes! Momentous occassion as I havn't properly been on a bike for a good few years. Pretty wobbly to start with, especially as I kept playing with the ''I <3 my bike'' bell that I had!! Good stuff! Took us about 40 minutes to go around the whole thing, by which time our thighs were killing us and bums were numb, so we hit up a really nice juice bar we'd seen on the way there. It was absolutely LUSH! I had a proper PassionFruit juice - literally pureed and iced passion fruit, very yummy and very well deserved we felt!!

That afternoon we were absolutely knackered, so had another quite early night. Probably a good thing because we had work this morning and it was so so sooooo tiring! We all thought the kids were about twice as hyper as usual!! While Stevie taught them English (another random missmatched lesson she said!), Danni and I made photoframes with them. We'd gone yesterday and bought loads of coloured card for the task, and asked each kid which colour they wanted. Then, as soon as we got the paints out, they proceeded in painting the whole thing a completely different colour to the original card. We despaired!! But still it was really fun. Actually, fun until it came to clearing up. The water had gone off... NO WATER!! And 15 painty kids. Nightmare!! Fortunately we had one damp towel which just about did everyone and all the desks and tables which were covered in paint. It was just so difficult, because (being Western I suppose!!) the last thing you expect is to not have running water.

All that seemed to make the kids even more hyper and we spent the rest of the afternoon playing ball games with them and trying to stop them fighting each other! - they play a game of boys V girls where they try to keep a ball to their team. Usually results in one poor girl clutching the ball and getting mobbed by loads of screaming boys, or vice versa!! Anyway, was a pretty good morning, we're just wondering how we're going to manage the week after next when we have an afternoon session with another set of kids too!! Seriously, it's so exhausting just having 3 hours in the morning, but another 3 in the afternoon... doesn't bear thinking about yet!! We'll just have to get over that hurdle when it comes along!!

Just uploaded photos of Botanical Gardens and our bikeride to facebook. Happy days :)
Tchau xxxx