Rest Day

Wednesday dawned and walking hurt, so it was another day to rest on the beach.

On the way to breakfast, we stopped, as we were doing every day, at a little courtyard, a garden area with a pond, flowers and trees, 6 turtles and numerous lizards. 

We played a little game of I spy to find the lizards. Amelia even caught a lizard in the lobby with her quick little eyes as she says.

Our goal that day was the beach. The night before when she was playing with kittens, Amelia met a little French Canadian girl named Leah who did not speak English. They did not need it really to play and laugh at the kittens.

We went to the beach and Leah and her parents were there, so the girls played and played. I visited the fish. Ernani snorkeled, and I played with the girls in the sand.

Her parents wanted Leah to learn English, so they were encouraging the two to talk. But we noted that even though they did not use language, they seemed to understand each other fine.

Leah's parents brought some bananas for the fish, so we got the girls to watch the fish as Leah's Mom feed them.

We spent the late afternoon in the pool. They had shows every day by the pool and we caught one that was an acrobatic show. They twisted around bars and cloth.

Then, we swam and got to know some Canadian women from Nova Scotia. Amelia had played with their mother, Mattie, in the pool the day before (I had been napping) and you could tell Mattie, a great-grandma she confessed to me, loved kids. We meet two of her daughters who told us about their excursion on Tuesday to dive and look at fish around a sunken ship. The third daughter was not a water person, so she stayed with Mattie, her Mom.

They were full of information and help about the resort, things to do, and what to ask for. They were having a girl's vacation with their 80-year-old mother. And they had had a family reunion there 8 years before.

The most interesting thing about the resort was how international it was. It was an island of its own on the island, and that had good and bad points. We did feel isolated from the country while in it, but also surrounded by the nature of the country on the beach and in the reefs.

I was reminded of Derek Walcott and his idea of living in both worlds and yet belonging to none.  As a Caribbean author, he lived it, and I was in his country as a visitor from America. Maybe not a colonizer but living for a week in an oddly looking colonial resort.