On Coconut Palms in Bloom For the second morning in a row, I wake up because of the scent. Or rather, because of a delicate, sweetish, very pleasant fragrance. In the humid morning air, this fragrance is the main thing you can smell. Yesterday I went around all the flowering plants nearby, sniffing every one of them to work out what smelled so wonderful. I couldn’t find the source. But by evening I realised that it was the coconut palms in bloom! Ripe coconuts are still falling heavily onto the sand, and the palms are already flowering again! They have these yellow sprays covered in tiny, stiff flowers that give off this exquisite fragrance.
On the Beach Disco And in the evening we went to Chaweng (the local Broadway) for a beach disco. Or rather, it was only the three of us dancing to techno music. Everyone else was simply reclining at the Ark Bar café on loungers pushed together, drinking beer and smoking hookah. But the three of us girls climbed onto those loungers and started dancing. And Andryukha gazed proudly at us, feeling like the master of the liveliest harem on the beach. I’ll be honest: half the beach envied him. And the other half envied us. So we appointed ourselves princesses of the beach.
On the Peculiarities of Foreigners 😉 Then one of the guys who had been sitting nearby came over. He tried to strike up a conversation with Masha, but when he realised that her English was about as good as her Nepali, he asked Andryukha whether we were going to Phangan. It’s an island very close by where everyone eats special mushrooms during the “Full Moon Party.”
Having received a negative answer, the German withdrew :-). But then Mashka told Oksana that she fancied one of those Krauts. Since she didn’t speak their lingo, Oksanka simply had to arrange her romantic destiny. Our Oksanka has no brakes, so she went over to introduce herself. The first thing they asked was whether we were on drugs (apparently, “drug” means some kind of narcotic pill). At that point, we lost all interest in our neighbours... Poor people! It had never even occurred to them that we could be cheerful and lively while completely sober—not stoned and not stuffed with hallucinogens. They simply don’t know how to have fun without chemical assistance 🙂
On Tropical Downpours Last night we had a real, honest-to-goodness tropical-tropically tropical downpour! In the morning I went out onto the terrace, and the water was knee-deep; everything was floating, from knickers and towels to vases of flowers :-). And there’s lots of water in the sea. It’s so cool! Lately, the low water level had been making me very sad: you couldn’t really swim, and the coral was far too close. But today, all day long, the sea has been like a proper sea: the waves are breaking right against the palms.