Last day at Intercultura

Flame ginger postcard
Originally uploaded by rowanf.

Yesterday I spent most of the morning painting the flame ginger bush outside my room. The I wandered over to the school supply place and bought orange paint for my ox cart wheel painting. (why does the spell checker keep wanting to turn ox to oz? Grumble)

I got to class and realized that when doing my homwork last night I had missed the culminating essay worth 30% of my final. So I was a bit distracted thinking about that. Also I think I was just kind of hitting a wall with studying. But we got thru the afternoon, I wrote my essay at break and I graduated from my week of classes.

At the graduation I fell chatting with an older fellow I had noticed. Turns out he is a travel writer who mostly concentrates on tennis vacations. He had won a week at Intercultura and was going to be in CR to review the courts at Hilton's Four Seasons so he took a class. We went to Il Vino for dinner and had a nice chat. Also fresh langoustino had arrived and I splurged. Yum!

No snorkeling this morning. Bah. Not sure what I want to do. Paint, I guess.

Note to self Villas Kalimbas http://www.villaskalimba.com/ if you come back to Samara with a friend.

Lazy lie about day

Geometric
Originally uploaded by rowanf.

Amazingly lazy day. Finished my ox cart wheel picture, though it doesn't look much like one and I rediscovered what a pain geometric designs are to paint. I also discovered that the Flickr app ignores any edits you do on the iPhone. So it is annoyingly uncropped. But I am too lazy to fuss with it.

I spent some time trying to draw a frog without success. So I finished reading _A Good and Useful Hurt_ by Aric Davis. It is a murder mystery set in a tattoo parlour with a bit of magic throw in. I liked it for the quirky characters but I often don't read modern mysteries because I really don't want to read about serial killers. This was over my 'mind of a killer' limit. But if that sort of thing doesn't bother you, it is a bit of fun.

I am reaching that stage of a vacation where the lure of my own bed, familiar food and my loved ones is overwhelming the joys of being away. Although I admit that the forecast of cold and rain at home for this weekend does not appeal! But I really want my own food, esp. greens. And I want it at the hours I want to eat. It is about 5pm and I plan to walk down the beach in an hour or so in search of the BBQ place, El Legarto whose YouTube video I was drooling over ages ago. They are evidently on the other side of the inlet so if the tide is very high it is quite a hike out to the bridge. Adventures.

Edit: found them, this side of the inlet but they hadn't turned their lights on yet so I walked on down to the end of the beach and came back as the lights came on. They were fine but Il Vino is better and across the street. But hey, I went there and fulfilled a wanna.